One of the indelible memories for anyone living through the 1960s was watching CBS newsman Walter Cronkite anchor another televised liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Throughout the decade, from Alan Shepard through Neil Armstrong, Cronkite made it clear to his audience that they were taking part in something momentous, something that not only represented the flowering of a great technological achievement but stirred the human soul as well.

This week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration observes the 50th anniversary of its creation. And make no mistake: There's a lot to celebrate. NASA's achievements write a glorious chapter in human history, one that's nearly impossible to overstate. Is it fair to call NASA the greatest scientific and exploratory agency ever created? It is.

Americans used to appreciate this. Rare was the school in the early '60s that didn't stop the day's activities so student and teacher alike could gather in front of a grainy, often wavy, black-and-white picture of an Atlas booster rising heavenward from the smoke and fire, while Uncle Walter, live from the Cape, told us what it all meant.

It meant a lot. The U.S. space program was a cultural touchstone as much as a scientific or political one. Astronauts were heroes, as revered as any ballplayer or movie star of the time. You'd have to be living in a cave not to know what NASA was, and byproducts of the space program touched almost every corner of American life.

It cost the United States about $40 billion to get to the moon. Even at twice the cost, that's chump change. The human race has been repaid many times over for that investment, as it has for many other NASA projects. So much of what we take for granted today is either directly or indirectly a byproduct of what used to be called space-age technology. Medicine, the military, communications, miniaturization, computerization -- all have benefited because of NASA's work.

The space program also helped to fire an interest in the sciences generally, with all the obvious benefits that accrue to that. And if you believe that reaching for the stars represents a triumph of the human spirit, then those who dedicate their lives to it -- from NASA's astronauts to the Soviet/Russian cosmonauts to all the other spacefarers who have taken up the challenge -- only carry us forward.

And to think it all started, more or less, with the terrifying appearance of a shiny ball measuring a mere 22 inches across.

Sputnik Started It All

It was Oct. 4, 1957 when the Soviet news agency Tass announced to a stunned world that the Soviet Union had successfully placed Elementary Satellite 1, aka "Sputnik," into an elliptical orbit 900 kilometers above the Cold War-wracked planet. The aluminum sphere was the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, and its celestial presence electrified the world and kicked the Space Age into high gear, leading in short order to the formation of NASA.

American scientists were already in a close race with the Russians to launch the first orbiting satellite. But the Americans' Vanguard program, run by the Naval Research Laboratory, was beset by cost overruns and delays. Getting beat by the Russians was a tremendous blow.

The pressure intensified with the successful Russian launch, less than a month later, of the much heavier Sputnik 2 (with the dog Laika aboard). The sting of that was only somewhat mitigated by the Army's successful launch and orbiting of Explorer 1 on Jan. 31, 1958.

It was clear that the United States was losing ground and that its space effort needed a major reorganization. The first step was to reinvigorate the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, a rather geeky and elitist civilian panel that had been around since 1915. As NACA's charter grew, the decision was made to expand it into a full-fledged government agency.

On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed legislation creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA was born.

Space Pioneers

NASA officially became a functioning entity on Oct. 1, 1958, with T. Keith Glennan as its first administrator. There were 8,000 employees, inherited from NACA; three research laboratories -- Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Ames Aeronautical Laboratory and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory -- and an annual budget of $100 million.

The agency's mission statement will have faint echoes for Star Trek fans: "To improve life here, to extend life there, to find life beyond."

The U.S. and Soviet space programs dueled throughout the decade, launching various satellites (military, communications, environmental) and sending their men (and eventually, women) on increasingly ambitious missions. The Russians were first to hit the moon with a man-made object (1959), first to orbit the moon and photograph its far side (1959), first to send a man into space (Yuri Gagarin, in 1961), first to send a woman into space (Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963), first to have a cosmonaut go EVA, or leave an orbiting spacecraft (Alexei Leonov, in 1965), first to land a probe on the moon and transmit data back to Earth (1966), the first to place a manned space station into orbit (1971).

NASA, though, was no laggard, posting a series of successes throughout the 1960s and eventually overtaking the Russians. The ultimate goal was straightforward, if not simple: Beat the Russians and be first to put a man on the moon.

A manned space program required astronauts, so NASA immediately began screening military and civilian test pilots for suitable candidates. Seven were chosen, and because the project was named Mercury, they became known as the "Mercury Seven": Scott Carpenter, L. Gordon Cooper Jr., John Glenn Jr., Gus Grissom, Walter Schirra Jr., Alan Shepard Jr. and Deke Slayton.

A project of that scope also required massive public support, and NASA cannily touted the Mercury Seven as the mascots of the fledgling space program, turning them into national heroes and rallying the populace behind the agency's lofty goals.

Twenty-three days after Gagarin's historic, 108-minute flight, Alan Shepard became the first American into space. It was a quick up-and-back, suborbital affair aboard Freedom 7. Eleven months later, on Feb. 20, 1962, John Glenn completed three orbits aboard Friendship 7 and the space race was officially tied again.

Project Mercury ran its course. It was replaced by Project Gemini in 1965, an intermediate program designed to pave the way for Project Apollo and the final assault on the moon.

To the Moon

Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, circling the moon 10 times before heading home. Apollo 10 amounted to a full dress rehearsal for the actual landing, orbiting the moon 31 times and coming within 50,000 tantalizing feet of the lunar surface.

