This week a new budget, and a new plan for NASA was announced. Because of the intense political and emotional feelings surrounding any big changes to such an important and visible program it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture.

NASA’s extraordinary accomplishments (backed up by an array of industries and the very fabric of an entire society) represent a key piece of human efforts to not only understand the universe around us, but to also make our first steps beyond the confines of our home world. Other nations have made, and continue to make, enormous contributions – from the Soviet, and now Russian, space program and its amazing feats of engineering, to the European Space Agency, the rapidly growing exploration programs of China, Japan, and an increasing roster of nations. It’s amazing to think that only half a century ago this was still all the stuff of science fiction.

Taken altogether one would be forgiven for thinking that space exploration is at present a rather rough-shod and haphazard affair. The truth is though that it’s no different than any other ambitious, exploratory, scientific enterprise. The multi-billion dollar effort to decode the human genome was, and still is, an evolving and fluid thing. The world of microelectronics has consistently veered off in many unexpected directions. Our efforts to understand the nature and origins of life on this planet are constantly adapting to new discovery and new opportunities. Given the size of the universe, and the incredible diversity of environments within just our own solar system, it’s actually amazing that the space programs of so many nations have managed to accomplish so much, and with so much coherence.

So NASA evolves, not necessarily in ways that everyone agrees on, but that’s ok – space exploration has to be a flexible and adaptable enterprise. While there are some givens – the need for vehicles that can lift large payloads into orbit, for example – the rest is, and may always be, a wide open blank slate – the final frontier. It’s an exciting time, private industry has never been more interested in getting into space, and while they face huge technical challenges, this may just be exactly the right moment for NASA to change its role – participate in a new way, while not discarding it’s vast treasury of knowledge and experience.

Time to watch the skies !