But it was all evanescent and fleeting. Congress never got the message and so funding lagged. Morale at NASA slumped, and with it perhaps NASA expertise. Now we have three shuttles (Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis) built in the 1970s with 1970s (or earlier) technology. And we have unfixed problems with foam, ice and spatial debris dinging a Rube Goldberg system of brittle heat-shield tiles that are the last line of defense - the only line, really - between shuttle success and disaster.

And we're not speaking of flights to "the moon, Mars and beyond." We're talking about Earth-orbiting flights in near-space.

Hear The Washington Post's John Schwartz:

"Until just a few years ago, some of the computers used in testing the shuttle's boosters still contained Intel 8086 microprocessors, which are from the family that powered the first IBM personal computers in the early 1980s. That microprocessor has 29,000 transistors and operates at a speed of 10 million cycles per second. Today's microprocessors tend to have 55 million transistors and run at a speed of 3.4 billion cycles per second."

It's rather like sending Americans into space in 1975 Buicks - technology and all. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin wonders "whether I could find a single electronics box in my house that's 25 years old and still works - and I don't think I can."

Adds deputy shuttle program manager Hale: "Going into space is right at the limits of human technology, even here at the start of the 21st century. We are doing something that is extremely difficult. This is not like . . . a commercial air transport. This is much more complicated and much more difficult."

The infinity of wonders called space is our manifest destiny    the final frontier for humans to explore and study what role, if any, life has in a universe of matter.

We have only just begun this spatial journey. But we cannot pursue it to the moon and beyond without sufficient will and cash. We cannot keep sending astronauts up in backyard stick-shift rust-buckets from a prior century - thereby jeopardizing the entire enterprise with a one-pound piece of foam.

Anxious questions, anxious times.

This is a moment for reinvigorated commitment to manned space flight, for money, for leadership from the nation's loftiest precincts, and for the courage - the persisting determination - to press on.