In that world, the space shuttle can never be made safe, is too expensive to operate and should never fly again. Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour are death traps waiting to torture more families with the loss of loved ones. Some suggest the International Space Station (ISS) should be abandoned and dumped into the ocean before we waste another billion dollars.

And to solve NASA's culture problem, they say, let's get rid of all the space agency's top managers. That includes Sean O'Keefe, who as a self-admitted bean counter is clearly the single person responsible for all of NASA's financial and operational woes -- none of which he could have possibly inherited from his predecessor.

This is all hogwash.

A Clear Vision

They say NASA lacks a clear vision of what it should be doing in space. On that I might tend to agree -- but with two important caveats.

First, it isn't NASA that lacks a clear vision. It's our nation that needs new glasses. We need a bold vision of the future expressed by our elected leaders in Congress and the White House. This isn't a partisan issue. Democrats and Republicans alike from the Oval Office on down have done little to guide the country beyond the innovations and triumphs of the Apollo programs.

Secondly, NASA does, in fact, have a vision for extending our reach beyond low Earth orbit. The space agency knows exactly where its headed and has known for some time.

Wernher von Braun knew long before he designed the Saturn 5 Moon rocket. Von Braun's colleagues knew when a plan was presented to Congress around 1970, but the only part that got funded was the space shuttle. During the Dan Goldin years at NASA, people were literally forbidden from saying the word, and only recently under O'Keefe's leadership has the space agency publicly discussed their desire to go there.

The destination: Mars.

This past week Mars was closer to Earth than it has been in all of recorded history -- and the world noticed. The close encounter peaked the day after the CAIB report came out, renewing the great space debate. Whether by divine intervention or not, there's no denying that the bright red "star" is a sign in the heavens and could be telling us something.

So let's not waste too much time on debating why we should go. Choose one or more: Spirit of exploration, national pride, a jobs program for the aerospace industry, science, or as the next step in ensuring the survival of our species before our planet becomes toast in five billion years.

For now, for me, it's enough just to go. In any case, it is inevitable that one day humans will walk on Mars. Whether it's our peers from another country, or our children or grandchildren who make the trip, it's going to happen. It has to. And I'm among those who are impatient.

What you may not know is that NASA is already preparing for the trip, even though there is no national mandate or announced program or timeline.

First, there's the ISS. It is all about learning how to build and operate a large structure in space, cooperating with international partners and surviving in weightlessness for months at a time. No one could seriously think it's about growing large protein crystals.

Second, there is an active fleet of probes in orbit around the Red Planet or on their way. And while the unmanned vs. manned debate will continue for some time to come, spacecraft such as Spirit and Opportunity, which are due to land on Mars in January, will help scientists select that best, first landing site for astronauts.

Third, in NASA offices around the nation -- offices with names like "Prometheus" -- there are people working on the details of how we might best go about getting to Mars.

Even at the Kennedy Space Center there are master plans already in the can for dealing with how the launch site could accommodate various types of new rockets that might be necessary for mounting a mission to Mars.

To make it so will require a president to show some guts and make a speech. Following that, a bunch of folks in Congress must put up or shut up. Then a renewed NASA needs to take the ball and run with it without overspending by billions or losing any more lives in the process.

Return to Flight

In the meantime, the right vision of the space program in the immediate post-Columbia era matches up fairly well with the CAIB recommendations and goes like this:

All existing space station elements still needing a ride into orbit should be launched on the shuttle as planned -- assuming all of the return-to-flight requirements detailed by the CAIB report are met. While it's not the dream machine originally envisioned 30 years ago, CAIB was right in stating, "the shuttle is not inherently unsafe."

While some prudent upgrades to the shuttle fleet should proceed to make it safer for astronauts to fly, NASA should also reconfigure the orbiters to fly unmanned just as soon as practical.

A new vehicle for transporting humans into and out of low Earth orbit should be developed as quickly as possible, not waiting for any cutting-edge technology to be invented. That new vehicle can be the so-called Orbital Space Plane (OSP). The sooner we can get this thing flying, the sooner we can get people off the shuttle. It would not be a step backward if the OSP turns out to look like an Apollo capsule.

Once this new crew transfer vehicle is available, all shuttle missions should be flown unmanned. This should continue until all of the hardware designed for launch on the shuttle is in orbit, after which the shuttle fleet should be retired and future cargo be lifted by rockets such as the Delta 4 and Atlas 5.

The nation also needs some kind of reusable Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (OMV) to be based at the ISS. An OMV would be used to take cargo launched into orbit and move it near the station, where an ISS robot arm could grab hold of it. (If a version of an OMV could be capable of flying up to geosynchronous orbit to refuel communications satellites, all the better.)

With this infrastructure in place, components of a Mars spaceship could be launched by unmanned rockets, assembled in orbit near the ISS by astronauts ferried there in an OSP. In fact, anything we want to do moving forward -- lunar bases or asteroid prospecting? -- could be staged in the same way.

Whether this vision or another is employed, as we recover from Columbia and fly again the most important thing to remember is that spaceflight is an inherently dangerous activity and will remain that way for years to come. No matter what NASA or any other organization tries to do, additional lives will be lost some day, there's no way around it.

This nation has to decide if it has the stomach for this kind of activity -- and a large enough pocketbook too.