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IN JANUARY 1961, NASA sent a chimpanzee called Ham to the edge of space, riding on a slender rocket hastily adapted from a medium-range army missile. Ham鈥檚 mission, a preliminary to launching astronauts on similar suborbital hops, lasted 16 minutes and carried him a mere 700 kilometres from his original launch site on the east coast of Florida.

Although some of the rocket鈥檚 equipment malfunctioned during the short ride, Ham was eventually plucked from the Atlantic Ocean after splashdown, frightened and wet but unharmed. Even so, the new man in the White House, John F. Kennedy, was not that impressed by the whole thing. His science adviser, Jerome Weisner, warned him: 鈥淎 failure in our first attempt to place a man into space would create a situation of serious national embarrassment. We should stop advertising this as our major objective.鈥�

But Kennedy soon warmed to space travel and became a NASA ally, especially when the agency picked up the pace and began to deliver results that awed the world. Just eight years after Ham鈥檚 jaunt, rocket boosters of unprecedented power and complexity were poised to hurl men to the moon, in fulfilment of a dream that had enticed humankind for generations. The scale and ambition of NASA in its glory years was an expression of political idealism from a different America than the one we know today: a nation that hoped for a better future rather than simply trying to protect itself from present-day anxieties.

鈥淭he scale and ambition of NASA in its glory years was an expression of political idealism鈥�

The was signed on 29 July 1958, as a response to Soviet Russia鈥檚 triumph in launching , 10 months earlier. The grim necessities of cold war competition may have spurred the space agency鈥檚 creation, but in its opening decade it became one of America鈥檚 last and most optimistic expressions of progressive government.

Political champions of the agency, such as senators Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kerr, and its second and most powerful chief administrator, James Webb, cut their teeth as young idealists during the 1930s New Deal under Democrat president Franklin Roosevelt, when an economically shattered country was revived with massive injections of federal cash. Throughout the 1960s NASA relived some of those dreams, investing large amounts of taxpayers鈥� money in science and technology to stimulate developments in industry, inspire schools and universities, and show the rest of the world 鈥� including Russia, of course 鈥� that America was worthy of admiration.

NASA campaigned throughout the 1960s for a new style of rationalistic 鈥渟pace-age management鈥� aimed at transforming large-scale government programmes across the board, not just in rocketry. Administration, human resources, organisational structures and record-keeping were streamlined to keep the fantastically complex lunar project on track, and they seemed to promise benefits for many other areas of US life too. As Roger Launius, chief space historian at the Smithsonian Institution, recalls: 鈥淣ASA thought it was possible to create the perfect organisation. They talked about the application of their techniques to other sorts of activities such as homelessness and poverty, welfare and education.鈥�

Hostility to the war in Vietnam contributed to a popular sense of distrust in large-scale technological enterprises. Yet it was not the counter-culture campaigners and peace-promoting hippy liberals 鈥� who hated the war and who feared the technocracy represented by NASA 鈥� who at the end of the 1960s turned the tide against NASA鈥檚 vision. Instead, under President Nixon, the US space programme fell victim to a Conservative reaction against its overreaching of government into national affairs.

Even in the lead-up to the there were many senators who agreed with what their colleague William Proxmire had said in 1963: 鈥淣ASA is probably the most centralised government spending programme in the United States. It concentrates in the hands of a single agency full authority over an important sector of the economy. This could be described as corporate socialism.鈥� And Proxmire was a Democrat.

After Apollo, it became painfully obvious that the challenges of reaching the moon were modest compared with the energy crisis, the environment, world poverty, ideological wars and all the other worries that afflicted society at the end of the 1960s, and which plague us to this day. These challenges could not be quantified in power-to-weight ratios, nor solved with the neat equations of orbital dynamics. Space-age management was suited only to the rocket cadets, not to the rest of us.

Then disaster struck on 28 January 1986: the and its seven crew was not only flagrantly careless but showed that NASA鈥檚 dreams of administrative perfection, even in the limited sphere of rocketry, were illusions too. And when President Reagan announced in 1984 that NASA should build an , tens of billions of dollars were spent over the next decade just on paperwork and muddled planning. In fact, it wasn鈥檛 until 1998 that the first components were launched into orbit.

So what lies ahead for NASA? If the agency wants to , as it has promised, then it would be wise to relearn how it did things in the 1960s. That may not be easy, because times have changed and it is no longer obvious that government agencies should have any central role in creating the technology for space adventures. Half a century ago, keen-eyed politicians could identify useful areas for large-scale national research, such as aviation, computing, rocketry and nuclear energy. Today it鈥檚 all anyone can do to just keep in touch with the bewildering pace of developments in medicine, genetics, electronic consumer goods, personal computing and global communications. Politicians find it hard enough to respond to the social and environmental impact of myriad technologies that are already on the loose, let alone urge the invention of new ones.

Rockets are no longer the defining machines of modern times, and now even the ballistic missiles that heralded the space age have lost their edge in an era of asymmetrical warfare. A few fanatics with ten-penny craft knives can change the world in a day, while the expensive nuclear megatons in their underground silos are all but impotent now that our dread of nuclear weapons has been overtaken by our fear of terrorism.

As for lunar exploration, that impressive but short-lived child of a near-forgotten cold war, we have reached a time where NASA is no longer the proud vanguard of a technological adventure. Instead it seems to be the faltering custodian of an old one. in the coming decade are based on systems designed in the late 1970s: solid rocket boosters from the space shuttle, bolted onto a familiar throwaway fuel tank, topped by a conical crew capsule that is embarrassingly similar to the old Apollo.

We鈥檝e seen this stuff before, so do not experience the same thrill in rocket adventures as our parents did 40 or 50 years ago, when both they and the space age were still young. This failure to seduce us represents a fundamental problem for NASA. If it can鈥檛 inspire people any more, then what鈥檚 the point? Unless it can restore that vital bond of communication, it鈥檚 hard to see a way forward for the ageing agency.

Sputnik鈥檚 Legacy 鈥� Learn more about humanity鈥檚 first 50 years in space in our .