NASA Marks 50 Years With an Eye on the Moon — and the Gap

WASHINGTON - Fifty years after its founding, NASA is racing to build the rockets and capsule that will return Americans to the moon by 2020 — while bracing for an awkward five-year stretch when the United States will have no spacecraft of its own.

The space shuttles are scheduled to retire in 2010 after completing the international space station. Their successor, the Orion capsule and Ares rockets of the Constellation program, is not expected to fly astronauts until 2015 at the earliest.

In between, American astronauts will hitch rides to orbit on Russian Soyuz capsules — an arrangement that has taken on new discomfort as relations with Moscow sour over Georgia.

The first full-scale test of the Ares I rocket is planned for next year. Engineers this summer completed the first review of Orion's full design, a capsule that looks, deliberately, like a larger Apollo.

The moon program, announced by President Bush in 2004, is chronically short of money, and the next president will face a choice: fund it fully, stretch it out or redirect NASA toward nearer goals. Both candidates have endorsed human spaceflight without committing to a number.

NASA's golden anniversary has prompted a wave of reflection — and one persistent question at every panel: how did the agency go to the moon with slide rules, and why is it so much harder now?

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Associated Press writers contributed to this report.

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