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NASA, once the embodiment of America's can-do spirit, is in a mid-life crisis.

As the agency nears its 44th birthday, the international space station faces a financial meltdown and growing discontent from NASA's partners. Flights of the costly, aging shuttle fleet are dwindling with no replacement in sight. Flat budgets, soaring cost overruns and pork barrel politics all but guarantee these issues won't go away anytime soon.

At the heart of the problem is NASA's decades-old failure to answer a simple question: What is the purpose of America's space program? While most Americans support NASA, they are less than enthusiastic and uncertain about the agency's mission, an Orlando Sentinel poll shows. A small but growing number question whether NASA is needed at all.

The agency's purpose was as clear as it was ambitious at the dawn of the Space Age: Win the Space Race. Beat the Soviet Union to the moon. Prove American technical prowess was more than a match for communism.

The nation hung breathlessly on the news of each launch. Ticker tape parades welcomed back heroes from the new frontier. It was a unique moment in history, when the prospect of losing the Cold War turned the space program into a national obsession. The possibilities looked limitless.

Created for a specific goal, NASA accomplished it in spectacular fashion. But in the post-Apollo world, the space agency has groped for a second act that would restore that sense of purpose without an equally compelling mission.

Today, NASA consists of five basic programs: aerospace technology, biological and physical research, earth science, human exploration and development of space, and space science. But for the past 30 years, the agency hasn't come close to articulating another overall vision as clearly understood and embraced by the public.

"The 1960s is something humankind does not want to go back to," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said. "Thank God we don't live in a world in which those kinds of messages need to be transmitted."

This year, O'Keefe will try the latest reinvention of NASA at one of the most pivotal times in the agency's history. A strategic review is in the works as part of an effort to reassess NASA's priorities. And many formerly sacred cows, including manned spaceflight, could see unprecedented changes.

"The vision that grew up in the Cold War is that NASA is supposed to champion manned spaceflight and be the agency that is inventing the long-range future of the human race," said Alex Roland, a Duke University professor of history and a former historian at NASA. "That needs serious rethinking."

NASA was created in 1958 as America's entry in the newly declared Space Race. Its mission was less about science and exploration than proving to the world that the United States had the right stuff technologically.

"We had an impetus back in those days we don't have now," said John Glenn, a former U.S. senator and the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. "The Soviets said they were technically better than we were and they were going to prove it."

Money for NASA was no object. By the mid-1960s, nearly 4 cents of every U.S. tax dollar was going to the space agency, more than five times the portion being spent today. Public and political support was so solid that Congress occasionally added millions to NASA's budget request. At the high point of the Space Race, more than 1 million Americans lived in households that earned their living through the space program. That constituency was larger at the time than the populations of several states.

The unqualified support and single-minded sense of purpose helped NASA pull off one of humankind's greatest technological feats in less than a decade. But within weeks of Apollo 11's landing on the moon, it became clear NASA needed a new mission if it were to survive. The final three planned moon landings were axed as the public became bored and Congress grew increasingly budget-conscious.

"It really was a unique time," said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "But you can't sustain an organization based on temporary national urgencies or public excitement and entertainment."

AMBITIOUS PLANS

Looking to capitalize on its success, NASA proposed several programs in 1969 that were stunning in scope.

A space task group chaired by Vice President Spiro Agnew called for a manned mission to Mars at a cost of $100 billion, an amount equal at the time to the total annual economic activity of the state of California. Other proposals included a lunar base, an ambitious 12-man space station to succeed the recently approved Skylab project, and a reusable shuttle to travel back and forth. The shuttle and station were to be developed as a single integrated program.

Congress, however, wasn't buying. One by one, the projects bit the dust. By 1971, only the shuttle — without a space station to fly to — clung to life.

To mollify congressional critics, shuttle supporters changed tactics and proposed a fleet that would fly 60 times per year and launch virtually all of America's satellites. The project was approved after rosy assessments of new jobs and an agreement to use the shuttle for military launches.

While work moved ahead with the shuttle, NASA began looking for other ways to justify continued taxpayer support. Spin-offs, which included things like cordless power tools, better athletic shoes and freeze-dried food, became a buzzword for earthly benefits derived from space-related research.

Not everyone thought it was a worthwhile rationale for having a space program.

"After Apollo, when NASA was searching for a mission, it started looking downward and inward instead of upward and outward," said Dan Goldin, a senior fellow at the Council on Competitiveness who was NASA's longest serving administrator from 1992 to 2001. "What we can do for people on Earth became a major, major focus. If you want to buy technology by the yard, you shouldn't have a NASA. Its primary mission should be to open the space frontier."

