NASA has seen the future — and it’s 1969. Though the space agency was intentionally low-keyed about it, NASA had one of its biggest launches in late August. It sent into public orbit a new campaign that aims to make into reality President Bush’s ambitious plan for returning humans to the moon by 2020 and then going on to Mars.

NASA knows what a tough job it will be to convince the public and Congress that Bush’s vision — which is expected to cost nearly $230 billion during the next two decades — makes sense. The decades since the last moon landing have not been kind to the agency, beset as it has been by a star-crossed space shuttle program, management troubles, cost overruns and an expensive international space station that has questionable scientific merit.

Given those realities, NASA did what any Madison Avenue marketing executive might advise: Ignore the recent past and go back to what worked the first time. In the dog days of summer, the agency unveiled details of a program that picks up where the space race left off — as if the shuttle era never happened. And NASA’s new sales pitch has all the hallmark components of a 1960s Big Science project, including:

• A retro design: NASA on Aug. 31 declared that it had selected Lockheed Martin to build the “Crew Exploration Vehicle,” awarding it an initial $3.9 billion for design and engineering. The new manned space system would be used for three types of missions: shuttling gear and groceries to the space station in low-Earth orbit; putting a man (and, presumably, a woman) on the moon; and boosting humans to Mars. To do that, NASA is abandoning the oh-so-’80s space-shuttle approach of a reusable winged vessel. Instead, it wants to return to the Apollo method, building a good old-fashioned rocket ship with detachable boosters. The crew vessel closely resembles the command module sitting in the Air and Space Museum. But this time around it’s bigger and better, seating six astronauts, or twice as many as Apollo’s module.

• A cool name and logo: The overall project is called “Constellation,” and the Major Tom-like capsule is dubbed “Orion.” The Orion logo is a triangle, suggesting the shape of the crew’s vehicle, and features the stars of the constellation. It is not yet available as a patch that moms can sew onto their kids’ jackets.

• A glossy slide show: NASA’s 11-slide overview is available in Adobe PDF format, though it also would be right at home in a Kodak Ektachrome slide tray. You’ll find impressively complicated specs (the crew module has a hypersonic lift-to-drag ratio of 0.34 @ 157 degrees!). What you won’t find: a word about the scientific purpose of sending humans back to the moon or to Mars.

• A patronage map: No NASA slide show would be complete without a U.S. map showing all the places where Orion will be built. To shore up support in Congress, NASA knows it must sprinkle the work among as many states as possible. At least 10 will take part, with most of the work in three states with a combined 70 members of Congress: Texas, Florida and Colorado. One loser: California, which would have been the big winner if NASA had chosen the rival bidding team of Northrop and Boeing.

NASA clearly hasn’t lost its touch when it comes to packaging a big-government space program. Yet it hardly went for a Big Bang when it unveiled Orion. The logo design leaked out to space blogs in mid-August. The project’s name was quietly unveiled on Aug. 22. Then NASA chose Aug. 31, the Thursday before Labor Day, to announce the contract winner — and NASA Administrator Michael Griffin skipped speaking at the briefing. Time or Newsweek, one presumes, would have jumped at the chance for an exclusive cover story during the summer doldrums. Instead, press coverage of this potential $230 billion program has so far been muted.

Why the soft launch? Because NASA knows that public relations is like rocket science: It’s better to send something so huge and volatile up in stages, with little fanfare, rather than risking a high-profile flameout by calling inordinate attention upon Orion. In any case, its core audience is not you and me just yet: It’s Congress.

Despite its retro-Apollo strategy, NASA knows it can’t escape its more recent past. The Government Accountability Office in July urged Congress to put tight reins on spending for the program, saying NASA so far has failed to make a “sound business case” for carrying out Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration.” The report singled out the space agency’s record of cost overruns, delays and poor performance. NASA, the GAO pointed out, “non-concurred” with its conclusions.

NASA brass also non-concurred with the views of three top scientists who on Aug. 16 resigned from the NASA Advisory Council. The scientists have been critical of the administration’s emphasis on moon-Mars flight missions at a time of deep cuts in space research. Their view, shared by most of the scientific community, is that not much new science would be gained from returning to the moon or proving that a human can go to Mars.

And if you look at the Apollo era’s meager scientific fruits — rocks that proved how the moon was formed, Tang powdered drink mix and Space Food Sticks — it’s hard to argue with that position.

Mike Mills is CQ’s executive editor for electronic publishing.