Low budget NASA

For days now, the drama aboard the international space station has been played down on the nightly news. The failed computers that control orientation of the station and produce oxygen are the latest technical glitch on the half-built $100 billion post-Cold War venture that in the past has seen gyroscopes and a Russian oxygen machine fail.

While none of these failures has been said to be serious enough to lead to an order to "abandon ship" from NASA, they have led some critics to call the space station a boondoggle. It has also fueled skepticism towards the Bush administration's "Vision for Space Exploration" program which calls for the so far, non-science producing station to be finished in three years, grounding the shuttles in 2010 and building the next generation of vehicles to go to our moon and Mars.

The success of NASA's unmanned craft programs has been largely hidden from the general public. On June 5 2007, the Messenger probe passed within 209 miles of the surface of Venus on it's second pass around the planet. Messenger this time was able to pair with a European spacecraft studying Venus for a rare opportunity to make oberservations from two seperate vantage points.

Messenger was launched in August 2004 and is the seventh in NASA's Discovery program of lower cost, scientifically focused missions. The Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the probe, operates it and manages the mission for NASA, plans to use the gravity from Earth, Venus and Mercury to slow down the lightly fueled probe and place it in orbit around Mercury in 2011. All went well on deceleration around Venus and Messenger is on target to make it's first pass of Mercury in January 2008, making it the first to orbit the planet and the first to visit since Mariner 10 raced three times around Mercury in the mid-1970's. It's mission is to stay in a permanent orbit around Mercury and collect data.

While NASA struggles with it's "billion dollar baby", it's unmanned space probes have led to many successes, from Mariner 2 launched in 1962, making the first flyby of Venus, through Rangers 6-9 who in 1965, returned thousands of photographs from the moon's surface. Viking 1 launched in 1975, successfully placed a lander on the surface of Mars in 1976 and it's lander was still functioning in a weather-reporting mode until an errant command shut it down in November 1982.

Probably the most efficient, reliable and cost effective program to come out of NASA has been the Pioneer missions. They are truly a shining example of what a small and talented group of people can accomplish, against all odds and when faced with performing something that had never been done before. Proof of that is shown by Pioneer 10 which is still cruising through the galaxy and sending back data thirty years after it's launch in 1972 and Pioneer 6, in a permanent solar orbit, is the oldest functioning spacecraft at 35 years old.

Today, the outcry from some is that NASA is wasting money and space exploration should be curtailed. The international space station may in fact be a boondoggle but NASA has shown that with the "right stuff", they can produce outstanding results that will only serve to further our knowledge of space around us and our planetary neighbors.