U.S. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said "you can't pull a sextant out and get a fix" on homeland-security goals the way NASA could with the moon.

He summed up today's complex task as "dealing with hatred and evil and human personalities, not just of (Osama) bin Laden but thousands of terrorists whose location we don't know."

Seamans, NASA's No. 3 man in 1961, doesn't envy the mission that confronts his bureaucratic successors today.

"How do you get into the mind of a terrorist?" he asked. "I know Tom Ridge has it much tougher than we had."

CLEAR GOALS NEEDED

During the moon race, NASA had a clear goal and was driven by a finite amount of time to accomplish it. The agency's contractor work force of 400,000 was bound by a sense of adventure and keenly focused on an exciting objective.

The goal: Launch a rocket from a planet rotating at 1,000 mph on its axis, achieve speeds of 18,000 mph to reach orbit, accelerate up to 25,000 mph to escape and travel 240,000 miles to the moon. Once there, orbit a body that itself travels 2,000 mph per hour around the Earth and undock a separate landing craft for a 70-mile descent to the rocky, desolate surface for the landing. Then retrace the steps to get back to Earth.

The goals of "homeland security" are fuzzier. One goal is to prevent attacks, for example, while another is to recover from them. With Bush aides warning that more attacks may be on the horizon, there is no fixed time frame for achieving the goal. Planners must keep one eye on tomorrow and the other eye on the indefinite future.

"We all have to realize this can't be perfect," said Seamans, who after leaving NASA served as secretary of the Air Force from 1969 to 1973. "You can't achieve 100 percent security."

Stephen Haines, a systems engineering expert and consultant, said the Bush administration has been more effective at pacifying the public with short-term security measures than at setting clear, long-term goals for homeland security.

President John F. Kennedy's 1961 call to go to the moon "was an example of systems thinking," said Haines, a former Navy officer. "Begin with an end in mind and work backward. ... Putting a man on the moon was a simple goal."

But homeland security resists such an approach. Professor Arnold Howitt, an emergency-preparedness expert at Harvard University, said it can neither be defined, time-bound nor limited by place. It involves largely different problems: intelligence, law enforcement and preparedness.

"Preparedness is not a state of mind (or) a clearly defined state," he said. "It's a process."

In systems thinking, once major objectives are defined, the incremental steps to get there come into clearer focus.

When NASA planners looked at going to the moon after Kennedy's speech, they itemized 10,000 distinct tasks, Seamans said. One of the most urgent was to answer the question that would shape the entire program: What should be the basic configuration of the mission?

NASA considered three approaches, including a direct ascent to the moon with a gigantic rocket and another plan to launch two rockets and use Earth orbit as a staging area to link up.

But by June 1962, planners had decided on a daring option called "lunar orbit rendezvous." That so-called LOR option required one launch, needed less fuel and called for the precision piloting of a command ship and a tiny moon-lander.

Since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has been scrambling in all directions as it sets priorities for homeland security. It is drawing up plans to secure vast borders, screen huge numbers of air travelers, improve coordination in government agencies and beef up emergency preparedness for catastrophes.

Within 10 months of the terrorist attacks - three months less time than it took NASA to devise its mission configuration - Bush and his advisers released a national strategy for homeland security. The July 16 blueprint attempts to link state and local agencies with federal entities as disparate as the FBI, Department of Agriculture, Coast Guard and Department of Health and Human Services.

But unlike the NASA decision, which locked in "lunar orbit rendezvous" and drove the moon program forward, the homeland-security strategy is tentative and will always be in flux.

"The strategy will be adjusted and amended over time," the blueprint states, "as our enemies in the war on terrorism alter their means of attack."

In America's new race, the government doesn't get to set all the goals - the terrorists have goals, too. In the 1960s, NASA also had an opponent: the Russian space agency.

"People felt the Soviets might interfere with our mission, jam communications," said Dave Hoag, an ex-Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory engineer who worked on Apollo guidance systems.