NASA's supreme moment arrived on July 20, 1969. With the entire world watching -- no exaggeration -- Apollo 11's lunar lander, Eagle, touched down on the powdery surface of the Sea of Tranquility at 4:18 p.m. EDT. The first words spoken from the lunar surface was a simple acknowledgement to mission control: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

Six-and-a-half hours later, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on the moon. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent two-and-half hours on the lunar surface, planting the American flag, placing a plaque ("Here Men From the Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon. July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace for All Mankind."), collecting soil samples and setting up scientific instruments.

Astronauts returned to the moon on subsequent Apollo flights to collect additional mineral samples, play a little golf and conduct a slew of scientific experiments.

NASA narrowly averted disaster in April 1970 with Apollo 13, when an oxygen tank ruptured onboard. The mission became a harrowing rescue drama that in some ways was NASA's finest hour. The three-man crew -- James Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Haise Jr. -- abandoned their crippled, oxygen-starved command module and crammed themselves into the lunar lander for an attempted return to Earth. Working with flight controllers on the ground, they swung around the moon, using the lunar gravity to propel them toward Earth. Three days after the explosion, they splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean.

Although there were five more Apollo missions to come, NASA was already turning its attention to the exploration of deep space, the deployment of an orbiting space station and the development of a reusable craft that it called the space shuttle.

And the race was not without its tragic setbacks.

In January 1967, Gus Grissom, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, was killed along with two crewmates, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, when their Apollo 1 training capsule caught fire during a test at Cape Canaveral. They were the first fatalities for NASA and the U.S. space program.

Even as they paused to mourn and bury their dead, NASA's engineers and astronauts forged ahead.

Beyond Apollo

On March 2, 1972, NASA launched Pioneer 10, which became the first satellite to pass through the asteroid belt and return close-up images of Jupiter. From there, it sailed on out of the solar system and into deep space, where it continued sending signals until contact was finally lost on Jan. 22, 2003.

NASA launched two more deep-space probes in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Together, the two spacecraft have visited more planets, asteroids, rings and moons, and traveled farther than any other spacecraft. Voyager 1 is now further from Earth than any man-made object.

Closer to Earth, NASA began to "extend life there" by launching its first space station, Skylab, in 1973. Americans were now able to spend extended periods in space, which, among other things, led to more sophisticated studies on the effects of prolonged weightlessness on the human body.

As the cold war thawed, U.S. and Soviet space programs began moving toward a spirit of cooperation, which culminated in the Apollo-Soyuz test project in 1975. The crews performed a few joint scientific experiments, but the real value of this mission was to help the easing of tensions back on Earth, advancing NASA's mission to "improve life here." It also paved the way for future joint U.S.-Russian efforts, like the Shuttle-Mir program.

The centerpiece of NASA's post-Apollo years has been the space shuttle. Designed to carry large payloads in low Earth orbit, the shuttle is the first truly reusable orbital spacecraft. Six shuttles have been built. Five of them -- Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour -- were fully operational. The prototype, Enterprise, was not built to fly in space.

Its versatility and durability has made the shuttle NASA's workhorse since STS-1, Columbia's maiden flight in 1981. Shuttles have been used to deploy and recover satellites, to deliver payloads and crews to various space stations, to conduct experiments in the weightlessness of space, and to dispatch crews to repair other space vehicles. In 1990, it was Discovery that deployed another resounding NASA success, the Hubble Space Telescope.

To date there have been 121 shuttle missions. Of those, 119 have ended successfully. The two that didn't remain burned into the national consciousness. The Challenger and Columbia disasters, which cost the lives of 14 astronauts, have dogged the shuttle program since 1986, delaying missions while NASA undertook painstaking investigations.

Recent shuttle missions have centered on keeping the Hubble telescope functioning and ferrying additional components to the International Space Station, a multinational endeavor that has helped NASA strengthen its ties with other national space programs.

Now the shuttle is nearing the end of its operational life. NASA plans to retire the orbiter following STS-133, scheduled for 2010. A new orbiter, Orion, is expected to deploy in the middle of the next decade.

Meanwhile, NASA is currently lavishing a lot of attention on our nearest planetary neighbor, Mars. Although NASA rovers have pretty well discounted the possibility of the existence of little green men, the red planet's geological history is being intensely studied. NASA's recent declaration that water ice is present on Mars holds out the hope that some form of life did, or does, exist.

The Next 50 Years

Challenges lie ahead as NASA moves into its second half-century. Funding remains a chronic problem, especially in the age of the shrinking government purse. NASA, like other agencies, has to fight for its place at the budget trough.

Public perception has also changed over the years. A new generation, one that has grown up taking space flight for granted, doesn't understand why the seemingly routine should be so costly. What they fail to realize, perhaps, is that none of this is routine, and never will be.

Maybe this glib miscalculation is also what spurs on that new breed of space explorer, the private entrepreneur. The idea that a few wealthy space enthusiasts could somehow supplant NASA and come anywhere near matching its achievements -- ever -- is laughable, or would be if it weren't given so much credence in certain corners of the popular consciousness.

Not to belittle the accomplishment, of course, but getting a pilot to the edge of space in an experimental aircraft is so ... 1956.

Laughable or not, however, NASA is watching this new generation of space entrepreneurs. That much is clear.

And as the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, NASA can look back on a half century of real achievement. There have been failures and disappointments, but considering the size of the omelet it was inevitable that a few eggs would get broken along the way. Nobody understood that better than the 17 astronauts who lost their lives in service.

By any measuring stick, the American space program, kick-started by a tiny Russian satellite in 1957, stands as both a towering scientific success and a triumph of the human spirit. We are privileged to be along for the ride.

"Form follows function." Nowhere is that dictum more inflexible than in the hostile reaches of outer space. So nothing hews to that dictum more closely than the space suit. Even as it has evolved over NASA's 50 years to adapt to increasingly sophisticated missions and changing spacecraft technology, the space suit's central purpose -- to maintain a human environment where none exists -- remains constant.

