Jensen suggests that the cause of NASA's troubles is more fundamental than public relations problems or technical difficulties, evinced in the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster or the May 1990 Hubble Telescope debacle. "NASA has largely been reliant on the US domestic political environment from its founding during the Eisenhower Administration," he states. "When the space race between America and the Soviet Union collapsed, of course NASA got into trouble!"

Alongside political expediency, NASA has come under attack for its poor communication within its own ranks. The behemoth has branches all over the US and as the Challenger disaster proved, NASA suffers from bureaucratic gridlock.

"NASA had a complex organizational structure and 10,000 subcontractors at the time of the Challenger disaster," says Jensen. "The more complex it gets, the more risky. It becomes even more complex with more contracting out of NASA's work or internationally developed systems."

Future manned missions will have to overcome the "Challenger syndrome," Jensen's label for NASA's subsequent bureaucratic gridlock, which he compares to the 1986 Chernobyl and 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant meltdowns, and the 1986 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India. "Systems analyst Charles Perrow has termed these incidents 'normal accidents' - complex factors interact in an unexpected fashion, and no one is really able to see through it at all. These hi-tech accidents may not have any clear cut causes at all, but may be inherent in the complex technological systems we have created, encoded within the organizational power structure itself. As long as we see organizational failures as simply the result of amoral individual actions in the 'chain of command,' our strategies for control will be ineffective, and dangerously so."

"This accident was not a result of decisions by amorally calculating managers. Instead, it was a normal accident, an almost inevitable organizational mistake, the kind of mistake that happens when large complex systems deal with tricky technologies. That is not reassuring, as these complex systems have invaded most aspects of our modern reality."

The shock resignation of space shuttle director Bryan O'Connor in March 1996 supports Jensen's analysis of the politics in space control. O'Connor publicly criticised NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's plan to shift control of the shuttle program from NASA's Washington HQ to the Johnson Space Center, fearing the change could jeopardize future shuttle safety.

Under Goldin's proposal, the Houston-based Johnson Space Center would control shuttle programs at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, the Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. O'Connor felt that this restructuring would encourage dangerous rivalries between the centers and create barriers to effective communication, making a future Challenger disaster more likely to occur. And it was issues of communication that the Rogers Commission and NASA internal studies warned against.

"Inevitably these funding cuts create a lot of inter-center rivalry," Jensen comments. "The centers are communicating tactically to survive the recession. In the 1960s each center fought for lucrative supply contracts, now they are fighting for their very survival.

"The NASA centers were created in a unique political and economic environment - part of a Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. The 1960s was a completely different political climate - NASA was beyond criticism thanks to Kennedy's presidential backing. He protected them throughout the Congress. Nobody could say anything against them, but neither did they want to. The US when Lyndon B. Johnson was president was different; you largely had an anti-technological movement spawned by the Vietnam War, student riots and inner city ghettoes. Many people felt they could use the funds on Earth and not on a manned Mars mission. NASA from that time on had to be nosediving; because the culmination had been there, the public saw no reason for them to press on."

Yet despite the sceptics, the support for space programs is vast enough to generate billion-dollar commercial packages in an extremely risky endeavour. What they hope to receive for their investments ranges from faster transportation to environmental solutions.

"Initial pay-offs for the public, even without a manned Mars mission," says Martin Thorne, "include a high-end courier service around the world, flying to London in record time, joy flights into the upper atmosphere or even a holiday in space within the next 10 years."

Thorne also mentions environmental and industry saving factors as justification of the space program. "Once a payload is out of Earth's orbit, it's easier to go onto Mars than the Moon, and even easier to go onto the Asteroid Belt than Mars. That's where the major pay-offs in raw materials for the next century are."

In support of this view, John S. Lewis, professor of Planetary Sciences and Co-director of the Space Engineering Research Center at the University of Arizona-Tucson writes in Mining The Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1996) that "while we humans worry over the depletion of the Earth's natural resources and the pollution of our planet, uncountable dollars worth of metals, fuels, and life-sustaining substances await us in nearby space." Lewis suggests that the technology to harness these resources are already in our grasp, and that we could already mine the Apollo and Amor asteroids that inhabit our immediate neighbourhood without having to travel to the main asteroid-belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Apollo and Amor groups feature the common 'carbonaceous chondrites' asteroid type, which are rich sources of silicates, water, carbon and nitrogen - precious materials to humans not just on Earth, but also if we are to colonize outer space."