Shadowing the race for security on every front are the ominous forces arrayed directly against the government - forces absent in the race for the moon.

"The moon didn't try to hide," said Richard Betts, head of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. "The moon didn't bomb the launch pad."

ASTRONAUT SPOKE OF SECURITY NEEDS

Long before Sept. 11, the moon race was used as a lens for viewing challenges like those confronting the nation today. One very personal link between the space program and homeland security can be traced back at least 18 years.

In 1984, one of the last two Americans to have walked on the moon became one of the first to point out the need for something like the Homeland Security Department under construction today.

Harrison Schmitt, an astronaut in the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972, went on to become a U.S. senator from 1977 to 1983. In 1984, he spoke to a group of public administrators in Washington about creating a better model for responding to natural disasters and emergencies, including terrorism.

The speech came in the context of disaster experiences such as the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and Mount St. Helens volcano. Americans also had coped with the deaths of seven people from poisoned Tylenol capsules; an extortionist ring that threatened to blow up a Texas oil plant; and the evacuation of 20,000 federal workers when a protester threatened to blow up the Washington Monument.

Schmitt's major point: Management of such situations was confused; agencies with overlapping responsibilities didn't work as a team and communicated poorly.

His suggestion: Create a national mission-control center much like the model that NASA used to get him safely to the moon and back.

"The need for good and rapid coordination of communications, intelligence and command functions and for pre-crisis preparation is essentially identical," he said, according to the text of his speech. "Even the political factor is present in the operation of a space mission-control center where national goals and prestige are on the line in full view of a worldwide audience."

Schmitt dug up the old speech after a recent interview on the topic of homeland security. "These are issues that have been around for a long time," he said.

Voices other than Schmitt's also cried out for better preparedness in the 1980s.

In December 1982, two days after the Washington Monument episode, five U.S. senators, including Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., wrote a confidential letter to the Reagan White House raising concerns about "the vulnerability of the civilian society to sophisticated terrorist attacks."

Their warning: "There is a reasonable likelihood that these attacks will become more frequent and serious in the years ahead. Expertise needs to be tapped to look into a broad range of potential terrorist targets - energy, water, communications, transportation, food, and public health."

Former U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum of Longwood, Fla., grew interested in terrorism in the late 1980s when a humanitarian project clued him in to the virulent anti-Western teachings in radical Islamic camps in Pakistan. He set up a congressional task force but was frustrated that no one would listen.

"The public wasn't willing to believe we were that vulnerable," McCollum said.

Before Sept. 11, no one ever seriously considered a government reorganization of today's scale - the largest since the Department of Defense and CIA were created in 1947. Americans lived in a world where terrorism was something that happened "over there."

Communications and travel advances had knit the country closer to the rest of the world throughout the 1990s. But Osama bin Laden's increasingly bold decrees declaring war on America went mostly unnoticed.

"Everybody bears some responsibility for the failure to be vigilant," said Leon Panetta, a White House chief of staff for President Clinton and now head of a California think tank. "We tend to operate more by crisis than leadership in this country."

PANIC AND CRISIS

The Sept. 11 attacks blindsided the nation, underscoring a vulnerability average Americans never knew they faced in their own hometowns. The space race, too, was born in panic and crisis - after years of warnings that were dismissed.

The Soviets had bragged throughout the 1950s about plans to go into space, but the United States largely ignored the plans as propaganda until Oct. 4, 1957. On that day, the 184-pound beeping Sputnik 1 began circling the globe.

Suddenly, Soviet superiority in space was no longer abstract: Americans could see it streaking in the night sky from their back yards. The country felt as if it had fallen dangerously behind in the contest for technological and military superiority. Some feared nuclear weapons directly overhead would be next.

In a headline, Life magazine called Sputnik "The Feat That Shook The Earth."

Leaders such as Sen. Lyndon Johnson, D-Texas, likened Sputnik to Pearl Harbor and began pushing for action.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower bowed to mounting pressure in early 1958 and approved the creation by Congress of a civilian space agency. NASA opened for business less than a year after Sputnik.

