COLUMN ONE : When the Sky Isn’t the Limit : NASA’s new chief is on a mission to restore the bold old days on a tighter budget. Posing basic questions about the agency’s purpose, he stirs both hope and anxiety.

Daniel S. Goldin, the new NASA chief, is seeking advice and he is asking everyone imaginable: eminent physicists, corporate leaders, Russian rocket scientists, writers, artists, cabbies . . . not necessarily in that order.

Why, he wants to know, does the United States need a space program?

He is soliciting opinions from the 24,000 employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

And he says that he intends to hold town hall meetings on the subject all across America.

Goldin was installed in April, an outsider with a mandate to restore the bold old days at a bargain-basement price. In his zeal to recharge the troubled agency, he seems willing to reinvent it, or at least to entertain all notions offered.

Inside NASA and out, the arrival of this hard-driving, emotional aerospace executive has inspired a melange of hope, anxiety and skepticism. When he says of NASA employees that “I want to open up their creative bubbles,” some of his listeners say he’s just the man to make the space program soar again. Others think his unorthodox approach borders on the absurd.

Everyone, though, admits to extreme curiosity about Goldin’s intentions.

“This man is almost frantically, energetically reaching out in every direction,” said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “It’s got a lot of people confused. Change is coming, but the outlines of where it’s headed are not clear.”

In 1962, the reply to Goldin’s most basic of questions would have been simple and swift: This country needs a space program to beat the Russians.

In 1992, with the Cold War over and the budget tight, the answer is much less clear. From various quarters come seemingly conflicting sentiments:

* Let’s learn about our place in the heavens, how we got here and what our future is. Shelve human flights, which are much too risky and expensive; concentrate on sending cameras and instruments to explore the universe. Include a good look at the environment of Earth.

* We need to colonize, we need heroes, we need adventure. Get people to the moon, establish an outpost there, head to Mars.

* We should promote world harmony--a nice turnabout from the space race based on distrust and fear. Join with the Russians, perhaps also the Europeans and the Japanese, on some spectacular project. We can save money that way too.

* We should help our country’s economy. Make sure we keep those high-wage, high-tech jobs at home. Develop innovative instruments and methods that can be used in other industries too.

* We don’t need it. Shut the whole thing down and use the money for housing and schools.

The choices, so long avoided, won’t be easy. “There’s going to be hamburger all over the highway,” said John Pike, space policy director for the Federation of American Scientists.

The shaping of the nation’s space program is the most visible piece of the debate over the value of big science, as the federal government struggles to decide how much and what kind of research it can afford. Major, multibillion-dollar projects, from the space station to the space shuttle to the Cassini probe’s planned rendezvous with Saturn, could be redesigned, put aside, jettisoned or propelled to the top of the nation’s agenda, depending on how NASA’s goals are defined.

As Goldin sifts through the suggestions, he knows just one thing for sure: He wants to steer what he calls “the new NASA” away from the stumblebum image of its recent past, away from the NASA that presided over the fatal explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope ground beautifully to the wrong shape, the jammed antenna on the Galileo spacecraft heading toward Jupiter, countless huge cost overruns and lengthy delays. Away from the NASA that, numbed by its failures, “is not trying to be on the leading edge of something,” as astronaut Daniel Brandenstein told his hometown Wisconsin newspaper.

“I’m on a mission,” Goldin said, seated in a conference room next to his new office. The unremarkable headquarters building is a block from the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, which documents the NASA triumphs of the 1960s. “I’m not here for a job. I’m on a mission because I’m worried about the future of our country.”

In his frequent pep talks to NASA employees, Goldin never fails to recite his mantra, a phrase reduced by his rapid-fire, South Bronx-flavored cadence to a single word: Fasterbettercheaper. The agency must reweave its tattered credibility, he preaches, before embarking on its new crusade--whatever that may be.

In a recent talk at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he said: “It’s time we face the fact that we have real problems in the way we’re managing our space programs. We must do much more with the dollars we spend.”

That wasn’t happening, he said, when he arrived in Washington after 25 years with TRW in Redondo Beach. He discovered that NASA was basing its decisions on expectations of a $15-billion allotment in 1993 and, more critically, on significantly higher budgets in the future.

