Spaceflight in the heady days of the Apollo moon missions represented an enormous amount of ingenuity, to be sure. Solutions to seemingly intractable problems were born apace. Some were triumphs of technical skill; others were triumphs of common sense in the face of knotty issues. All sorts of genius were required to achieve the goal.

But two other things were crucial. The first was will. The U.S. made major investments in Apollo. In 1966, 420,000 NASA employees and contractors were at work on the project. Second, there was careful planning. It's not necessarily something a scientist enjoys, but it's the only way to land a man on the moon when the president has given you a deadline of "before this decade is out" and you only have 16 minutes of manned spaceflight experience under your belt.

Spaceflight missions steadily increased in scope, a carefully plotted stairstep toward success. Suborbital missions gave way to orbital missions, rendezvous in space gave way to spacecraft docking, orbiting the moon gave way to landing on it. NASA's leadership set out a "regimentation," classes of missions "from the very beginning... with a great amount of discussion and work. We had certain goals and objectives... We were able to build on our experience and learned from each one of those things," Chris Kraft, flight director of many early American flights and eventual director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, once explained.

With such a model in mind, NCSA recently completed a strategic planning effort to guide us through the next five years. The central conclusion was that to serve the future needs of the nation's scientific and engineering communities, NCSA must undertake a major new effort to create cyberenvironments for science and engineering. We must make the cyberinfrastructure as easy to use as Mosaic made the Internet to use.

The national cyberinfrastructure will consist of a vast array of distributed resources--computers, data stores, and data sources like telescopes and sensors. Using such a powerful collection of resources will be daunting. To realize the full potential of the cyberinfrastructure, scientists and engineers must be able to access and marshal those resources to solve the cutting-edge problems that confront them. Cyberenvironments will provide scientific and engineering communities with the integrated set of tools and services needed to coordinate the end-to-end use of these resources to analyze, visualize, and model the natural or engineered systems of interest.

This will be our mandate in the coming years, and its implications are clear. Cyberenvironments will enable scientists and engineers to draw on the full power of the cyberinfrastructure to advance scientific discovery and the state-of-the-art in engineering. Raw computing power is still very important, but many scientific and engineering problems require integration of simulation, data sources (sensor arrays, telescopes, etc.), databases, and analysis and visualization, all in a distributed environment. Cyberenvironments will allow the scientist or engineer to fashion her own course, knowing that all of the capabilities in the cyberinfrastructure are reliably behind her.

The tools and services in the cyberenvironments will include scientific and engineering applications and web services, graphical user interfaces and portals for easy interaction with the applications, and workflow and collaboration software to support complex, collaborative projects. A major component of this effort will be an integrated data analysis and visualization capability, which is needed by an increasing number of scientific and engineering communities.

Cyberenvironments will not be born full blown. Like the moon missions, they will be created in stages. Each stage will provide an increased set of capabilities and, at the same time, will lead to a better understanding of the issues and the creation of the next version of the cyberenvironment.

To realize the full potential of the advanced tools and services in the cyberenvironments, NCSA will provide access to these tools and services running on leading-edge computing and data storage resources. To ensure that these resources continue to meet the rapidly increasing computational needs of the scientific and engineering communities, NCSA will establish a new effort in innovative systems for science and engineering. This effort will first focus on new computing technologies, as these technologies are now undergoing a major change, but over time its scope will broaden to encompass the entire system needed to solve cutting-edge problems in science and engineering.

Development of plans for implementing this vision is underway. The course becomes clearer each day. But each endeavor that we laid out in our strategic plan represents only the broadest of strokes. I hope that it helps give everyone at NCSA and all of our partners the will and enthusiasm to imagine the finer points and to begin to define them and integrate them into a complete picture. The whole--whether we're talking about our center and its collaborators or about cyberenvironments--can truly be greater than the sum of its parts.