Griffin’s View Of A Threadbare NASA Budget Comes After Others Voiced That Conclusion; He Sees No U.S. Crew On Space Station In 2012
He Expects Next President To Order Continued Space Shuttle Flights, But Funding Questionable; NASA Will Study Possible Continued Flights
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin yesterday said he still supports official NASA policies calling for a half-decade gap in U.S. manned spaceflight capabilities, even though he privately wrote a heartfelt email that deplored White House moves fiscally eviscerating the space agency.
In his private email, Griffin expressed honest anguish and dismay at the plight facing NASA, views that precisely parallel public statements of some leading luminaries and space experts, They range from key congressional leaders, to veteran space experts such as Gene Kranz, to John Glenn, who in his younger years was a pioneering astronaut and later in life was the oldest astronaut at age 77. Glenn also was a former senator. (Please see Space & Missile Defense Report, Monday, May 12, 2008, and Aug. 4, 2008.)
As he has in myriad public appearances before Congress and elsewhere, Griffin yesterday was the loyal soldier, saying that the email leaked to the Orlando Sentinel didn’t reflect his repeated support for retiring the space shuttle fleet in 2010, as White House policy demands.
“I strongly support these administration policies, as do” the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), along with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Griffin said.
But his private email, distributed internally to various NASA officials including Deputy Administrator Shana Dale and Associate Administrator for Space Operations Bill Gerstenmaier, reveals a deep distress, with Griffin lamenting a White House ‘jihad” against the space agency being conducted by OSTP and OMB.
For those two White House agencies, “retiring the shuttle is a jihad rather than an engineering and program management decision,” said Griffin, a brilliant man with multiple advanced degrees and a wealth of expertise in space programs.
Those White House moves also have attracted the anger of some members of Congress, who deride the plan to retire shuttles in 2010 because the planned next-generation Orion-Ares U.S. spaceship system won’t be ready for manned flight until 2015, leaving a half-decade gap when the United States won’t be able to get even one astronaut off the ground. Rather, NASA will be reduced to buying space transport from Russia, a nation notably unfriendly to the United States and other countries in recent months.
Griffin on many occasions has termed the five-year gap “unseemly.” Decisions creating the half-decade gap in U.S. manned spaceflight capabilities were made long before Griffin took the helm at NASA, decisions he otherwise might have opposed at that time. And in his private email, Griffin ordered a NASA study of how shuttle flights might best be continued, if a newly elected president so orders.
In his comments yesterday, however, Griffin said he backs the White House policies, including the decision to retire shuttles in two years.
“The leaked internal email fails to provide the contextual framework for my remarks, and my support for the administration’s policies,” Griffin said.
He noted that the Bush administration “policy is to retire the shuttle in 2010 and purchase crew transport from Russia until Ares and Orion are available.”
He also noted that NASA will require an exemption from Congress before it legally can buy more Soyuz spaceship flights from the Russians, an exemption that many lawmakers say isn’t likely to be provided because so many legislators are furious with the Russian invasion of Georgia, and with Russian opposition to U.S. plans for a European missile defense system. Griffin agreed in his email that an exemption is unlikely.
On the one hand, “The administration continues to support our request for an … exemption” that would permit NASA purchases of Soyuz flights after the current contract with Russia expires in 2011, Griffin noted yesterday.
But he noted in his private email that unless Russia withdraws from Georgia quickly, which he said won’t occur, then congressional approval of an exemption is “DOA,” or dead on arrival, despite backing from some key lawmakers.
That means, he said in the email, that beginning in 2012, NASA won’t be able to send its astronauts on Soyuz missions, meaning that there no longer will be any U.S. presence on the International Space Station built with U.S. money, unless space shuttles still are flying then. He wrote that his guess is “there is going to be a lengthy period with no U.S. crew on [the space station] after 2011.”
With no exemption to permit U.S. crews to fly on Russian spaceships, there also is little likelihood of Congress providing huge added funds to accelerate the Orion-Ares development program, and even if there were, the future U.S. spaceship wouldn’t fly any earlier than 2014. Further, commercial spaceflight companies are unlikely to develop private manned spaceflight capabilities to the space station before 2015.
A No-Win Choice
Where all that leaves NASA, he wrote, is “to continue flying the shuttle, or abandon U.S. presence on” the space station.
While Griffin wrote in the email he sees no chance of the Bush administration relenting and permitting space shuttle flights after 2010, President Bush will be out of office in January, when a new president will be sworn in to office. The hand on the Bible will belong either to Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois or Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
And Griffin said the next president, whomever it is, will order continued space shuttle flights, because it would be senseless for the United States to abandon the $100 billion space station.