But by and large it was a race against time - and the unknowns of a new but unpopulated environment.

"Space is a dangerous place," said Florida Institute of Technology Professor John Clark, who was NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center director during Apollo. "If you treat it with respect, you can live with it."

BY THE NUMBERS

During the moon race, mathematics was the ally. It was a tool of physics and engineering, one that would solve complicated equations of fuel-consumption rates, escape velocities and flight paths between two moving, rotating objects - the Earth and the moon. Definitive answers were calculated with slide rules and computers.

In the race for homeland security, mathematics mostly serves to illustrate the overwhelming complexity - some would say futility - of the mission. Rather than decisions based on definitive answers, decisions are based on probabilities and educated guesses, often with input from inexact disciplines such as intelligence gathering, psychology and religion.

Viewed by the numbers, homeland security is daunting: Guard 285 million people in an open society that covers 3.5 million square miles. That includes securing 361 ports, 429 commercial airports, 7,500 miles of borders with Mexico and Canada and 5,000 miles of mainland coastline. The mission must take into consideration 6 million cargo containers, 11.2 million trucks and 510 million Americans and foreign travelers entering the country annually.

Bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist organization might leverage any combination of those access points and vehicles into attack scenarios too numerous to quantify.

Topping the list of potential targets are government and military installations; bridges, tunnels, and power plants; and symbols of American life such as the Statue of Liberty or Walt Disney World.

What is perhaps the most important mission variable - the time, place and method of attack - cannot be controlled.

The more terrorists take aim at unconventional targets, the more exponentially the list of attack scenarios grows. Shopping malls, office buildings and parks suddenly become part of the security equation. And as the list expands, so does the number of lives on the line.

In the moon race, NASA was risking only a few lives at a time - the Apollo crews. The worst-case scenario involved three astronauts marooned, dead and forever orbiting the Earth or the moon.

"In homeland security, you can plug 99 out of 100 holes, but if terrorists explode a nuclear device in the continental U.S., you haven't done much," Clark said.

American intelligence agencies intercept thousands of suspected terrorists' communications daily around the world - telephone, radio and Internet - so it can help in what National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden calls a football game in which you are "perpetually on defense."

The U.S. government then must keep tabs on 330 million noncitizens who come and go annually. At least 321,000 are fugitives from deportation orders.

Even some of the smaller numbers to be grappled with are menacing. Bin Laden, for example, is thought to own a fleet of 23 cargo ships - "all capable of being bombs themselves," a Coast Guard intelligence official told shipping executives at a conference in Florida earlier this year.

The government must attempt to control and protect commerce. America's two biggest trading partners are its neighbors, Canada and Mexico, with $406 billion and $248 billion in trade, respectively, in 2000. Searching every truck would bring trade to a standstill and slow an economy that helps pay for defense.

Up to 6,500 trucks cross the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit daily, giving U.S. Customs Service inspectors little time to deal with each. Suspicious shipments go through more inspections and possible scanning by portable X-ray or gamma-ray detectors.

A bigger problem exists with the 6 million cargo containers entering the country each year at the nation's ports, where some "super cargo" ships arrive carrying 3,300 containers the size of tractor-trailers. The Customs Service said it screens for high-risk cargo in many ways_but physically inspects only 2 percent of containers.

"When we get on a plane, we check people. When cargo containers go on ships, we don't do that," says Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard officer and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "A container could be used as a poor man's missile."

TIME NOT AN ALLY

Much of the technology for the moon race was new, or greatly refined over a decade. The urgent mission of homeland security offers neither the luxury of time nor the comforts of trial and error.

Years of problem-filled research and exploding rockets, for example, led NASA to the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built - the 6 million-pound Saturn V.

New inertial guidance systems were designed to help astronauts independently determine their position if they lost communication with ground controllers. Sensors monitored virtually every function on the spacecraft. Redundancy was engineered into almost every system, except for the engine to escape moon orbit.