But the research agency was given a small budget and was not destined for spectacular endeavors at first. Then came another shock: the Yuri Gagarin flight into orbit on April 12, 1961. The United States launched Alan Shepard briefly into space a month later, giving NASA its first 15 minutes of manned space flight.

With only that sliver of experience but the imperative of competing with the Soviets, newly elected President John F. Kennedy pointed to the moon - vowing to make history with one of the boldest strokes in the 20th century.

"This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth," Kennedy told Congress on May 25, 1961. "No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

Kennedy warned that the project would be lengthy, have no guarantee of success, require scientific and technical commitment and need to eliminate "wasteful interagency rivalries."

Forty years later - nine days after the Sept. 11 hijackers killed 3,043 people - President George W. Bush stood before Congress with a similar plea to put politics as usual aside.

"Our nation has been put on notice: We are not immune from attack," Bush said. "We will take defensive measures against terrorism to protect Americans. Today, dozens of federal departments and agencies, as well as state and local governments, have responsibilities affecting homeland security. These efforts must be coordinated at the highest level."

The kind of organization hinted at by moon-walker Schmitt in his obscure speech in 1984 was suddenly about to become a reality.

The race for security was on.

SPECIAL BRAND OF TERROR

Both the moon race and the homeland-security effort represent the domestic, civilian facets of even broader military concerns. In the 1960s, it was the Cold War and the nuclear-arms race. Today, it is the global war on terrorism.

Each of those broader conflicts carried a special brand of terror. The darkest days of the Cold War were shrouded in apocalyptic visions of all-out missile exchanges, decimated cities and nuclear winter. Today's worst-case scenarios may be more contained - destruction in a single city with a pirated warhead, for example - but the deterrent of "mutually assured destruction" is meaningless when dealing with a suicidal foe.

Yesterday's fears were cushioned by the knowledge that early-warning systems would give civilians at least 30 minutes' notice before destruction. Today's threat can haunt people as they ride an elevator up a skyscraper, attend a sporting event or board an airplane.

The stakes in either case are high enough to command instant public support for new government initiatives. But already there are questions about whether the homeland-security mission can sustain high levels of public support.

"We can't stay on the balls of our feet for five years," said Columbia University's Betts, who served on the blue-ribbon National Commission on Terrorism in 2000.

Sustained public enthusiasm was key to the success of the race for the moon. NASA Administrator James Webb won crucial public support by insisting the space program be conducted in the open. He called for live television coverage of the Shepard launch.

"Kennedy said, 'Are you crazy? What happens if there is an accident?' " recalled Paul Dembling, now 82, a top NASA aide who was in the room when Webb was on the telephone with Kennedy. "(Webb) said, `Do you think you're going to keep it quiet?' From then on, it was all open to the public."

NASA captured the American imagination when it courted the press, sent vans out to schools to promote space science and made instant celebrities of the Mercury and Gemini astronauts, who became the idols of the nation's children. It was like an exciting television show that went on for a decade.

"We had the most fascinating job going in the country," said Robert Seamans, the agency's No. 3 official in the early 1960s and the most senior surviving NASA manager from the Apollo era. "People wanted to be part of it."

NASA made managers readily available on Capitol Hill and spread contracts - and therefore jobs - to almost every state.

"We kept the congressmen happy, and we kept them informed," said Dembling, who then headed NASA's congressional-affairs office.

Public support for homeland security was galvanized by repeatedly televised images of an airliner smashing into the World Trade Center and the giant towers crumbling on Sept. 11.

The palpable sense of personal threat has made Americans accept inconveniences, costs and previously unpalatable infringements on rights - so far.

Public support for the new department, extra security at airports and the war on terrorism is high, said Tom W. Smith of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The Sept. 11 attacks got Americans behind many ideas they would not have favored previously.

"Events do change opinions," Smith said.

But how long can the public support last?

The race for security is not as telegenic as the moon race. Much of it is cloaked in exactly the kind of secrecy that Webb so adamantly wanted to avoid. Officials have already drawn fire for not keeping Congress closely informed.

Many experts said some measure of public unity has already faded - and predicted it will fade even more if another attack doesn't shock the nation.

