Frustrated NASA chief vents about agency’s fate
Orlando Sentinel
“In a remarkably candid internal e-mail to top advisers obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, [Mike] Griffin lashed out last month at the White House for what he called a ‘jihad’ to shut down the space shuttle, expressed frustration at the lack of funding for a new moon rocket — and despaired about the future of America’s human-spaceflight program.
“The tone of the note depicts a man watching as his finely crafted plans for a revitalized space-faring NASA appear to be melting before his eyes.”
‘My own view is about as pessimistic as it is possible to be,’ Griffin wrote on Aug. 18….
“Griffin’s harshest words were reserved for his bosses in the White House: the Office of Management and Budget, which sets spending goals, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which advises the president.
“’In a rational world, we would have been allowed to pick a shuttle retirement date to be consistent with Ares/Orion availability, we would have been asked to deploy Ares/Orion as early as possible (rather than “not later than 2014″) and we would have been provided the necessary budget to make it so,’” he wrote.”
My View: This story is well worth reading all the way through, as is Griffin’s full e-mail. It paints a very desperate picture of what’s happening with the space agency’s human spaceflight program.
There’s nothing really surprising here. I’ve been hearing similar complaints for years from people close to NASA. The entire program was ill-conceived from the start, an overly ambitious effort that has been underfunded and badly executed.
The key question is what the next president will do with the mess that Mr. Griffin and Mr. Bush will leave behind. (This is a general question that the new chief executive will have to ask about a whole range of matters.) There are no easy answers.
In the weeks and months ahead, you will hear discussions about a variety of options. There will be calls for boosting funding for NASA, speeding up the COTS program, funding alternate launch architectures, cutting back on ISS, and giving NASA a waiver to buy more Russian Soyuz vehicles. None of these options are without significant cost - financial and political. And the government doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on them.
The other question is: If things really are so bad, why is Griffin still serving as administrator? It would be foolish to make him the scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong - there is much blame to go around, as Griffin points out in his e-mail. President George W. Bush and his advisers launched an ambitious program without fully understanding what was required to implement it. And they haven’t come through with adequate resources.
However, Griffin has been responsible for many bad decisions and overall poor management of the program and the space agency. And he has been far from candid with Congress and the American people who pay his salary and fund his programs. That’s reason enough for him to leave. Give NASA a fresh start.
It would not make sense for Griffin to leave now, with a mere four months left in Bush’s term. The departure would probably create more problems at NASA than it would solve. But Griffin probably has to go at sometime early in the next administration. I can’t see Barack Obama re-appointing him. Nor do I think it would make sense for John McCain to do so, although stranger things have happened.
That’s my opinion. Anyone agree? Believe different? Feel free to comment.
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