On the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, America wonders whether to go back there

IT WASN’T supposed to be like this. Five years ago, in a flurry of manifest destiny, George Bush outlined a plan to return Americans to the moon in 2020, with an option on going to Mars later. Now that plan is the subject of a rather un-American bout of introspection and self-examination. Instead of back-slapping and sky-punching there is hand-wringing and uncertainty. At the behest of Barack Obama’s newly empowered Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), NASA, America’s space agency, is submitting to an independent review of its human-spaceflight plans in order to determine their future.

In truth, NASA has never really recovered its direction since the triumph of the Apollo project. The zenith of that project was 40 years ago on July 20th 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped out of Apollo 11’s lunar module onto the Sea of Tranquillity, and promptly fluffed his lines. The cancellation of Apollo three years later started the slide, and the space shuttles that were supposed to fill the gap failed to become the workaday vehicles that had been promised. The agency’s probes have visited all of the solar system’s planets and it has done a lot of important science. But its manned space programme has never got back the pizzazz of 1969. …