SHUTTLE FAILURE

The shuttle debuted in 1981 and it quickly became apparent the spaceship never would approach the ambitious flight rate sold to Congress. NASA managers' zeal to ramp up the flight rate indirectly led to the agency's worst tragedy: the January 1986 explosion of shuttle Challenger and the deaths of seven astronauts. The shuttle fleet was grounded more than two years for modifications. NASA's mission became one of survival and rebuilding confidence.

"Coming out of the accident, there was a period we needed to continually emphasize the stability of the operations or NASA would never be able to go on to future missions," said Richard Truly, who became NASA's associate administrator for spaceflight three weeks after the Challenger tragedy. "After the accident, NASA had several big missions and constituencies — space science, planetary exploration, aeronautics research, shuttle operations, space station. There was not a single, unifying, simple-to-understand goal."

NASA's prayers were answered in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan proposed in his State of the Union address to build a permanently manned space station that would "permit quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, and in metals and lifesaving medicines."

The shuttle — stripped of most satellite launches after the Challenger and relegated mainly to flying NASA science missions — at last would have a destination.

On the 20th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing in 1989, President George Bush tried again to give NASA the grand vision it had lacked since the 1960s. He announced plans for a manned mission to Mars that also would return astronauts to the moon. But the initiative's $400 billion price tag made it dead on arrival on Capitol Hill.

COST-CUTTING

No bold new space mission marked the Clinton era. Instead, NASA revamped core programs while cutting costs and encouraging privatization. The agency's budget doubled from 1981 to 1992 during the Reagan and Bush years, but NASA produced little to show for it.

Goldin arrived as an agent of change.

"There was a sense that if only we could get the budget to keep doubling we could solve all of our problems," said Goldin. "It wasn't bad people but it was Cold War thinking. In the early 90s, that wasn't going to play anymore."

When asked separately what NASA's mission should be heading into the 21st century, Goldin and current NASA administrator O'Keefe replied with identical one-word answers: exploration.

"It's exploration in general," O'Keefe said. "It's the broadest definition of it. There should always be a research agenda. There should always be some tangible benefit."

O'Keefe and the current Bush administration have yet to fill in the details. In fact, faced with other national emergencies, the White House has shown little interest in NASA or non-military space projects.

MORTGAGED FUTURE

New initiatives and attempts to redefine broad NASA objectives are impossible without major changes in the human spaceflight program. The agency essentially has mortgaged its future for the next 10-15 years to build the station and fly the shuttle. That leaves little room for restructuring priorities in an era of stagnant budgets and a new war on terrorism.

Critics long have argued that current manned missions in low-Earth orbit have little to do with genuine exploration and yield no significant science benefits. Still, manned spaceflight accounts for more than half of the agency's spending in recent years.

To cut costs, shuttle flights already have been reduced to a baseline of four per year to support the station. Other missions will be added only if the need arises and money is available. There are rumors of layoffs in the astronaut corps for the first time. And further privatization of shuttle responsibilities is being studied.

Meanwhile, the $96 billion station project risks losing its scientific and political rationale. The station is on probation for the next two years while NASA comes to grips with a $4 billion projected cost overrun. Last year's elimination of a crew-return vehicle and two station modules froze the number of residents at three for now. Planned science could be cut by as much as 40 percent.

The science cuts and smaller crew size mean NASA will be hard-pressed to deliver on promises of cutting-edge research.

The future looks even bleaker for big-ticket dreams of a manned mission to Mars. O'Keefe insists there must be a well-defined research agenda and a thorough understanding of the risks before such a project is even considered. Something else would be needed as well: hundreds of billions of dollars.

PRIORITY SWITCH

Many researchers have fought for years to switch NASA's priorities from manned spaceflight to unmanned interplanetary probes and space-based telescopes. Such a switch not only could save money, but almost certainly could yield greater science dividends.

Most of NASA's greatest triumphs since Apollo have come from these missions. Nuclear-powered probes now being considered, while politically controversial, could make future exploration even more cost-effective and productive.

There is no question the missions are doing groundbreaking exploration. NASA spacecraft have visited distant worlds, chased asteroids and surveyed the far reaches of the universe. The Voyager probes rewrote humankind's knowledge of our solar system. The Hubble space telescope—already considered one of the most revolutionary science instruments ever built—continues to rewrite our fundamental understanding of the universe. Other unmanned missions have found indications of water on Mars and Europa, a moon of Jupiter, suggesting the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

As for future manned missions, there's a growing consensus that NASA first must refocus resources on a return to the agency's research and development roots. That, in turn, could spark commercial projects that eventually open the frontier of space the same way industry opened the field of aviation.