On Jan. 14, Bush said he wanted to send humans back to the Moon and on to Mars. Critics charged the plan, as it were, lacked specifics and the costs could not be easily estimated. The White House has not talked space in the three months since.

Meanwhile, Congress is making budget decisions now, and members complain they don't know how NASA aims to spend the additional funds Bush requested.

The President appointed a commission to form a plan and report back in early June. Unlike the authoritative CAIB commission that reviewed the Shuttle Columbia disaster and whose safety directives have kept the fleet grounded, the "vision commission" has no teeth implicit in the recommendations it will make to the President. Nor is it known if the group will make specific suggestions for firm, initial steps or provide sweeping outlines of broad paths.

Meanwhile, an ominous lack of intent must be read into the White House silence -- not even a pep talk? -- especially considering the whole vision thing is about to be sacked by Congress, where in the House many members can't comprehend why they should allot a 5.6 percent budget increase -- at a time when domestic funds are tight -- to NASA for what they see are ill-focused purposes.

"I cannot commit this Congress and future Congresses to a program that is undefined," Rep. John Walsh (R-N.Y.), chairman of a House appropriations subcommittee responsible for reviewing NASA's 2005 budget request, said last week.

Rep. Allan Mollohan (D-West Virginia) bristled at the idea of approving wholesale change in the space agency via budget hearings, "all without the benefit of appropriate debate and deliberation and without sufficient budgetary detail or program cost projections."

It sounds a lot like the House wants to make an informed decision about how NASA will spend the additional taxpayer money. An unexpected answer to that question has emerged.

Inexplicably, NASA plans to spend most of the increase on existing human spaceflight programs, Space News, SPACE.com's sister publication, recently reported. The bulk of the new funds won't be earmarked for the long-term goal of crewed flights to the Moon and Mars.

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe says most of the requested $866 million budget increase for 2005 would be used to get the shuttles back in the air and continue construction of the International Space station. Specifically, he said, $374 million of the increase would pay for safety improvements to shuttles.

Doesn't the shuttle program have a budget already? Doesn't the space station have a budget already? (Yes and yes; combined they equal about $6 billion of NASA's $15.5 billion budget in 2004).

More important, isn't NASA supposed to spend the new money planning construction of a spacecraft that will get us beyond low-Earth orbit? Unfortunately, while one might logically have assumed so, Bush didn't spell this funding detail out in his January speech:

"Achieving these goals requires a long-term commitment. NASA's current five-year budget is $86 billion. Most of the funding we need for the new endeavors will come from reallocating $11 billion within that budget. We need some new resources, however. I will call upon Congress to increase NASA's budget by roughly a billion dollars, spread out over the next five years. This increase, along with refocusing of our space agency, is a solid beginning to meet the challenges and the goals we set today."

Sure, part of the Bush vision was to get the shuttles flying again and then complete the station. But this joint effort has become increasingly questionable, too.

While the body tasked with overseeing NASAs internal overhaul in the wake of the Columbia disaster investigation, the Stafford-Covey Task Group, says the agency is completing the steps needed to launch the orbiters, engineers dealing with the day-to-day work of retrofitting and repairing the aging fleet have a dimmer view. The longer they work to fix the flawed spacecraft, the more problems they find. They may be safeguarding the fleet straight into the Smithsonian.

When announced, Bush's long-term plan to "extend a human presence across our solar system" excited advocates of human spaceflight, who saw Mars in particular as an invigorating target for astronauts who have spent the past 30 years going in circles. That insider euphoria hasn't spread to the masses.

Surveys show the bulk of the public is as nonplussed over the prospect of going to Mars as it is about returning to the Moon. Apathy for human spaceflight has made bold strides over the past three decades. Go if you like, the public seems to say, just do it within your budget.

The responsibility for the rapidly fading vision rests with the lack of leadership afforded NASA by the Bush Administration. It's as if Dad said the family is going to Disneyland, then he went back to work and left them all wondering when and how.

NASA has not helped matters, if good relations with the public and the scientific community are a goal.

When charged with the new vision -- a bold directive to put humans back on the Moon by 2020 and then send them to Mars -- O'Keefe immediately announced the world's greatest observatory would be left for dead. The Hubble Space Telescope would not be serviced by astronauts, as planned, and its gyroscopes and batteries would fail in 2007 or 2008. (Under tremendous pressure to reconsider, NASA is now looking into a robotic repair mission.)

O'Keefe said the decision was based purely on safety. Most astronomers saw it as the first casualty of the new human exploration initiative.

Since then, the budgets of other important science missions within NASA have been squeezed or delayed, to the consternation of scientists. Already thin support for bolder human exploration appears to be slipping in the science community. Astronomers see the current robotics program as part of a "golden age" in which ever-more-powerful space-based telescopes -- thanks in large part to NASA -- are unlocking the secrets of the cosmos. The new NASA has them worried, according to an April 27 article in The New York Times .

"The golden age is in jeopardy," said cosmologist Michael Turner of the University of Chicago. "I'm very nervous."

Glimmer of hope

The Moon-to-Mars idea is not quite dead. But a tremendous public relations effort is needed to sell it to the American people and, especially, to Congress. "The advocates must become as vocal as the skeptics," OKeefe said at the National Space Symposium last month. "We can win this debate."

But in reality it's a job only the President (and probably the next few Presidents, given the lengthy time frame of the whole project) can see through.

For now, the Senate has offered tentative support for the additional 2005 funding. But the House is wrestling over it in committees, and the overall budget must ultimately be hammered out by compromise between the two bodies, something that won't take place until after the November election.

Here's a sticking point: Non-defense spending in the 2005 budget is likely to increase by 0.5 percent.

"In such a budget, should NASA receive almost a 6 percent increase?" wonders House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.). "Is it the highest domestic spending priority? I dont think so, and I doubt my colleagues will either."

And if the new money comes, will we ever get to Mars by spending it largely on shuttle fixes?

A last gasp of hope could be provided by the Presidential Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy. It has been meeting in various cities around the country, gathering input from scientists, former astronauts, politicians and average folks on exactly how NASA should embark on its newly proposed journey.

The commission is due to report to Bush in early June. We will find out then -- based on the President's enthusiastic support or lack of it -- whether he ever really intended to go to Mars, or if this has all been just an interesting little diversion from far bleaker Administration initiatives taking place on Earth.