Have you seen the images beamed back by the Phoenix Mars lander? In case you missed them, no need to find them. They look similar to the pictures taken by the Viking probes that landed on Mars back in the 1970s, and just like the shots beamed back by Pathfinder in the 1990s and the Rover missions earlier this decade.

Mars is still red, rocky and not even close to making Money magazine's "Best Places to Live" list. Despite this, Phoenix will continue to look for traces of water in the neverending, pointless quest to learn whether Mars has ever supported life as we know it.

In other marginal scientific news, space shuttle Discovery is on a 15-day mission that includes delivering a new toilet pump to the International Space Station.

Of course there's more science going on with these projects than my cheap shots imply, but it sure is hard to find. NASA seems mired in busywork that has transformed astronauts and engineers -- whose toughness and ingenuity once inspired movies -- into nothing more than celestial bureaucrats.

Where are the big ideas that challenged and inspired this nation and literally changed the world? Unfortunately, they're not at NASA.

Yes, I know that President Bush pledged in 2004 to a build a permanent base on the moon to be used as a way station for eventual manned exploration of Mars. But since the proposal was made in the wake of the Columbia shuttle disaster, Bush's plea for a return to the moon is based more in emotion than science.

It's also not an original idea, even within the Bush family.

On July 20, 1989 -- the 20th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon -- President George H.W. Bush proposed the same moon base-to-Mars exploration track. The idea remains as implausible today as it was when the senior Bush advocated it.

And yet, the next meaningful big idea in space stares us in the face practically every night. A look through binoculars at the Carolina moon reveals a crater-defined crust of celestial impacts that, if they occurred here in Earth's near-term future, would drastically alter life on this planet if not end it.

We all know the script. An asteroid hurls toward Earth on a collision course. If it hits, humankind goes the way of the dinosaurs. Mr. President, what can we do?

If this science fiction scenario does become reality and the president turns to NASA, we're in the cosmic cross-hairs. NASA has no plans to deal with a catastrophic celestial collision, reports Gregg Easterbrook, author of "The Sky is Falling" in the June edition of the Atlantic magazine.

NASA has encased itself in the conventional scientific wisdom that the barrage of asteroids that pockmarked the moon and Earth ran out its string millions of years ago. But those assumptions are being seriously challenged with new technology, knowledge and point of view.

Only recently have astronomers shifted their telescopes from deep space to nearby heavens. As a result, the number of impact risks discovered has grown exponentially. Even the conservative NASA estimates there are now 20,000 asteroids and comets in the Earth's vicinity that could cause serious, even cataclysmic, impacts.

Identifying these potential space disasters is one thing. Averting them is another.

Former Apollo astronaut Russell Schweickart, known as Rusty, is among a growing number of people trying to get NASA to invest more in tracking potentially hazardous space rocks and researching the technology that could throw them off course. He told Easterbrook that it wouldn't take a nuclear explosion to do the job.

According to Schweickart, a spacecraft weighing only a few tons but landing at the right place could change an asteroid's motion, gently steering it away from a collision course.

Still, Easterbrook reports that NASA remains uninterested in space object avoidance projects. However, that could change as the Air Force -- which has the world's second-largest space budget -- becomes increasingly interested in deploying a space-rock defense system.

Increased competition with the Air Force for scarce public dollars could produce a tangible, down-to-Earth dividend. The money chase could force NASA to finally recognize that protecting the planet we inhabit is much more important to the rest of us than exploring planets we can't.

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