That thinking he describes as “a disaster in the making.” A more realistic view, he said, is to plan for no financial growth at all, perhaps even for cuts.

To that end, Goldin has started a color war of sorts within the agency, forming 16 “blue teams” and “red teams” to recommend cost reductions of 20% to 40%. The “blue teams” are made up of people who examine the project they work on. The “red teams,” NASA employees from other programs, play devil’s advocates.

The teams will be a way of life at NASA as long as Goldin is administrator. Get used to it, he warned employees at Langley Research Center in Virginia. “The train is leaving the station. Choo choo,” he said, deadpan, from an auditorium stage. “All aboard.”

He has also vowed to trim bureaucratic layers that he believes create unnecessary delays. “NASA headquarters,” he said, “is going on the UltraSlimfast diet.”

Still, the linchpin of success, in Goldin’s mind, is for everyone to reach a consensus on NASA’s reason for being. His pinched professorial features stay calm when he talks about it, but his voice quavers and rises as he interrupts himself.

“If we could get some alignment . . . a set of values for NASA,” Goldin said, “I believe we’ll get away from going to this crossroads and that crossroad and this crossroad and that crossroad.”

Futurist Alvin Toffler, one of Goldin’s legion of informal advisers, says a clearly expressed purpose should also help NASA woo back popular support. The agency has so many scattered activities, Toffler said, “it doesn’t add up to a pattern. There is an assumption that (the space program) doesn’t do any good for the American people.”

The call went out weeks ago to NASA’s astronauts, scientists, technicians, managers. All were invited to contribute their ideas. Toffler plans to convene a panel of young intellectuals to add theirs. Goldin spends many hours on Capitol Hill with members of Congress, who decide how much money NASA projects should get. On Saturday mornings, he augments his engineering background with a crash course in life sciences.

Numerous blue-ribbon panels have examined NASA since the Challenger accident in 1986: the Rogers Commission (headed by a former secretary of state), the Stafford Commission (headed by a former astronaut), the Augustine Commission (headed by the chairman of Martin Marietta).

But Goldin’s re-examination is billed as being much more thorough, and is the first to include agency employees. More important, Goldin’s effort is the first to be headed by someone with the power to push changes through.

Some worry that he will--”there are a lot of scared middle managers around here,” an employee at NASA headquarters said.

And some wonder if he will--”So far, it’s just rhetoric,” said a member of the JPL staff. The NASA-wide employee committee responsible for the “vision statement” has come up with a working paper that lists “the same old vague goals that NASA has always kind of seen for itself. I would have liked to see something a little more specific,” he said.

A preliminary draft centers on “the peaceful quest for knowledge” and being “explorers, discoverers and innovators.” America should “lead a global effort,” remaining “the preeminent space-faring nation,” the committee’s paper says.

Goldin, for now, is withholding comment. He wants to let everyone else collaborate first, in the belief that he will be more likely hear others’ true opinions if they don’t know his. “I bite my tongue,” he said, “every day.”

This much is apparent. When it comes to people in space, Goldin is an unabashed romantic. Forty-six years ago, when he was 6, he grew obsessed with Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers on the screen at the Wood Theater on Westchester Avenue in the South Bronx.

Forbidden to play contact sports because of his poor eyesight, Goldin read science fiction instead. On camping trips with his father, he stared at the stars, wondering if there were planets around those pinpricks of light, and if there were people on those planets. He still believes some other civilization must be out there.

After his 1962 graduation from the City College of New York, Goldin wrote an application to NASA that read like a fan letter. The young engineer landed a job at NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, designing an electrically propelled, nuclear-powered spaceship for a crew of eight on a theoretical journey to Mars.

His five years at NASA coincided with the first push by humans into space, the high-adrenaline era of Mercury and Gemini and the move toward the moon. The possibilities appeared as endless as the galaxies sweeping toward the outer limits of the universe.

But TRW was recruiting him for similar work in Redondo Beach. “I needed growth and I thought I could get it there,” he said. He eventually moved into management and into defense work, including projects for the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.”

