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New NASA Administrator - Michael Griffin

© Robert Davis

On April 12, President Bush's nominee to succeed Sean O'Keefe as NASA Administrator, Michael Griffin, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee. He has since been confirmed as NASA Administrator, and with this development the future of American manned spaceflight is looking better than ever. The text of his statement to the committee, to which I will be referring, is available at http://commerce.senate.gov/pdf/griffin.p... for download.

One key realization of Dr. Griffin's, which he stated very plainly for all to hear, is that money is most emphatically not the problem. As he points out, during the last sixteen years, NASA has received about the same funding in constant dollars as it received during its first sixteen years. If we're less than thrilled with our accomplishments in these latter sixteen years compared to the former, it's because we haven't been spending the money properly, not because we need more. Returning to the moon and sending people to Mars need not be a half-trillion dollar money pit. Indeed, if we've learned anything at all during the years of our spacefaring experience, then we really ought to have to work pretty darned hard at wasting money to have the cost ratchet up to that level.

Under questioning from the committee, Dr. Griffin further stated his views--and what a relief they are!--regarding CEV development and the Hubble Space Telescope. http://www.marssociety.org/news/2005/041... In no uncertain terms, the new Administrator gave the ponderous, ten-year development schedule for the CEV its comeuppance. Although the President set 2014 as a drop-dead deadline, conventional wisdom quickly hardened that the earliest operational CEV, traveling only to orbit and the International Space Station, would certainly not fly any sooner than that. Dr. Griffin wondered why on earth it should take so long to build a new vehicle to do things that we already know perfectly well how to do, and indicated his intention to accelerate the program. This is a particularly well-placed intention given the otherwise unaccountable gap in human spaceflight capability after the projected retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2010. I am hopeful that the first edition of the CEV will now be ready for action within approximately the same timeframe as the Shuttle's retirement, preventing any gap in capability. After all, as Griffin himself pointed out, Gemini was developed in three years, Apollo in six. With NASA having recently received the initial CEV proposals as I write this, it ought to be perfectly feasible to get the CEV flying within 5 to 6 years.