From the Mercury suit worn by John Glenn during his historic three-orbit flight in 1962 to today's shuttle and space station rigs, the basic requirements for the space suit have not changed, but the designs have. Here's a look back at the last piece of technology standing between NASA's astronauts and oblivion.

An astronaut is fitted into his space suit. Because suits are recycled among astronauts, they need to be constantly resized to maintain adequate pressure. This is accomplished using a sizing device developed for NASA by Hubert C. Vykukal.

Enos the chimp, restrained by wrist tethers and still wearing his space suit, after returning from orbit aboard Mercury Atlas 5 in November 1961. He beat John Glenn into space by two months.

John Glenn in his Project Mercury pressure suit, which he wore when he became the first American to orbit the Earth. Glenn is also the only astronaut to go into space wearing both Mercury and space shuttle suits.

Neil Armstrong, pictured here, would be the first human being to set foot on the moon. But not in this suit. Here, he models a Project Gemini G-2C training suit, designed to be flexible when pressurized.

On June 3, 1965, astronaut Ed White became the first American to walk in space. He's wearing a modified Gemini space suit and is tethered by a lifeline to his Gemini IV capsule.

Engineer Bill Peterson fits test pilot Bob Smyth into an Apollo space suit with a lunar excursion module restraint harness during testing in 1968. Project Apollo put astronauts on the moon, so the suit had to be designed for both lunar conditions and maximum flexibility.

America's first man into space, Alan Shepard, walked on the moon a decade later as commander of Apollo 14. This was the suit he wore, minus helmet and gloves, when he played his famous round of lunar golf.

The iconic shot: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin is photographed by Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong in the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong is just visible in Aldrin's face shield.

When the first shuttle flight, STS-1, lifted off on April 12, 1981, astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen wore the ejection escape suit shown here. It's a modified version of the Air Force's high-altitude pressure suit.

This is the familiar orange launch and entry suit worn by current shuttle crews, nicknamed, appropriately enough, the "pumpkin suit." This is an all-purpose suit designed to cover most contingencies: It includes a helmet with built-in communications gear, a parachute pack and harness, a life raft and life-preserver unit, an oxygen manifold and valves, and survival gear.

In February 1984, shuttle astronaut Bruce McCandless became the first astronaut to float in space completely untethered to his spacecraft. A jetpack known as the manned maneuvering unit kept McCandless within hailing distance. NASA has since ditched the MMU and are once again secured to the spacecraft, although they do wear a similar device in case of an emergency.

An artist's conception of the future launch and entry suit, left, and a spacewalk suit. Although NASA plans to retire the shuttle in 2010, there are plans to replace it with another vehicle, Orion, by mid-decade, and to return to the moon by 2020.

Adrian Emry, 7, of Moses Lake, Washington, gives a thumbs-up to NASA engineer Bill Welch, who wears a lunar spacesuit concept for use in Project Constellation, the planned U.S. return to the moon.

From equipment installed backwards to problems with the metric system, NASA's failures can be as fascinating as its successes. Of course, more cynical critics might suggest that NASA's failures overshadow its successes -- but let's see you send a ship to the moon.

That aside, NASA's in a difficult position: Charged with meeting America's spacefaring dreams on a shrinking budget, and perpetually judged against the magic of the moon landing, the agency is an easy target. And a few mistakes are inevitable: After all, Murphy's law was coined by an actual rocket scientist.

With that in mind, let's take a look at some of NASA's most conspicuous, embarrassing (and non-fatal) gaffes.

Left: The $1 billion Mars Observer, launched in 1992 with the aim of studying the red planet's terrain and climate, was supposed to be the first in a series of Observer missions. Instead it became the first in a series of Mars failures: Three days before its scheduled orbital entry, communications inexplicably and permanently ceased. It may now be orbiting Mars, though some wonder if it didn't blow past the planet and end up circling the Sun.

Six years after the Mars Observer disappeared, the Mars Climate Orbiter followed suit. This time, however, NASA knew what went wrong: Subcontracted engineers at Lockheed Martin used English units of measurement rather than the agency's favored metric system. The ensuing navigational mix-up sent the vehicle into a low-altitude orbit, where it was torn apart by atmospheric stresses.

Finally: no mysterious silence, no goofball measurements! Nothing but 142 million miles of smooth sailing all the way from Earth to 40 meters above the red planet's surface. That's when the lander's computers misinterpreted a routine vibration as evidence of touchdown, cut the descent engines and sent the craft plummeting to destruction. Says NASA historian Steven Dick, "An unconfirmed theory is that the Martian air defenses are pretty good!"

In September of 2004, NASA's Genesis capsule returned to Earth with samples of solar wind -- a stream of electrons and protons from which scientists hoped to tease the secrets of the sun and our solar system. It was supposed to parachute gently back to Earth, where a helicopter would snag it mid-air before any jarring impact could dislodge the precious solar particles. But the Genesis' parachute failed to open, sending the craft and its ethereal cargo slamming straight into the Utah desert. Agency investigators later found that its deceleration sensors were installed backwards.

Not long after the Genesis face-plant, parachutes on this Jupiter probe also failed to deploy when a cross-wired pair of accelerometers fed each other the wrong data. Just in the nick of time, however, the chutes opened. Whew!

The DART -- or Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology -- was supposed to show off NASA's navigational precision. It wouldn't just hook up with another planet, but would dock with an orbiting communications satellite. This delicate dance turned destructive on its October 2004 test run, when DART collided with the satellite. NASA delayed its report for a year, then unleashed a scathing indictment citing a "lack of training and experience," schedule pressure, bad software coding and breakdowns in responsibility.

