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Full disclosure: I'm a space geek. As a child, I spent hours in a chair tipped onto its back on my bedroom floor with a football helmet on, pretending I was John Glenn. I faked sick in elementary school to get to stay home and watch Apollo launches.

So when the president of the United States announces a new mission for NASA, I stand up and take notice. Only right about now, I'm finding it a little hard to get excited.

The problem is, the mission President Bush unveiled in a highly publicized address on Jan. 14 raises more questions than answers. "We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon and prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own," the president announced. NASA, he said, would finish the space station, retire the space shuttle, build a "crew exploration vehicle," conduct manned missions with it by 2014, land on the moon by 2020, and then aim to go to Mars and beyond.

That's an awfully big package of objectives, stretching awfully far off into the future. Not exactly what John F. Kennedy proposed in 1961. His message, in case you don't remember it, was: We'll go to the moon and back safely by the end of the decade.

But even before Bush delivered his speech, it was winning rave reviews. Homer Hickam, the famed coal miner's son-turned NASA engineer and best-selling author, called it "so cool" in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Since Kennedy's challenge was met, Hickam wrote, the space program "has muddled along without much purpose or conviction. But President Bush will change all that."

Likewise, much of the coverage in newspapers and on TV in the wake of Bush's speech compared his challenge favorably to Kennedy's. So why am I not looking forward to calling in "sick" to watch the crew exploration vehicle blast off for the return trip to the lunar surface? Maybe it's because we've already been to the moon. Or because President Bush's father articulated a Moon-Mars mission statement almost identical to his son's more than a decade ago.

But I suppose I shouldn't quibble about the nature of the mission. Bush's announcement at least means that NASA has a mission, which is more than many agencies can say (or at least say clearly.) NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe was practically giddy after Bush's speech.

"This afternoon we got a mandate," he said at a news conference. He's been a federal executive long enough to know just how rare and precious that is in government. O'Keefe wasted no time in translating Bush's vision into specific organizational and operational reality. Just compare his statements on the importance and implications of the renewed emphasis on human space exploration with the president's:

Bush: "We do not know where this journey will end, yet we know this: Human beings are headed into the cosmos."

O'Keefe: "What you'll see in the program [is] the very specified emphasis on the research on station to emphasize life sciences, human physiology, the human effects and consequence of long-duration space flight [to] develop the means by which to mitigate those consequences in order to facilitate the opportunity for broader exploration objectives of longer duration."

Spoken like a true public administrator, which is just what NASA needs right now. If anybody can turn the agency around, it's O'Keefe. The day after Bush's speech, he announced a restructuring of NASA's headquarters operations to start implementing the new mission.

But the question is whether O'Keefe or his successors will get the chance to finish the job. President Bush's commitment to his space vision was quickly called into question. Less than a week after he unveiled the Moon-Mars initiative, he delivered a State of the Union message that included nary a mention of it. Steroid use by professional athletes had apparently become a more pressing national concern.

Then there's the question of money. Bush pledged to seek only $1 billion in new funding over the next five years to get the initiative off the ground. NASA is supposed to come up with another $11 billion by shifting money around in its $86 billion budget.

That's a prudent approach -- depressingly so. Of course there's no room in the federal budget for a big fat new space program. But that leaves NASA in the same position it, like many other agencies, has been in for years: Scrounging money from existing efforts to launch new ones. What's more, the hundreds of billions of dollars it would take to actually put people on the Moon and Mars are left for some future administration to find.

Under such circumstances, it's hard to be optimistic that the latest mission for NASA will turn out much differently than the other much-ballyhooed space projects that have come and gone since Apollo.

I think I'm about to become a former space geek.

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