Only days before his agency faced down the dreaded Galactic Ghoul at Mars, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin gave a rather dour assessment of his organization’s current status to a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon.
According to an account over at Jeff Foust’s Space Politics blog, Griffin said this is a “time of incredible turmoil” due to the:
pending retirement of the space shuttle, which will cause mass layoffs;
upcoming change in presidential administrations; and,
failure of Congress and the President to agree on a new budget.
Apparently, none of the chaos engulfing NASA results from any bad decisions by Griffin, although the administrator did acknowledge the severe budget and schedule pressures affecting NASA’s shuttle replacement, Constellation. The system may not be ready for human flights until five years after the shuttle is retired and may need billions in additional funding.
On this, Griffin’s basic message was something akin to the USC Trojans fight song: Fight On. “When the going gets tough, let’s not reoptimize for low Earth orbit,” Griffin said.
Well, perhaps this isn’t quite as inspiring as the USC fight song, penned in 1922 by dental student Milo Sweet as his entry into the Trojan spirit contest. So, if this will help boost morale of anyone at NASA experiencing incredible turmoil, here’s the USC Marching Band performing Fight On. Just substitute “NASA” for “‘SC”, “space agency” for “alma mater,” and make it gender neutral. And maybe try to make it rhyme.
After seven weeks of suspense, NASA has found a permanent replacement for Ed Weiler, the acting associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. And the new chief is….
Ed Weiler!
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin removed the interim from Weiler’s title on Wednesday. The former director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center had been named to the post on March 26 following the resignation of his predecessor, Alan Stern.
“I’m very pleased to have Ed officially accept a more long-term position as science chief. His leadership style and 26 years of Headquarters experience will be vital to the success of upcoming science activities and missions,” Griffin said in a press release.
With only eight months left in George W. Bush’s term, it’s not clear how permanent the new position will be for Weiler. However, it is possible that John McCain might keep Griffin and his crew on board if he wins the presidency.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin was in New Jersey last week, promoting his agency’s efforts at exploring and settling space as the ultimate way of ensuring humanity’s survival in the face of a likely global holocaust, NJHerald.com reports.
Speaking before an audience at the County College of Morris, Griffin played a video narrated by physicist Stephen Hawking that showed the Earth shrinking into the vast cosmos. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers,” Hawking intoned ominously. “I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space.”
Griffin heartily agreed, saying that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the video is worth “a thousand pictures.” He then proceeded to make a pitch for why it’s also worth billions in tax dollars for his space agency’s efforts to explore and settle Earth orbit, the moon and Mars.
“People ask me why we’re going back to the moon. Haven’t we already been there?” Griffin said. “Well, yes, we have. But using that critereon, then Spain should have stopped colonizing the New World. We’re returning to the moon both to learn how to go further and for the science we can learn about the moon, on the moon.”
There has been a lot of media coverage of S. Alan Stern’s departure as head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD). Stern lasted less than a year on the job before abruptly resigning on Wednesday in the wake of the agency’s decision to rescind deep cuts in the popular Mars Exploration Rover program.
Because neither Stern nor NASA Administrator Mike Griffin revealed the precise reasons behind the departure, people were left speculating about a decision that has left the science community stunned.
“His departure is a shock to people,” Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., told Scientific American. “It means potentially a black day for science at NASA.”
After years of brilliant success studying the Red Planet, scientists and engineers working on NASA’s Mars exploration are getting their just desserts: deep cutbacks in their programs for the next four years.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin announced last week that he was refocusing the agency’s exploration budget on the outer planets. RedOrbit.com reports that NASA is requesting around $343 million annually for Mars exploration for 2009-12, just over half the $620 million it had estimated just a year ago.
Griffin said the change was spurred by a recent National Research Council report which gave the agency an “A” for its Mars work and a “D” for its exploration of the outer worlds.
