If you got up early enough last Saturday morning before the football game and tuned to NASA TV, you may have been able to watch a Delta II rocket fling NASA’s new GRAIL probes into space.

For the uninitiated, GRAIL is designed to orbit the moon and use the effects of gravity to “see” beneath its surface. In this way, researchers can better understand how planets form and how the moon was created.

While instruments like GRAIL that can measure gravity by sending microwaves across hundreds of miles with pinpoint accuracy are amazing, what do they achieve in the United States’ grand plan for space exploration? Maybe the first question should be, “Do we have a grand plan for space exploration?”

Ever since we reached the moon, it seems we have been traveling backward, undoing the achievements we made in the 1960s in human spaceflight. The International Space Station is great, but it is little more than a waypoint on the path to achieving some unknown goal.

Why don’t we have goals for NASA? Well, simply because Congress has never given the agency enough funding or dependable-enough funding for it to declare its intent to go to the moon, Mars or an asteroid. Even when NASA created the James Webb Space Telescope, which is slated to replace Hubble, Congress did not listen to reason and respond to some small budget issues appropriately. In the best dysfunctional political form, it did not move $0.5 billion of the $6.5 billion budget forward by a few years as an oversight panel recommended — a mistake that is slated to cost an additional $2.2 billion and may end up killing the mission.

In the same fashion, a lack of congressional foresight over the last few decades has kept NASA from having a space ship designed and built to replace the shuttle when it retired. Now we are stuck paying $62.7 million per seat (up from $55.8 million) on Russia’s Soyuz for each astronaut we send into space until American alternatives become available. That is less than the entire published cost of a Falcon 9 flight that could potentially get 7 astronauts into space (though crew capability is still under development).

If Congress or the president had found money to allow NASA to develop new space vehicles while they finished the final flights of the shuttle, these costs and our dependence on Russia could have been avoided.

NASA needs a purpose. It needs a long-term goal to strive for. NASA has money, but much less than it did during the Apollo days. Congress needs to stop telling NASA to go to the moon or Mars without giving it any extra money to pay for the engineers, technicians and scientists to make it happen.

If we want to do great and inspiring things with our tax dollars, we must set some good goals and then take real steps to achieve them.