Dr. Alex Roland, a former NASA historian now at Duke University, said a moral of the story was that Congress and the public needed to work harder to hold the space agency accountable for its dreams.

In an interview with a NASA historian during that period, Captain Lee recalled the difficulties, and in the end, the satisfactions of that effort, made as the cold war was still thawing.

"It depends on who's running and how they stand," said Dr. Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who is historian of technology at Duke University.

Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who teaches history at Duke University, said the new plan "might sell politically, even though it's retro" in echoing the ends and means of the Apollo Moon program.

"We're going to have manned flight, come hell or high water," said Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who teaches the history of technology at Duke University.

Dr. Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who teaches at Duke University, extended that analysis, saying the agency fell into a vicious cycle in which it repeatedly tried to outdo Apollo.

"This is an agency that's living in the past," said Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who heads the history department at Duke University.

"The shuttle could never do what the agency tried to make it do, and so they traded off safety," said Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who is a professor of history at Duke University.

Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who now teaches at Duke and is a frequent critic of the space program, said that in some ways the problem was "worse than an unexpected anomaly arising."