“After Mars Science Lab - the current planetary sciences flagship - we are now planning in earnest for an outer planets flagship to Europa, Titan or Ganymede,” Griffin told attendees at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston last week.
Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham has added his voice to a growing chorus of people who want to extend space shuttle missions beyond 2010 and to provide NASA with billions in additional funding to move up the launch date of its successor.
“What we really need is a fix for the five-year hiatus, not a Band-Aid,” Cunningham writes in Launch Magazine. “That means both extending the life of the shuttle and moving the launch date for Orion forward. NASA needs a $2 billion appropriation to extend the life of the shuttle for 18 to 24 months, and an additional $2 billion to move the first flight of Orion closer by 18 to 24 months.”
Cunningham argues that a long gap between flights would erode American leadership in space, devastate the space workforce and astronaut corps, leave the United State dependent upon an increasingly authoritarian Russia, and place the fate of the International Space Station in the hands of other nations. He also called the NASA COTS program, which is designed to fund private human spacecraft alternatives, “a long shot at best” that will be prone to delays.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin is staunchly opposed to extending the life of the aging shuttles on safety and cost grounds. The shuttle’s retirement will free up billions of dollars needed to get Orion and its Ares boosters flying, the administrator says.
The results of the 2007 NASA Cultural Survey have been published, and it does not paint an especially good picture of the credibility of the agency’s management under Administrator Mike Griffin.
Only 51 percent of the 5,408 employees who responded to the survey answered “Yes” to the statement: “I can rely on management to be honest.” When broken down by field center, only 36 percent of employees surveyed at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., found management to be honest. This was followed by NASA Glenn in Cleveland (39 percent) and NASA Headquarters in Washington (46 percent). The highest figure was at Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston (62 percent).
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin emerged from his ninth floor office over the last two weeks to give a series of major speeches and interviews. Griffin updated everyone on how things are going at the space agency (very well, surprisingly enough) and tried to clarify his position on global warming. On the latter, he may have created even more confusion.
Griffin’s first stop was the Goddard Memorial Symposium, where he blamed critics for undermining his agency’s efforts and demanded that everyone get in line behind the Bush Administration’s plans to send humans to live on the moon and eventually Mars.
“The rift and harsh rhetoric between proponents of robotic science and human spaceflight does not help our nation’s overall space effort one iota, but it does cause division that weakens us,” Griffin declared. “If we wish a better reality for tomorrow, we as a community must police this behavior; those who engage in it must be made to feel, and be, unwelcome in the community at large. My hope for today is that there will in the future be more respect for each others’ work.”
With that threat/exhortation delivered, Griffin was off to Houston for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. While there, he granted an interview to the editors of the Houston Chronicle in which he decried the unwillingness of certain people to listen to alternative viewpoints. Who, precisely? Scientists. Climate change scientists, to be exact. Continue reading ‘Mike Griffin on Global Warming, Intolerance and Policing Free Speech’
Last week, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin sat down the Houston Chronicle’s editorial board and reporter Eric Berger to discuss a range of issues. Some highlights:
Griffin is opposed, for reasons of safety and cost, to efforts by Congressman Dave Weldon and others to extend the shuttle program beyond 2010.
China will “probably” get to the moon before the United States. “They are constructing a very well-crafted space program. They are doing things on a number of fronts — economic, political, military — that seem to have the intent of establishing China as a strategic power in the world.”
Griffin does not want another “space race.” Although the Apollo program was a stunning achievement, America was not able to use it as part of a long-term space exploration effort with sufficient political and public support.
Jeff Foust at The Space Review takes a closer look at the remarks made by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and Presidential Science Adviser John Marburger at the recent Goddard Memorial Symposium.
Griffin discussed NASA future exploration plans, pledged that the agency would work even closer with the emerging NewSpace industry, and urged the space community to get behind NASA’s plans to the point of ostracizing dissenters. Marburger talked about placing the nation’s future exploration and settlement of space within the larger context of American national interest.
What space-related event wouuld you like most to see in 2009?
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