55 years ago, its greatest glory with the moon shots & space program, and it retains much engineering talent and lofty aspirations. But even as the agency talks of expanding civilization throughout the solar system, it has been forced to recognize its limitations. Flat budgets have become declining budgets. The joke among agency officials is that, when it comes to budgets, flat is the new up. Lacks the money and the technology to do what it has long dreamed of doing, which is to send astronauts to Mars and bring them safely back to Earth. It has resorted to fallback plans, and to fallbacks to the fallbacks.