As the Glory and Grandeur Fade, So Do NASA’s Friends : Space: Skyrocketing costs and urgent down-to-Earth needs have cut into the budget for other-worldly exploration.

It was 1969 and three men had just returned from the moon. They got parades and medals and a presidential dinner. Their burn-stained space capsule was hauled around to all 50 state capitals, escorted by highway patrolmen with the reverence and awe accorded to Old Glory itself. It was hot as the dickens but people lined up for hours just so they could say they had seen the thing.

It was history and triumph and the United States was No. 1. Oh, my, America was proud.

Fast-forward to 1993.

Apollo is history. Skylab is forgotten and the space shuttle has flown 57 times since 1981. Ho hum.

With the tragic exception of Challenger, all launches and landings look the same--up and down, up and down--and network television long ago quit carrying them live. Ask the man on the street to name a current astronaut and get a blank stare.

For nine years, there’s been a boring debate in Washington: Does the United States need a space station? Last June, in Congress, the naysayers came within one vote of killing the project.

Where have all of NASA’s friends gone?

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In the 1960s, NASA could do no wrong. It had the whole country in its corner and the goal was simple: Beat the Soviets.

Nobody’s head rolled when the early rockets blew up or when John Glenn failed 10 times to get off the ground before becoming the first American to orbit Earth or when NASA spent $26 billion to get 12 men on the moon.

“NASA was a creature of the Cold War,” said Don Fuqua, the former chairman of the House space committee and now president of the Aerospace Industries Assn. “When the Berlin Wall came down, there no longer was this enemy out there that we had to compete with.”

The bleachers where the cheerleaders once sat are filled with critics now.

One of them, a congressman, told his colleagues recently that NASA had led them around by the nose for years and “bamboozled” Congress. Even NASA acknowledges it underestimated costs and over-promised results.

That was just one of the many confidence-eroding circumstances.

The Challenger disaster, which killed seven astronauts on the 25th shuttle flight, was “an accident rooted in history,” according to investigators who concluded the agency had gotten sloppy.

The Hubble Space Telescope’s inability to see to the edge of the universe as promised was due to careless miscalculation. The $1.4-billion Galileo space probe to Jupiter is handicapped because its main antenna is jammed.

The much-heralded Mars Observer mission intended to gather data for a future manned mission ended in mystery and futility when the craft lapsed into silence just before it arrived. Efforts to restart it failed; no one knows if it went spinning past the planet or simply blew up.

On its 12th anniversary, the space shuttle fleet was on only its 54th mission; NASA had promised up to 400 by then. The shuttles have proven to be cantankerous, finicky and expensive.

In 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, President George Bush announced a 30-year program that would see a U.S. colony on the moon and an expedition to Mars.

Nothing more has been heard of that $500 billion-plus proposal.

On and on. America may have crossed the last affordable frontier.

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The NASA Alumni Assn. recently began talking about staging an event next year to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the moon landing. It dropped the idea for lack of interest.

“The pioneering days of space are simply over. Even a Mars landing doesn’t have nearly the appeal that a moon landing had.” said Walter Cronkite, an unabashed booster in the space program’s early days when he covered flights for CBS.

“There has been a big change in tastes,” said John Chancellor, who did the same for NBC. “I was in Moscow when (Soviet cosmonaut) Yuri Gagarin went around Earth.

“I saw a country of 200 million people have a nervous breakdown in front of our eyes. There was a huge amount of nationalism then, an us-and-them nationalism. Now there are no Commies under our beds,” Chancellor said.

A young congressman from New Jersey, Dick Zimmer, has led the fight against the space station.

“I consider myself a friend of NASA,” he said. “I think I’m giving it tough love.”

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As a candidate, Bill Clinton was a friend of the space station, and as President he practiced tough love, ordering NASA back to the drawing board. With good reason.

Since 1984, when Ronald Reagan proposed it, the station’s expected costs climbed from $8 billion to $31.3 billion by NASA’s estimate.

Even that, said the General Accounting Office, was low. The station would cost at least $40 billion to build and more than $100 billion to operate over its 30-year planned lifetime.

Clinton gave NASA administrator Daniel Goldin new marching orders: Cut the cost in half. Goldin had the station redesigned and downsized for the umpteenth time and Clinton adopted a version he said would save $18 billion. The Zimmer forces still shuddered at the idea of spending that much.

“This space turkey,” was a recurring phrase during the House debate. Allusions to Columbus failed to sway doubters.

“Egyptians, Ottomans and Romans all were victims of their own foolishness,” said Rep. Marge Roukema of New Jersey.

“The price tag is out of this world,” said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney of New York. “One hundred billion dollars for a Motel Six in space when we have an infant mortality rate in Harlem . . . that rivals many Third World countries.”

On one House roll call, the station survived by a single vote, 216-215.

“They like space and they like the idea of space but are not willing to spend the billions that NASA wants to spend on it,” said Howard Benedict, executive director of the Mercury Seven Foundation.

Will the excitement return? “I don’t think it can. Going to the moon was a one-time thing. There will never again be an adventure like that, even going to Mars,” Benedict said.

It is indisputable that when NASA is doing spectacular things, the interest revives. All the networks, with their millions of viewers, watched fascinated when three astronauts caught a huge satellite in their gloved hands last year after days of trying the capture it the way it had been rehearsed.

NASA’s friends surely will be watching in December or January when the agency begins its most challenging mission in years, repair of the Hubble telescope.

It will involve the magic formula of derring-do and risk, acts of great courage and potential calamity.

“Hubble is a very bold mission,” said administrator Goldin. “This is the type of thing Americans are about. They love it.”

Mark Albrecht, who ran the Bush Administration’s National Space Council, thinks “naysayers and Luddites” are always present when it comes to spending money on space research. Their voices are muted, he said, when NASA is engaged in missions and projects that are captivating.

“When we stop talking and fiddling and start building the space station, with construction measured in a few years, it’s got the potential of getting people excited,” he said. “We post-World War II Americans have space wired in our primary fabric.”

Perhaps it was a generational thing in the early days, said Brian Duff, formerly of NASA, who had the happy duty of escorting the Apollo 11 capsule around the country after its triumphal return.

In those days, NASA had powerful friends in the White House and elsewhere.

“John F. Kennedy invited John Glenn to Hyannis, where he went water skiing with the President,” Duff said. “Lyndon Johnson didn’t let an astronaut come back from a space flight without giving him a medal.”

Where have all of NASA’s friends gone?

James Webb, who headed NASA then, liked to say that government is good at doing things people want done. People wanted to go to the moon and NASA did it for them.

“I don’t think there’s popular enthusiasm for a space station or going to Mars or the moon,” Duff said. “My sense is that NASA is going to have to figure out what people want done.”