When the Bush administration announced a new mission for NASA in January 2004, many dismissed it as a cynical P.R. ploy. Yet it was the first time a U.S. administration had declared that the country's policy on manned space exploration was to go into space and keep going (see "Toward a New Vision of Manned Spaceflight").

Given that ambition, the "Report of the President's Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy" -- also dubbed "A Journey to Inspire, Innovate, and Discover" -- charted an ostensibly reasonable course. It decreed that when construction on the International Space Station finished in 2010, the shuttle would be mothballed. By 2014, a new manned vehicle -- the crew exploration vehicle, or CEV -- would make its first flight. Astronauts would take the CEV to the Moon by 2020 and would head for Mars in the following decades. Since the Bush administration gave NASA a limited budget with which to achieve this, some said that the White House wasn't serious; others argued that the tightfistedness was justified, given the agency's history of overruns. In any case, NASA in 2005 announced a design for a four- to six-astronaut CEV resembling the Apollo command module, which would be boosted into space atop a revamped heavy lift vehicle (HLV). NASA's new boss, Michael Griffin, described the combo as "Apollo on steroids."