Seven years ago, when the tower still seemed like a useful idea, the governor came to the groundbreaking.

“And all you’ve done is go around in a damn circle, like a dog chasing his tail.”

“It’s heartbreaking to know that, you know, you thought you’d done something good,” Forshee said. Like other workmen, he had taken pride in this massive, complicated project - only to learn that it was in mothballs. “What the hell are they doing? I mean, that’s a lot of people’s hard-earned money,” said David Forshee, who spent 18 months as the general foreman for the pipe fitters who helped build the tower. The useless tower was repeatedly approved by people who, in essence, argued that the American space program had nothing better to do. In Mississippi, NASA built a monument to its own institutional drift. Its congressional overseers tended to view NASA first as a means to deliver pork back home, and second as a means to deliver Americans into space. It began to absorb the vices of less-glamorous bureaucracies: Officials tended to let projects run over time and budget. Jerked from one mission to another, NASA lost its sense that any mission was truly urgent. Today, the first goal is to visit an asteroid. In the past few years, presidents have repeatedly scrubbed and rewritten NASA’s goals. Photo for The Washington Post by William Widmer Now, NASA has become a symbol of something else: what happens to a big bureaucracy after its sense of mission starts to fade. In the Space Race days of the 1960s, the agency was given a clear, galvanizing mission: Reach the moon within the decade. The empty tower in Mississippi is evidence of a breakdown at NASA, which used to be a glorious symbol of what an American bureaucracy could achieve. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

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