X-33 men: Gore and Goldin's new space shuttle is a bad idea whose time has come.

• Author: Carney, Dan
• Position: Vice-Pres. Al Gore, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin

IT WOULD BE HARD TO IMAGINE A MEDIA opportunity better suited to Vice President Al Gore and NASA Administrator Dan Goldin than their recent visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. There was Gore, the administration's chief Techno-Democrat and high priest of reinvention, extolling his vision of the future alongside Goldin, the superhero-cum-bureaucrat destined (in his own mind, at least) to reclaim the lost glory of the space program. Completing the picture was Norman Augustine, vice chairman of aerospace giant Lockheed Martin and the prime contractor for the Gore-Goldin masterstroke, the X33, the new space vehicle that would be the vanguard of NASA's reinvention.

As Gore and Goldin spoke of the X33, there was a sense of a new beginning in the air. Thanks to $220 million from Lockheed Martin and $941 million from the taxpayers, the X33 would evolve into a completely privately financed launch vehicle that would slash the cost of getting to space by a factor of 10, replace NASA's aging shuttle fleet, and create whole new space industries capitalizing on these new bargain-basement rates for ascending into the heavens. For less than $1 billion, the United States would not only get a replacement for the shuttle but would reassert itself as the unquestioned leader in the commercial launch industry. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand the importance of this moment," Gore said.

Nor, unfortunately, do you have to be a rocket scientist to see through this happy charade. The scene in Pasadena had the kind of eerie familiarity that often goes along with history repeating itself. Twenty-four years earlier, President Nixon and his NASA administrator James Fletcher had convened in an almost identical ceremony a few miles south in San Clemente. Their little plastic model was something called the shuttle, which was going to bring down launch costs, make space travel routine, and . . . well, you get the picture. It has instead become a colossally expensive failure. Promised in 1972 at a cost of $88 million per launch, it is now running about $500 million just in annual operating expenses. With its development, the replacement of the Challenger, and other up-front costs factored in, a former House Science Committee staffer estimated its cost at $1.8 billion per launch, 20 times the original projection.

Alex Rolland is one of many people struck by the similarity of the events, the similarity of the proposed rockets, and the similarity of the ends NASA says it will achieve. Now acting chairman of the history department at Duke University, he was NASA's in-house historian when the shuttle was being developed. "The most remarkable thing is that these people are saying this with a straight face," he says. "I have great respect for Vice President Gore. But I couldn't believe he would stand up and say the things he did "

Gore and Goldin are no slouches. Since Goldin joined NASA in 1992, he has...