Though human error and institutional incompetence underlie many NASA failures, nature hasn't always been kind, either. In 1987, an Atlas-Centaur rocket was hit by lightning within moments of launch. It spun out of control and had to be destroyed.

This image shows lighting striking the space shuttle Challenger, not an Atlas-Centaur.

Not all of NASA's mistakes are vehicular, or even involve rocket science: A launch-site banner celebrating the July 2007 takeoff of the space shuttle Endeavour, christened in honor of explorer James Cook's famous vessel, misspelled its name as "Endeavor."

The Hubble Space Telescope -- the most technologically advanced eye ever turned toward the heavens -- was launched in 1990 after nearly two decades of planning, research and delays. Only then did scientists realize that its mirror was incorrectly ground. There is, however, a happy ending to the story: A dramatic 1993 in-space repair mission restored the Hubble's vision, and its subsequent insights into our universe have been boundless. The image shown here is of the Carina nebula, taken by the Hubble.

NASA's mission is to take humans where they've never been before, so in honor of the agency's 50th anniversary, we take a look through the vehicles NASA's used to carry us into the unknown.

This gallery looks through all the eras of NASA from the early glorified missile launches of the pre-NASA 1950s through the Apollo moon missions to the shuttle era and beyond. In the process, we provide you with a brief history of the agency and human progress in space exploration, from the first satellite launches to the Mars Phoenix Lander.

Left: With the successful launch of the Juno 1 rocket, the United States entered the Space Age. That rocket, shown here, placed the Explorer 1 satellite into orbit around the Earth in January 1958. Explorer marked an important milestone in the space race between the United States and the USSR, as the Russians had launched the first-ever satellite in October 1957.

Explorer's launch actually predated the formation of NASA by a few months: It was carried out by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, indicating that the United States viewed space both as a frontier and a prospective battlefield. After several months of data transmission, the Explorer's batteries died in May. It hung in orbit until March 1970, when it burned up over the Pacific.

Astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in Space 47 years ago. He flew aboard his Mercury-Redstone 3, named Freedom 7, to make a historic 15-minute suborbital journey May 5, 1961. This image shows Shepard in the craft before launch. After being stuck in the tiny capsule for four hours and suffering through a myriad of delays, Shepard implored mission control to "fix your little problem and light this candle."

Soviet cosmonauts ejected from their vehicles before landing, so Freedom 7 became the first ship to take a human into space and return him all the way to the Earth's surface. But it wasn't easy. Before the craft splash-landed (map coordinates)in the Atlantic Ocean off Florida, Shepard was subjected to 11 g's of force.

After the Freedom 7 briefly entered space, NASA's next step was to put an American into orbit. They accomplished the feat on February 20, 1962 with the Friendship 7, another Mercury spacecraft, propelled into space by the new Atlas rocket. John Glenn circled Earth three times in a flight that lasted a total of 4 hours, 55 minutes, 23 seconds.

Left: Test Mercury spacecraft are assembled at Langley Research Center, Virginia.

As a reusable hypersonic craft that flew at the edges of space, the X-15 rocket plane is considered by some to be the most-direct predecessor to the space shuttle, and the bridge between standard jets and spacecraft. Eight test pilots had a chance to fly the craft, including NASA research pilot Bill Dana, pictured here next to X-15 No. 3. He reached a top speed in the plane of almost 4,000 miles per hour and soared 59 miles high.

: Image: Courtesy NASA

The most famous space mission in human history marked the first time that human beings had set foot on another celestial body. The Saturn V rocket blasted the astronauts into space July 16, 1969, on their way to the moon. Four days later, the command module circled the moon as the lunar lander brought astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface. Stepping onto the moon for the first time, Armstrong delivered his famous line, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

This is a model of the Eagle that landed. The Apollo program's lunar lander remains the only vehicle to carry human beings to the surface of another celestial body and then return them home. Twenty feet tall and 14 feet in diameter, it remains an engineering marvel. Half the module was designed for the descent stage and the other half for takeoff and rendezvous with the orbiting command module. Initially plagued with cost and schedule overruns, it eventually became the most dependable piece of the Apollo infrastructure: Six of these landers made the trip to the moon.

: Image: Courtesy NASA

The Apollo lunar roving vehicle was an electric dune buggy built for the moon. One was included in each of the last three manned missions to the moon, Apollo 15 to Apollo 17. Each rover drove more than 15 miles across the lunar surface, ranging several miles from the landing module and reaching a maximum speed of 8 mph. Here, we see Apollo 17 mission commander Eugene Cernan with that mission's rover.

For some detailed fantasy fodder, check out NASA's Lunar Rover Operations Handbook -- just in case you're ever kidnapped, sent through a time machine and forced to stand in for Cernan.

Skylab, America's first experimental space station, was launched in 1973 and soon hosted its first crew, who conducted experiments in solar astronomy, Earth resources and medicine, as well as five student experiments. In total, the lab was occupied for 171 days, with residents logging 42 hours of spacewalks.

In 1979, it experienced an unexpectedly early re-entry and fell from the sky over Esperance, Western Australia. "There was this bunch of brightly colored lights, followed by big sonic booms," Stan Thornton, a resident of the town, told Wired.com in 2001. "The sky lit up like a big retail shop."

The Voyagers, as a duo, were both launched in 1977 and are now the farthest human objects from Earth. After providing the first looks at Jupiter's giant red spot, Voyager 1 is now almost 10 billion miles from Earth and outside the known orbit of any natural solar object, excluding long-period comets. It will be the first human object to reach interstellar space. Voyager 2 is on a similar path.