Each mission and its problems served as a building block for the next flight.

With homeland security, there may not be time for such a progression. The threat is new, and it's right now. So while new technologies are researched and developed to meet long-term threats, much energy is being spent on pressing existing technologies into service immediately.

The newly created Transportation Security Administration and its contractors are racing to build explosive-detection scanners the size of minivans to protect 622 million fliers and an estimated 1 billion pieces of traveling luggage. Last year, Congress ordered that 2,000 bomb-screening machines be in all airports by December. But only two companies are licensed for the job, and some critics say their technology is dated and production lines too slow.

House Transportation Aviation Subcommittee Chairman John Mica, R-Fla., said some airports plan to use portable explosives-detection wands to fill some of the gap.

"You might just as well stick the wand in their ear because they're not going to be able to detect most explosives," Mica said.

Undercover testing in June by TSA officials showed screeners at 32 of the nation's airports failed to detect dummy guns, dynamite or bombs in nearly 25 percent of tests.

Another technology being touted to find terrorists is biometric facial recognition, which compares computerized photos with facial features of people from surveillance cameras. Though these devices have shown promise identifying individual employees for building-security systems, they have a high failure rate in constantly moving crowds.

For the moon program, NASA developed sensors to monitor astronaut health and air chemistry inside the capsule in real time. Homeland-security planners would like to have similar capabilities for detecting biological and chemical agents, but affordable, more reliable systems could be years away.

Smallpox and anthrax typically cannot be detected before infection symptoms appear, days or weeks later when a person is hospitalized.

The government has offered little reassurance to the public about its ability to head off the most fearsome scenario - terrorist use of a nuclear device.

To combat the threats of warheads or smaller radioactive weapons known as "dirty bombs," about 4,000 pager-sized "personal radiation detectors" are distributed to Customs Service inspectors at airports, seaports and border crossings.

Secret Department of Energy Nuclear Emergency Search Teams are monitoring Washington, New York and other locations for radioactive attacks.

But physicist Edwin Lyman, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, said existing technologies for detecting weapons radiation have many limitations. Reliability can hinge on operator training and experience and distance between the device and the sensor. Lengthy exposure times - up to 30 minutes - may be needed to detect heavily shielded plutonium. Devices containing highly enriched uranium can be easily camouflaged with aluminum foil, he said.

Lyman's bleak conclusion: Today's technology may be powerless to stop the worst from happening.

"I pretty much expect there will be nuclear explosions in the United States," Lyman said, referring to the long-term threat.

INCOMPATIBLE SYSTEMS

When astronauts headed to the moon, NASA knew it needed good communications, tracking systems and computer systems. So it built its own cutting-edge networks linking worldwide tracking sites with mission control and spacecraft.

Today the government must stitch together a patchwork of outmoded, incompatible systems.

"They're old computer systems, and we're keeping them together with the equivalent of electronic duct tape," one White House official said.

In both the space race and the race for security, miscalculation or miscommunication could mean death.

NASA communications satellites helped relay data on the latest movements of spacecraft in orbit.

Five state-of-the-art IBM mainframe computers costing $55 million were purchased by NASA for the Manned Spacecraft Center in the mid-1960s. They would play a major role, Seamans said, in crunching numbers for trajectories, ensuring spacecraft did not miss their 5-mile entry window to moon orbit or the narrow Earth re-entry corridor of plus-or-minus one-half a degree.

"Fortunately, computers were coming in at that time to help solve the trajectory problems," Seamans said.

Computer memory for onboard navigation and guidance was primitive by today's standards and would fill just 5 percent of a floppy disk today, said Apollo-veteran Hoag.

Although the United States is known as a computing giant worldwide, much of its government is not. Since the 1960s, different federal agencies have used different systems for different missions. Many are incompatible, despite government spending of $50 billion annually on information technology.

Those gaps were never more evident than Sept. 11, when some of the 19 hijackers had been flagged in various FBI and CIA computers, but the information was not shared with airline or border authorities.

