Once again, it is back to the future for NASA. In 1952, Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who spearheaded America's first two decades of space efforts, laid out a step-by-step blueprint of space exploration, starting with putting a satellite in orbit around Earth. The next steps in von Braun's blueprint read like NASA's achievements of the past four decades: launching astronauts into orbit, sending astronauts to the Moon, the space shuttle, a space station. Only the order was changed when President John F. Kennedy made the push for sending people to the Moon. That goal was originally supposed...