In his recent testimony before Congress, my fellow planetary scientist Wes Huntress made the following cryptic statement: "Fifty years ago, in 1952, we developed a national dream of space exploration. As a nation of people who make dreams happen, and who explore to provide for a better life, we didn't do too badly with making that mid-Century dream of space travel come true."

The Congressmen were probably puzzled by the first sentence of this quote. To most people, the US space program started with Vanguard and Explorer in 1958. But we hard-core space cadets know what Dr. Huntress was talking about: the famous series of articles by Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Cornelius Ryan, Chesley Bonestell, et al. In COLLIER'S magazine (1952-53), later published as a series of large-format books.

This was the first presentation of an integrated vision for the human exploration of space. And the Von Braun Master Plan was trumpeted to the public over and over again (in many formats from Walt Disney TV specials to comic books) all though the 1950s until it was practically engraved on the brains of the Baby Boom generation.

So Huntress is not exaggerating when he calls the Plan "our national dream of space exploration." However, he is dead wrong when he says "we didn't do too badly" at it. Actually, we have utterly failed to achieve that dream, for two reasons:

A) the space program outlined by Von Braun in 1952 had excessively grandiose goals and was wildly optimistic in terms of funding and scheduling.

B) the solar system is both a lot more dangerous to human life and a lot less interesting than we thought it was in 1952.

The slavish adherence of NASA to both the spirit and the letter of this unworkable and long-obsolete plan is one of the main root causes of our current mis-direction in space...