"Databases used for law enforcement, immigration, intelligence and public-health surveillance have not been connected in ways that allow us to recognize information gaps or redundancies," states Bush's national strategy. Agencies that keep terrorism-watch lists "have not been able to systematically share information with other agencies."

Computer systems at the FBI, U.S. Customs Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service are in the process of being overhauled because they are antiquated. Some will not be completed for many years.

The immigration service, for example, has seven separate databases that do not communicate with each other. Its computerized fingerprinting database for visitors also does not interact with the FBI's criminal-fingerprinting system. Recurring computer software and operator problems allowed criminals and even a wanted serial killer to slip across the U.S.-Mexican border in recent years.

Under the FBI's old investigative information system, the software required 12 steps to store a document electronically. The FBI's new system under development, known as Trilogy, will streamline work, allow one-click storage and enable quick dissemination to FBI offices nationwide.

The FBI also has been working on a little-known program called "Magic Lantern," an electronic wiretap of sorts reportedly able to monitor computers of suspected terrorists.

FBI Director Robert Mueller said most of his agency's computers are so outmoded that cross-indexing his own name into the computer the way it's pronounced - Muller - would not find links to the correct spelling.

"We're not where I want to be," Mueller said.

The FBI still uses old, 486-class computers a 10-year-old boy would reject, said Rob Atkinson, technology director at the Progressive Policy Institute.

"Somebody has got to force these agencies to build interoperable systems that automatically share information with certain types of people," he said.

THE HUMAN FACTOR

The race for the moon was all about precision. The race for security is all about people - often imprecise and unpredictable people.

During moon missions, Americans were passive participants on the sidelines, watching launches on television and riding high on American pride. In homeland security, their active cooperation with security measures is key to the government's game plan.

But 13 months after the attacks, many people say they are confused by the flurries of government warnings and the White House's color-coding alert system. Security planners wonder how long people will be willing to put up with long lines at security checkpoints.

NASA, on the other hand, was able to manage and control most human factors involved in the moon race.

Most astronauts were seasoned military pilots who had to learn to live in the unfriendly confines of outer space. To simulate weightlessness, they trained underwater and in a special airplane. They also practiced in a crowded space capsule.

They had to learn to live for days in what was basically a metal can.

When problems arose in spaceflight, astronauts calmly attacked them with the help of thick flight manuals, backup plans and seemingly omniscient ground controllers.

"We had problems, but we were so damn well-trained, we overcame them," said ex-astronaut Ed Mitchell, a 1971 moonwalker on Apollo 14.

In the arena of homeland security, the man in the spotlight may well be a local police officer or firefighter - so-called "first responders" - who until recently have had little training about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

Law-enforcement officers now must prepare to deal with terrorists unlike most criminals they've encountered before at home. In what is known as "asymmetrical warfare," the rules can change with each attack. Men armed with box cutters can bring down skyscrapers. The human imagination becomes a dark force.

"9-11 was the best operation I've ever seen," said international security consultant Billy Hix, a retired top CIA counter-terrorism official.

With Apollo, the human imagination was a source of inspiration.

After eight years and $20 billion, NASA's mission was achieved July 24, 1969, when Apollo 11 safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Four days earlier with 600 million television viewers watching, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first men to walk on the moon.

They left behind a plaque that read: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind."

The race for security will never be tied up so neatly, systems expert Haines said.

"We can't prevent the terrorist mind from wanting to attack us - because they believe the U.S. is evil," he said.

To reduce the potency of such thinking, he suggested a "21st century Marshall Plan" to rebuild Afghanistan and help other needy areas in the Islamic world.

But the most important solutions, he said, won't be found with mathematics, engineering, new technologies or faster computers. Instead, they boil down to a basic question about human behavior:

"If you hate me, how do I convince you not to hate me?"

(Orlando Sentinel correspondent Tamara Lytle contributed to this report.)