Left: This shot of Neptune is among the last photos that the spacecraft took before heading out of the solar system.

Designed to usher in a new era of reusable spacecraft, the various space shuttles have carried out more than 120 missions and have deployed more than 60 satellites, including the groundbreaking Hubble Space Telescope. Sometimes called the most complex machines ever built, they've flown hundreds of millions of miles. However, their successes have been shadowed by the high-profile, lethal endings of the Columbia and Challenger. Three ships, the Atlantis, Endeavour and Discovery (pictured) will remain in service until 2010, when the shuttles will be retired. They'll be replaced by the next-generation Ares launch vehicles.

In 1997, NASA aimed the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft towards Saturn and waited. Seven years later, Cassini entered Saturn's orbit and has been sending back beautiful images of the planet, its moons and rings ever since. Cassini jettisoned the Huygens probe in December 2004. After orbiting Titan, Huygens landed on that moon in January 2005, sending scientists the most-detailed images of Titan's surface ever seen.

Since then, Cassini has continued to image the planetary system. Here, Saturn's pale, icy moon Dione is offset by the gold and blue hues of the planet, in this image taken October 11, 2005. The horizontal stripes near the bottom of the image are Saturn's rings. Cassini was nearly in the same plane as the rings when the image was taken, making them look thin and masking their awesome scale.

When the international space station is completed, it will be a 900,000-pound, 190-by-146-foot orbiting hub for space science and exploration -- probably the most complicated space endeavor ever undertaken. Assembled in orbit from component modules, it has about 15,000 square feet of living space and has been continuously inhabited since November 2000. It's powered by 240 square feet of solar arrays and features a suite of scientific modules, including NASA's Destiny, which became the agency's first permanent lab since SkyLab when it went into operation in 2001. When all is said and done, the total cost of the ISS could end up running to $100 billion. Given that steep price tag, and with NASA firmly focused on the moon and Mars, the ISS's future looks murky.

In one of the most creative missions in NASA history, the Deep Impact spacecraft actually fired a projectile into the surface of Comet Tempel 1 to learn more about its interior. Even though blasting the comet was the flashiest part of the 2005 mission, further observation by the spacecraft's main imager captured another surprise: the first-ever evidence of water ice on the surface of a comet. In this picture, the "impactor" is located at the bottom of the craft.

One of NASA's "cheaper, better, faster" missions, the little lander that could completed a perfect touchdown in May of this year near the Martian north pole. In the next month, it will finish a series of tests to assess the suitability for life of the ice-laden Martian dirt. Then, after a mere 90 days on the surface, it will shut down, never to be heard from again. Here, the lander is pictured in prelaunch trials in 2007.

The model for the next generation of lunar rover isn't a buggy: It's a truck. The "crew mobility chassis" is designed to provide astronauts with maximum mobility, with all of its wheels able to pivot in any direction. Another key aspect of the lunar truck is that it serves as a mobile control station for robots like the K10, seen in the distance of this image snapped during a training exercise.

George Church is dyslexic, narcoleptic, and a vegan. He is married with one daughter, weighs about 210 pounds, and has worn a pioneer-style bushy beard for decades. He has elevated levels of creatine kinase in his blood, the consequence of a heart attack. He enjoys waterskiing, photography, rock climbing, and singing in his church choir. His mother's maiden name is Strong. He was born on August 28, 1954.

If this all seems like too much information, well, blame Church himself. As the director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, he has a thing about openness, and this information (and plenty more, down to his signature) is posted online at arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/pers.html. By putting it out there for everyone to see, Church isn't just baiting identity thieves. He's hoping to demonstrate that all this personal information — even though we consider it private and somehow sacred — is actually fairly meaningless, little more than trivia. "The average person shouldn't be interested in this stuff," he says. "It's a philosophical exercise in what identity is and why we should care about that."

As Church sees it, the only real utility to his personal information is as data that reflects his phenotype — his physical traits and characteristics. If your genome is the blueprint of your genetic potential written across 6 billion base pairs of DNA, your phenome is the resulting edifice, how you actually turn out after the environment has had its say, influencing which genes get expressed and which traits repressed. Imagine that we could collect complete sets of data — genotype and phenotype — for a whole population. You would very quickly begin to see meaningful and powerful correlations between particular genetic sequences and particular physical characteristics, from height and hair color to disease risk and personality.

Church has done more than imagine such an undertaking; he has launched it: The Personal Genome Project, an effort to make those correlations on an unprecedented scale, began last year with 10 volunteers and will soon expand to 100,000 participants. It will generate a massive database of genomes, phenomes, and even some omes in between. The first step is to sequence 1 percent of each volunteer's genome, focusing on the so-called exome — the protein-coding regions that, Church suspects, do 90 percent of the work in our DNA. It's a long way from sequencing all 6 billion nucleotides — the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs — of the human genome, but even so, cataloging 60 million bits multiplied by 100,000 individuals is an audacious goal.

The PGP stands as the tent pole of what Church calls his "year of convergence," the moment when his 30 years as a geneticist, a technologist, and a synthetic biologist all come together. The project is a proof of concept for the Polonator G.007, the genetic-sequencing instrument developed in Church's lab that hit the market this spring. And the PGP will also put Church's expertise in synthetic biology to use, reverse engineering volunteers' skin cells into stem cells that could help diagnose and treat disease. If the convergence comes off as planned, the PGP will bring personal genomics to fruition and our genomes will unfold before us like road maps: We will peruse our DNA like we plan a trip, scanning it for possible detours (a predisposition for disease) or historical markers (a compelling ancestry).

