Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's camp yesterday released a policy statement on America's space program. The statement doesn't really lay out any concrete details on what Romney's plans for NASA would be if he is elected, other than to say that President Obama "has failed to deliver a coherent policy for human space exploration and space security" and that Romney would do it way better. Unfortunately, this merely adds Romney to the end of a long line of politicians stretching back to the 1970s who want to use NASA as political capital rather than actually advance America's space program, confounding an agency which does its best work when it is given a task and is then left alone to finish it.

From the space race to the Space Shuttle

Make no mistake: the "Space Race" of the late 1950s and 1960s was primarily a political and military exercise between the United States and the Soviet Union, though Kennedy's powerful rhetoric hit all the right notes to add a deeply human motivation to the endeavor—it's in our nature, he said, to be explorers, and if we don't get to the Moon first, then we will get there last. It's almost a foregone conclusion that his assassination just 14 months after his famous speech at Rice University helped ensure that NASA and the Moon would remain a national priority, if for no other reason than because his successor, the wily Lyndon B. Johnson, was one of the most skilled political operators Washington has ever known, and he knew that tampering with Kennedy's legacy would destroy his own chances for election in 1964.

But starting with Richard Nixon's first term in 1969, even as Project Apollo was sprinting to a wildly successful manned lunar landing, the meddling began. The final three landings of the program, Apollo 18, 19, and 20, were canceled during Nixon's terms and NASA's manned program was reprioritized toward the development of the the Space Transportation System, which would itself transform over the course of its development into the Space Shuttle Program.

The ostensible goal of Shuttle was to lower the cost of launching payloads into orbit by making the launch vehicle reusable and the launch process routine. Reduced costs were the order of the day; even though NASA's Saturn V rocket was (and remains) the most successful heavy lift vehicle ever created, plans to continue its use were scrapped in favor of the shuttle. In 1974, Nixon departed in disgrace and Gerald Ford took office. Faced with a nation in the midst of an energy crisis and a severe economic recession, his continued support of the more "efficient" shuttle program was a foregone conclusion.

Ford's successor, Jimmy Carter, was dealt a bad hand at the end of the 1970s. Carter is one of the few presidents in the last 50 years to not really care much about American's manned space program. Under his leadership—or more correctly, during his period of noninvolvement—NASA tested the prototype orbiter Enterprise.

Ronald Reagan dabbled heavily in NASA's course, proposing Space Station Freedom as the first permanently manned orbiting facility and also pushing for commercial involvement in space travel. In keeping with his plans of defeating the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union, Reagan also favored more military space activity, most famously in the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative program, popularly known as "Star Wars" for its descriptions of laser-equipped satellites zapping Soviet missiles out of the sky in mid-flight. SDI had no small amount of NASA involvement, with shuttles and other launch vehicles ferrying cargoes (some classified) into orbit.

NASA was diverted again by George H.W. Bush. By the late 1980s, with NASA still recovering from the loss of Challenger and having been confined to sending shuttles to low earth orbit for years, the first President Bush proposed that the struggling agency take on a new mandate—the Space Exploration Initiative. President Bush outlined plans to send humans back to the Moon for permanent settlement and on to other planets as part of a multi-decade, long-range commitment. NASA contractors were thrilled, but it seemed clear even at the time that the plan was far too ambitious to survive past Bush's presidency.

It was. President Clinton realigned NASA's directives again, trimming many of the SEI-outlined goals and pushing for construction to start on the International Space Station, a scaled-back version of the United States' solo space station plans of the 1980s which would rely partly on funding contributed by other countries for completion. President Clinton's plans for NASA included prioritizing robotic exploration; "flags and footprints" missions like the return to the Moon and a manned mission to Mars were shelved.

After his election in 2000, George W. Bush put forth the boldest direction change for NASA since the 1960s, calling for the creation of an entirely new set of rockets and spacecraft under the umbrella of Project Constellation. Bush's plan would have seen a tremendous revitalization of NASA's manned space flight efforts, but suffered from a tragic lack of funding; eventually, in 2009, the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee (informally known as the "Augustine Committee" after its chairman, Norman Augustine) concluded that Project Constellation could be modified in several ways to produce a viable and successful set of missions, but the most desirable path forward would require an increase in overall agency funding by $3 billion through 2014, and then increases of 2.4 percent for each year after that.

Unfortunately for Constellation, at that point George W. Bush was no longer the president. The program had the double-whammy of being both underfunded and not really doing much for the current president's legacy; the bulk of Constellation was summarily cancelled after a single launch of one of the technology demonstration vehicles. Worse, President Obama didn't come out of the starting gate as a fan of manned exploration at all: in one of his first statements on the matter, he expressed his desire to increase educational funding by siphoning dollars directly from NASA over a five-year period.

Realizing that such a defunding of NASA could be political suicide in space- and vote-heavy states like California and Florida, President Obama has shifted NASA's direction by half-adopting and half-ignoring the Augustine Committee's findings and pushing for more commercially driven, manned space flight initiatives, with NASA focusing on "big picture" items from the Committee's Flexible Path set of recommendations (like a manned asteroid rendezvous). President Obama's plans for NASA are realistic, but largely uninspiring.

Space should always inspire us

That, really, is the key—"uninspiring" is a word that should never be used of a country's manned space program. NASA has of course done some very serious science during its existence, including placing an actual geologist on the Moon to study it firsthand, but the primary goal of NASA's lobbing astronauts into the heavens has always ultimately been political rather than scientific. The most important side effect of the manned program, though, has been the long tail of science and engineering interest it generated. Whether you love or hate his schtick, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson makes an insightful point when he observes that increased interest in all things scientific and futuristic tracked with the successes of Apollo and waned when the agency's direction began to drift.

Nothing—absolutely nothing—makes a kid's jaw drop like meeting an astronaut; kids build LEGO spaceships and plan to fly to the stars almost as a matter of course before their interest in science and math is beaten out of them by a stale educational system focused on rote memorization. All the educational funding in the world can't inspire someone to want to become an engineer like a video of someone standing on another world can. Diverting money from NASA to pay for textbooks is a shortsighted, stupid policy, which robs would-be engineers and mathematicians and scientists of the things which inspire them to become engineers and mathematicians and scientists in the first place.

NASA has historically been able to accomplish great things when the agency is given a direction and funding—and then left alone. The two most visible program successes NASA has had since its inception—Project Apollo's Moon landing and the creation of the Space Shuttle—were able to be completed largely because the sitting president didn't pay much attention to the agency. For many presidents, NASA is almost like an expensive toy that they can't resist poking, and unfortunately, poking the toy every four to eight years means that the toy can't get any work done. Romney's new space policy statement, which blasts President Obama's space policies without offering much in the way of concrete proposed action, is simply one more direction change waiting to happen. NASA will continue to flounder unless given a long-term plan that it can stick to.