“There is no other politically tenable course,” Griffin wrote. “It will appear irrational — heck, it will be irrational — to say that we’ve built a space station we cannot use, that we’re throwing away a $100 billion investment, when the cost of saving it is merely to continue flying” the shuttle fleet.
Damaging Return To Moon
But continuing to fly the shuttles on trips to the space station in low Earth orbit will devour money that should be going to develop Orion-Ares, so the United States can move beyond low Earth orbit to the moon and beyond, Griffin said. At the same time, he predicted that the next president won’t see that as a steep cost.
Griffin didn’t even bother to say that a major increase in the total NASA annual budget could permit both continued shuttle flights, and development of Orion-Ares, because he isn’t expecting any huge funding expansion.
The U.S. space agency leader warned that funding more space shuttle flights, in a zero-sum game, will suck money from the Orion-Ares program, delaying the time when the United States returns to the moon.
Thus far, the United States is the only nation to have sent men to the moon, in the Apollo program of the 1960s and 70s. But many space analysts predict that even if NASA achieves its goal to send an Orion-Ares mission to the moon by 2020, the astronauts may be greeted there by Chinese taikonauts, and perhaps voyagers from other nations.
The next president may not see a long delay in returning to the moon as a huge loss, but Griffin in his email clearly was nonplussed by the prospect.
In hearings, experts such as Glenn and Kranz have deplored the nickel-dime approach to NASA budgets, which have been held to the $17 billion to $18 billion yearly level.
This penny wise-pound foolish approach has caused the half-decade gap when there will be no U.S. manned spaceflight program, and also meant many other NASA science and aerospace programs are short of the money they need, according to some experts.
Study On Continued Shuttle Trips
But Griffin in his email saw the writing on the wall: the next president is likely to order continued space shuttle flights, even though that president may not move to provide added funding for those missions.
So Griffin ordered NASA to study how it might conduct further shuttle flights beyond the mandated October 2010 cutoff, a study that Griffin dubbed “Plan B.”
That plan would examine “how we would continue to operate shuttle, in case the new administration directs us to do so, while doing the least damage possible to Ares/Orion, in the events that (a) extra money is made available and, (b) no extra money is made available. Our focus should be on minimizing the collateral damage to NASA caused by the recent events and their likely consequences.”
Griffin also dismissed as false the view that facilities at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana are so limited that continued shuttle operations and the emergent Orion-Ares program couldn’t be accommodated simultaneously.
“The argument that we need to get the shuttle out of the way so that conversion of [the Vehicle Assembly Building and the Michoud Assembly Facility] for [Orion-Ares] can proceed is simply specious,” Griffin said. “If we are told to extend shuttle without any new money, there is no immediate need to convert” the facilities to Orion-Ares use.
On the other hand, “if we’re given extra money, then [the facilities] conflicts are solvable. If we absolutely had to find a way for shuttle and Orion/Ares to coexist at [the facilities], we would,” he predicted. “It’s only a matter of money. So I’m not going to make this argument, either.”
Holding Space Station Hostage
Griffin said in his email that Russians never would admit they need American astronauts to continue operating the space station.
Perhaps they’re right, he said.
“Yes, there are actions we could take to hold [the station] hostage, or even to prevent [Russians] from using it — power management stuff, for example,” Griffin noted. But he doesn’t advocate that.
“We will not take those actions,” Griffin directed. “Practically speaking, the Russians can sustain [the space station] without U.S. crew as long as we don’t actively sabotage them, which I do not believe we would ever do, short of war” between U.S. and Russian forces.
What that means is that the Russians have the upper hand.
“I will not make the argument that ‘dependence’ works both ways,” Griffin wrote. Rather, “We need them. They don’t ‘need’ us. We’re a ‘nice to have.'”
Separately, Griffin observed in his public comments yesterday that the administration doesn’t want to see any abandonment of the space station.
“Administration policy continues to be that we will take no action to preclude continued operation of the International Space Station past 2016,” even though there is no formal approval yet for operations after that date, Griffin added.
He said in his email he is open to other views, and welcomes correction of any factual errors.
But he concluded his memo by indicating that NASA is facing a cloud as dark as any Florida thunderstorm approaching a shuttle on the launch pad.
Griffin, a man who for years has poured heart and soul into an attempt to rescue NASA from oblivion or irrelevance, acknowledged that his view “is about as pessimistic as it is possible to be.”