Bringing the genome into the light, Church says, is the great project of our day. "We need to inspire our current youth in a way that outer space exploration inspired us in 1960," he says. "We're seeing signs that knowing about our inner space is very compelling."

To Church, who built his first computer at age 9 and taught himself three programming languages by 15, all of this is unfolding according to the same laws of exponential progress that have propelled digital technologies, from computer memory to the Internet itself, over the past 40 years: Moore's law for circuits and Metcalfe's law for networks. These principles are now at play in genetics, he argues, particularly in DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis.

Exponentials don't just happen. In Church's work, they proceed from two axioms. The first is automation, the idea that by automating human tasks, letting a computer or a machine replicate a manual process, technology becomes faster, easier to use, and more popular. The second is openness, the notion that sharing technologies by distributing them as widely as possible with minimal restrictions on use encourages both the adoption and the impact of a technology.

"I always tell people, your biggest problem in life is not going to be hiding your stuff so nobody steals it," Church says. "It's going to be getting anybody to ever use it. Start hiding it and that decreases the probability to almost zero."

For most of his career, Church has been known as a brilliant technologist, more behind-the-scenes tinkerer than scientific visionary. Though he was part of the group that kicked off the Human Genome Project, he's far less known than scientists like Francis Collins or J. Craig Venter, who took the stage at the end. His obscurity is due partly to his style. He talks about his accomplishments with a certain detachment that one might mistake for ambivalence. "He's not without ego; it's just a different sort of ego," says entrepreneur Esther Dyson, a friend and one of the first 10 PGP volunteers. "Everything is a subject of his intellectual curiosity, including himself."

His low profile may be the result of his tendency to get too far ahead of the curve, working a decade or two ahead of his field — so far that even the experts don't always get what he's talking about. "Lots of George's work is so advanced it's not ready to become standard," says Drew Endy, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford and cofounder with Church of Codon Devices, a synthetic-biology startup. "He's perfectly happy to spin out tons of ideas and see what might stick. It's high-throughput screening for technology and science. That's not the way most people work."

But thanks to the PGP, the Polonator, and the fact that the rest of the world is finally starting to understand what he's been talking about, Church's obscurity is coming to an end. He sits on the advisory board of more than 14 biotech companies, including personal genomics startup 23andMe and genetic testing pioneer DNA Direct. He has also cofounded four companies in the past four years: Codon Devices, Knome, LS9, and Joule Biosciences, which makes biofuels from engineered algae. Newsweek recently tagged him as one of the 10 Hottest Nerds ("whatever that means," Church laughs).

For someone who has spent his whole career ahead of his time, he is suddenly very much a man of the moment.

Most historians would cite Prague or Paris or Berkeley as the intellectual hub of the 1960s, but for people interested in computers, there was no place so significant as Hanover, New Hampshire. There, at Dartmouth College, an experiment in time-share computing was flourishing. Developed by professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System let students remotely access the power of a mainframe computer to do calculations for mathematics or science assignments or to play a simulated game of college football. It ran on an easy-to-learn, intuitive program that Kemeny and Kurtz called Basic.

In 1967, the DTSS transitioned to a more-powerful GE-635 machine and offered remote terminals to 33 secondary schools and colleges, including Phillips Academy, a prep school in nearby Andover, Massachusetts. The terminal — not much more than a teletype machine, really — sat in the basement of the school's math building, forgotten until the next fall, when a young George Church showed up for his freshman year and began asking whether there was a computer on campus. Someone pointed Church to the basement. "There wasn't even a chair in the room. I had used a typewriter before, but never a teletype. And so I just started pressing keys," Church recalls. "Eventually I hit Return, and it came back with 'What?' And so I started typing in stuff like crazy and hitting Return. And it kept coming back with 'What?' At that point, I was pretty convinced it wasn't a human, but it was actually talking in words. So I just hadn't asked the right question or given the right answer."

Soon, Church found a book on Basic. "I was just sailing," he says. He spent endless hours in that basement — he eventually borrowed a chair — and taught himself the intricacies of coding, learning to program in Basic, Lisp, and Fortran. Indeed, thinking in code came so naturally to Church that he stopped going to his classes (a habit that would later get him kicked out of graduate school at Duke) and taught the computer linear algebra instead.

It turns out that learning how to write code — change it, hit Return, see what it will do — was ideal training for Church's eventual career in computational biology. "That's how we reverse engineer things like E. coli — you change something, and you see how it behaves," he says. "Little did I know that 30 years later, we would use almost exactly the same operations to optimize metabolic networks."

Church first hit on the power of computation to automate biology in the mid-'70s when he was in graduate school at Harvard. At the time, he was working on recombinant DNA, a then-new technique to splice a gene from one organism into another. Identifying a sequence of 80 or so base pairs of genetic code was a slow, tedious process. "You had to literally read off the bases and write them on a piece of paper, one by one," Church says. "So I wrote a sequence-reading program that would crunch it out. When the senior graduate student heard I had automated that, he said, 'What do you want to do that for? That's the only fun part.'"

By 1980, when Church's adviser, Wally Gilbert, won the Nobel Prize for DNA sequencing techniques, the process was still slow and expensive, executing one DNA strand at a time. So Church began working on one of his earlier targets for automation. His idea was to sequence several strands together by combining them into a single sample mixture. He called it multiplexing, drawing an analogy to signal multiplexing in electronics, in which more than one signal flows through a current at the same time. Church thought most of the work could even be integrated into one device rather than numerous machines.

