NASA's engineers have shown the world yet again their capacity to be great.

Their plan to deliver the 1-ton rover Curiosity to the surface of Mars was bold, audacious, unprecedented - and, early on Monday, successful.

It garnered well-deserved kudos from all around, including the top: "It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination," President Barack Obama said.

While it's clear NASA can still do great things, what's less clear is how much greatness the agency has left.

On Friday the space agency took a big step toward ceding low-Earth orbit to commercial spaceflight companies, providing $1.1 billion to SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada to develop spacecraft to fly humans into space. This was widely viewed as an important step in bringing NASA out of its post-shuttle hangover, during which it has had to rely on Russian transport to and from its International Space Station.

What's next?

Yet after Curiosity's success, NASA itself has few major events planned - its new Orion spacecraft could launch an unmanned test flight in 2014, but it will fly on a commercial rocket. And even if NASA's own larger rocket, now on the drawing board, survives a decade of political change, it won't fly until at least 2021.

"It's always a good thing when NASA pulls off an incredibly complex and difficult challenge," said Jim Muncy, a space consultant who runs PoliSpace. But, he noted, there's not many major, attention-grabbing missions coming for awhile, during which time it may be difficult to maintain broad political support for the agency.

The need to find funding in NASA's budget for the James Webb Space Telescope, the cost of which has risen from $1.6 billion a decade ago to $8.7 billion, has caused NASA to delay or cancel other interesting projects.

"The problem is that the James Webb Space Telescope costs so much that we're not going back to Mars anytime soon," he said. "NASA's big programs tend to eat their young."

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Can NASA keep public's curiosity piqued?