He expected much from those he supervised. Some thrived. An executive at times exchanged shouts with Goldin, but says he relished being free to speak his mind. Others felt intimidated, and one filed an age discrimination suit against Goldin and TRW. “It’s an active case,” Goldin said, declining comment.

Goldin rose through the ranks, becoming head of his division, then his group. But he was passed over for chief of the defense and space sector. This was a great disappointment, said UCLA management professor Moshe Rubinstein, another adviser and friend. But “he had told me his dream job, and it wasn’t to run TRW,” Rubinstein said. “He wanted to be science adviser to the President or the head of NASA.”

Now that he’s apparently where he wanted to be, Goldin hasn’t given up his love affair with human space travel.

While he watched his first shuttle landing as NASA administrator, Goldin’s eyes glistened with tears. He recalls his dreams as a grammar school student. “Here I am, I was at P.S. 93 . . . I’m going to walk to the shuttle and meet the astronauts,” he remembers thinking. “I still feel like the child I was.”

In June, he tacked an ad-libbed benediction straight out of “Star Wars” on the end of a speech to a surprised group of military officers and aerospace contractors. “May the force be with you,” he said.

Informed observers say that one reason Goldin’s predecessor, Richard H. Truly, was forced out was his unenthusiastic response to President Bush’s pronouncement that the United States should establish a permanent outpost of people on the moon and send astronauts to Mars by 2019. Though a special space exploration office was opened, it was “lip service,” one insider said.

Goldin says he is excited about the prospect of visits to Mars, talked about since the post-World War II days of Werner von Braun.

But don’t expect anything soon, he warned.

He said that NASA will probably reduce the percentage of its budget devoted to human space flight. “I don’t think we’re going to the moon (again) in this century,” he said.

And he added: “My contention is, if we had a half-trillion dollars, we’d go to Mars right away. But we don’t have a half-trillion dollars.”

He says the way back to the moon and to Mars can be paved by sending robot scouts to both bodies, a relatively inexpensive method of gathering information.

He muses aloud about phasing out Truly’s beloved space shuttle program over the next decade. “When I moved from California to Washington, I came on an airplane, but my worldly goods moved on a truck,” he said. As a parallel, he said, perhaps humans can occasionally travel to space on a smaller, less expensive version of the shuttle, he said, with satellites launched on even less expensive rockets.

Goldin recently returned from a trip to Russia, where he agreed that NASA will host a cosmonaut on the shuttle, an astronaut will spend five or six months aboard the Russian space station Mir and the two craft will rendezvous three years from now.

But he also pushed strongly for the $30-billion U.S. space station Freedom. When the House of Representatives voted by a slim margin last week to continue funding for the project, Goldin counted it as a victory. He argues that America must study the effects of long-term space life on humans if the country is to ever send astronauts to stay for extended periods on the moon and Mars.

In doing so, he resists a chorus that includes Caltech Planetary Sciences Chairman Bruce Murray, Planetary Society Director Louis Friedman, former Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin and former Soviet Space Science Director Roald Z. Sagdeyev.

All urge NASA to make more use of the Russian Mir instead, paying for remodeling if necessary and saving billions. Aldrin says the United States could even send up an “addition”--an American capsule that orbits in tandem with Mir.

Freedom’s huge expenditures--which the General Accounting Office believes could rise again--”put us in a place where we are squeezing out the (interplanetary) science,” Friedman said.

Goldin wants to help outfit Mir. But he adds, “We agreed we’re going to spend a year or two working together before we rush in.”

Besides, he said, if Congress had killed Freedom, the project’s billions probably would have gone to veterans or housing or even reducing the deficit--anything but space. “He had to lobby for it,” one of the station’s critics said. “He’s keeping his options open.”

So how will Goldin cut? Trying to do too much has been NASA’s classic pitfall, said Norman Augustine, who chaired the last outside review of the agency.

His commission’s advice then was to do a few things well and that was based on a 10% annual growth in the budget. Priorities must be set and soon, Augustine said.

“Norm Augustine is correct,” Goldin said. “On the other hand, I don’t think America can walk away from the space program. We’re going three steps forward, one step back; four steps forward, two steps back. We’re making progress.”