It was a provocative idea, not just because he was substituting several human tasks for machine-driven ones, but also because he didn't make the usual false promise that technology would simplify the process. On the contrary, multiplexing would be complicated, Church maintained. But technology was up to the task.

Four years later, Church was invited to present his work on multiplexing at a small meeting in Alta, Utah. The Department of Energy had gathered about 20 scientists to mull over one question for five days: How might recent advances in genetics be used to measure an increase in genetic mutations arising from radiation exposure, as in Hiroshima? The group quickly reached the conclusion that technology circa 1984 couldn't answer that question. Meanwhile, they still had several more days in the mountains. "There were a bunch of us there who could talk about genomics as if it were an engineering exercise. And then we said, well, as a kind of booby prize, we could think of other things you could do," Church recalls, "like, say, sequencing the human genome."

Though Church was almost entirely unknown before the meeting, his presentation on multiplex sequencing methods stole the show. When he fell into a huge snow drift during a break one afternoon, one participant worried that the future of sequencing had disappeared with him.

That Alta brainstorm would become the Human Genome Project — the effort, adopted by the National Institutes of Health, to sequence one human genome for $3 billion within 15 years. However audacious the HGP seemed, Church was disappointed by it almost from the start. "We could have said our goal was to get everybody's genome for some affordable price," he says, "and one genome would be a milestone" on the way toward that goal.

The HGP also played it safe with its choice of technology. Despite the promise of Church's multiplexing system, the HGP instead used a more established instrument manufactured by Applied Biosystems, based on a technique developed by biochemist Frederick Sanger. As Church saw it, this meant that the project had failed to put its $3 billion toward improving the state of the art. Even worse, the HGP consumed so many of the resources available to the field of genetics that it effectively locked that state of the art into 1980s technology.

The result was nearly two decades of inertia. It wasn't until 2005, when the Human Genome Project was complete and new goals were put forth, that Church finally perfected the multiplexing approach he had presented 20 years earlier at Alta. In a paper published in Science, Church demonstrated a technique that could analyze millions of sequences in one run (Sanger's method could handle just 96 strands of DNA at a time). And Church's method not only accelerated the process, it made it far cheaper, too, elegantly demonstrating the power of automation to drive exponential advances and bring down costs. Church's approach, and a competing innovation developed by 454 Life Sciences that same year, inaugurated the second generation of sequencing, now in full swing.

In the past three years, more companies have joined the marketplace with their own instruments, all of them driving toward the same goal: speeding up the process of sequencing DNA and cutting the cost. Most of the second-generation machines are priced at around $500,000. This spring, Church's lab undercut them all with the Polonator G.007 — offered at the low, low price of $150,000. The instrument, designed and fine-tuned by Church and his team, is manufactured and sold by Danaher, an $11 billion scientific-equipment company. The Polonator is already sequencing DNA from the first 10 PGP volunteers. What's more, both the software and hardware in the Polonator are open source. In other words, any competitor is free to buy a Polonator for $150,000 and copy it. The result, Church hopes, will be akin to how IBM's open-architecture approach in the early '80s fueled the PC revolution.

In the sequencing game, though, the cost of the machine is only half the equation. The more telling expense is the operating cost, particularly the cost of sequencing entire human genomes. Executives at 454 estimate that their latest machine can pull off a whole genome sequence for $200,000. Applied Biosystems claims its instrument has completed a genome for just $60,000. Church maintains that, while the Polonator isn't up to whole-genome reads, it is clocking in at about one-third the cost of Applied Biosystems' estimate. A whole sequence from Knome, the retail genomics firm cofounded by Church, goes for $350,000. (It's worth noting that these figures are only roughly comparable, since each company uses slightly different quality measures and specifications.)

As these numbers continue to drop, the mythical $1,000 genome comes ever closer. Sequencing a human genome for $1,000 is the somewhat arbitrary benchmark for true personalized genomics — when the science could become a component of standard medical care. An important catalyst in achieving that point is the Archon X Prize for Genomics, which is offering $10 million to the team that can sequence 100 complete genomes in 10 days for less than $10,000 each. As of June, seven teams, including Church's lab, had entered the competition. Church, who served for a time on the advisory board of the contest, says that the prize will drive costs down further and help publicize the potential of personalized whole-genome sequencing.

That's important because Church hopes the Polonator and other next-generation instruments will inspire a new generation of smaller labs to begin work in personal genomics, as well as other genetic sciences. Already, the onslaught of technology has jump-started new projects, like sequencing part of the Neanderthal genome, examining extremophile microbes in old California iron mines, and studying the regenerative properties of the salamander. In medicine, cheaper sequencing has enabled research into drug-resistant tuberculosis; the genetics of breast, lung, and other cancers; and the DNA architecture of schizophrenics.

But if the Polonator is going to lead that charge, it has to work — and work on a massive scale. And that means passing a major test: successfully sequencing the 100,000 exomes in the PGP.

All of us know our height, weight, and eye color. Fewer of us know our arm span or resting blood pressure. But who among us knows the direction of our hair whorls or the Gell-Coombs type of our allergies? This is the level of detail that the PGP requires the 100,000 volunteers to reveal about themselves, a list staggering in its exhaustiveness. The PGP will tally head circumferences, injuries, chin clefts and cheek dimples, whether volunteers can roll their tongues or hyperflex their joints, whether they dislike hot climates or are hot tempered, if they've often been exposed to power lines or wood dust or diesel exhaust or textile fibers. The project questionnaire asks how many meals they eat a day and whether they prefer their food fried, broiled, or barbecued. It even demands to know how much television they watch. And, of course, PGP volunteers will hand over most aspects of their medical history, from vaccines to prescriptions.