In June, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., told reporters that homeland security had already slipped from the forefront of people's minds. At town meetings, he talks about trips to Afghanistan and his work on the Senate Intelligence Committee. But he said the questions constituents have are about prescription drugs, sewers and more local concerns.

By late July, various polls showed 40 percent of the public thought the economy was the most important issue, and 30 percent worried most about terrorism and homeland security.

Aroused by patriotic rhetoric and rituals, Americans traditionally expect to win once the nation sets its sight on a goal. And part of winning is seeing measurable results along the way - results that won't be as apparent in the race for security as they were in the race for the moon.

If four years pass with no terrorist attacks, is that victory? On the other hand, if there is a major terrorist attack in the fifth year, is that defeat? There is no agreement on the answers.

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., warns that the country always will have weak points.

"One concern I have is we don't oversell this (homeland security) department," Graham said.

But Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn. - the new department's chief proponent on Capitol Hill - thinks the bar should never be lowered.

"We should never believe another Sept. 11 attack is inevitable," Lieberman said. "We can stop it if we organize ourselves."

LOTS OF MONEY NEEDED

With Congress poised to create a new Cabinet agency, the race for security is at a critical turning point. The words and actions of politicians today may hold clues to the ultimate success or failure of the effort.

A gauge of public support for homeland security will be the willingness of elected officials to spend money on it.

Proportionally speaking, the government's long-term financial commitment to homeland security may never be able to approach what Congress devoted in the short term to NASA's moon program.

Soon after Kennedy's speech, the space agency was commanding annual budgets equivalent to $25 billion in today's dollars, roughly two-thirds of what is proposed to be spent on homeland security starting next year.

But the money spent on NASA at its peak amounted to about 4 percent of the entire federal budget at that time. The $37.7 billion proposed for homeland security amounts to less than 2 percent of today's budget.

Neither Congress nor the White House has expressed a desire to raise taxes or make big cuts in other federal programs to pay for the new homeland-security costs.

Cindy Williams, a research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program, says she is confused by Bush's financial approach. In other times of crisis, such as World War II or the Vietnam War, the government raised taxes to finance its response.

"If this really were a war, if people saw it as the national emergency we say it is, why wouldn't we raise taxes?" asked Williams, who formerly ran the Congressional Budget Office's national-security division.

Some Republicans and advocates of smaller government say the effort can and should be paid for by cutting spending in other areas. The debate over the new program has already been partially bogged down in arguments over civil-service regulations and pork-barrel projects unrelated to terrorism.

Sustaining public support for homeland-security spending will become harder still with time. After the Apollo program, even NASA had trouble finding money because it had lost its clearly defined objective of landing on the moon.

History shows that major U.S. government efforts, such as the moon shot, succeed when there is a sense of urgency, the public is united and Congress throws its weight behind the executive branch.

The Manhattan Project, America's top-secret scientific and military program to design atomic bombs, succeeded because government, industry and academia worked together.

In a survey conducted two years ago by the Brookings Institution in Washington, 450 history and political-science professors ranked the federal government's top 50 achievements since 1944. The scholars rated various efforts by how important they were to the country, how difficult they were to accomplish and how successful was the outcome.

Ranked No. 1 was the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. Other top accomplishments were expansion of voting rights and civil rights, fighting disease and building the interstate highway system. Promoting space exploration, which included NASA's troubled space-station project as well as the Apollo moon program, ranked 25th.

The study concluded that the top achievements shared characteristics such as a clear description of the problem to be solved, plenty of budgetary resources, a sense of "moral rightness" and clear and measurable results.

Brookings senior fellow Paul Light, author of the study, said the government flounders in efforts plagued by public ambivalence, such as the "war on drugs." The failure to halt the flow of narcotics through the country's porous borders also may be a preview of how hard it will be to keep terrorism out.

If the nation is willing to embrace the long-term challenge, Light said, "homeland security will be one of the greatest achievements in the 21st century."

But Light said the effort will succeed only if the nation puts it in the category of "great achievement" as opposed to the "quick fix" of addressing a problem simply by throwing a big new bureaucracy at it.

"One road leads to the Marshall Plan," he said. "The other leads to the Department of Energy. Now, I think we're at a crossroads."