This phenotype data will be integrated with a volunteer's genomic information, then combined with statistics from all the other subjects to create a potent database ripe for interrogation. In contrast to the heavy lifting that genetic research requires now — each study starts from scratch with a new hypothesis and a fresh crop of subjects, consent forms, and tissue samples — the PGP will automate the research process. Scientists will simply choose a category of phenotype and a possible genetic correlation, and statistically significant associations should flow out of the data like honey from a hive. A genetic predisposition for colon cancer, for instance, might be found to lead to disease only in connection with a diet high in barbecued foods, or a certain form of heart disease might be associated with a particular gene and exposure to a particular virus. Genomic discovery won't be a research problem anymore. It'll be a search function. (This helps explain why Google, among others, has donated to the project).

The process began last year, and each of the first 10 volunteers has a background in medicine or genetics. They include John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and a physician; Rosalynn Gill, chief science officer at Sciona (a personalized genetics nutrition company); and Steven Pinker, the noted psychologist and author. The other 99,990 participants won't be expected to be so elite, though they will have to pass a genetics-literacy quiz to demonstrate informed consent. The general selection process, which starts with registration at personalgenomes.org, is scheduled to begin later this year.

Besides offering up their genomes, subjects will have to part with some spit and a bit of skin. The saliva contains their microbiome — the trillions of microbes that exist, mostly symbiotically, on and in our bodies. If phenotype is a combination of genotype plus environment, the microbiome is the first wash of that environment over our bodies. By measuring some fraction of it, the PGP should offer a first look at how the genome-to-microbiome-to-phenome chain plays out.

The skin sample goes into storage, creating what would be one of the world's largest biobanks. Members of Church's lab have devised a way to automate turning the skin cells into stem cells, and they hope to publish the technique later this year. (Similar work has been done at the University of Wisconsin and Kyoto University.) By reprogramming the skin cells using synthetically engineered adenoviruses, Church's team can transform the skin cells into many sorts of tissue — lungs, liver, heart. These tissues could be used as a diagnostic baseline to detect predisposition for various diseases. What's more, the reprogrammed cells could be used to treat disease, replacing damaged or failing tissue. It's an intriguing hint of how Church's work with synthetic biology complements genomic sequencing.

If the PGP were simply an exercise in breaking down 100,000 individuals into data streams, it would be ambitious enough. But the project takes one further, truly radical step: In accordance with Church's principle of openness, all the material will be accessible to any researcher (or lurker) who wants to plunder thousands of details from people's lives. Even the tissue banks will be largely accessible. After Church's lab transforms the skin into stem cells, those new cell lines — which have been in notoriously short supply despite their scientific promise — will be open to outside researchers. This is a significant divergence from most biobanks, which typically guard their materials like holy relics and severely restrict access.

For the PGP volunteers, this means they will have to sign on to a principle Church calls open consent, which acknowledges that, even though subjects' names will be removed to make the data anonymous, there's no promise of absolute confidentiality. As Church sees it, any guarantee of privacy is false; there is no way to ensure that a bad actor won't tap into a system and, once there, manage to extract bits of personal information. After all, even de-identified data is subject to misuse: Latanya Sweeney, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, demonstrated the ease of "re-identification" by cross-referencing anonymized health-insurance records with voter registration rolls. (She found former Massachusetts governor William Weld's medical files by cross-referencing his birth date, zip code, and sex.)

To Church, open consent isn't just a philosophical consideration; it's also a practical one. If the PGP were locked down, it would be far less valuable as a data source for research — and the pace of research would accordingly be much slower. By making the information open and available, Church hopes to draw curious scientists to the data to pursue their own questions and reach their own insights. The potential fields of inquiry range from medicine to genealogy, forensics, and general biology.

And the openness doesn't serve just researchers alone. PGP members will be seen as not only subjects, but as participants. So, for instance, if a researcher uses a volunteer's information to establish a link between some genetic sequence and a risk of disease, the volunteer would have that information communicated to them.

This is precisely what makes the PGP controversial in genetics circles. Though Church talks about it as the logical successor to the Human Genome Project, other geneticists see it as a risky proposition, not for its privacy policy but for its presumption that the emerging science of genomics already has implications for individual cases. The National Human Genome Research Institute, for example, has cautioned that the burgeoning personal-genomics industry, which includes research-oriented projects like the PGP as well as straight-to-consumer companies like Navigenics and 23andMe and whole-genome-sequencing shops like Knome, puts the sales pitch ahead of the science. "A lot of people would like to rapidly capitalize on this science," says Gregory Feero, a senior adviser at the NHGRI. "But for an individual venturing into this now, it's a risk to start making any judgments or decisions based on current knowledge. At some point, we'll cross over into a time when that's more sensible."

Church cautions, however, that keeping clinicians and patients in the dark about specific genetic information — essentially pretending the data or the technology behind it don't exist — is a farce. Even worse, it violates the principle of openness that leads to the fastest progress. "The ground is changing right underneath them," he says of the medical establishment. "Right now, there's a wall between clinical research and clinical practice. The science isn't jumping over. The PGP is what clinical practice would be like if the research actually made it to the patient."

In the not-too-distant future, Church says, hospitals and clinics could be outfitted with a genome sequencer much the way they now have x-ray machines or microscopes. "In the old books," Church says, "almost every scientist was sitting there with a microscope on their table. Whether they're a physical scientist or a biological scientist, they've got that microscope there. And that inspires me."

Wired deputy editor Thomas Goetz (thomas@wired.com) wrote about personal genomics in issue 15.12.