Sky-High Profitable Mistakes

Priorities like science didn't have much to do with it.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 8 — NASA’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, says the current period of space exploration will come to be seen as a mistake.

“Viewed from the point of history several decades out,” he said in an interview, “the period where the United States retreated from the Moon and quite deliberately focused only on low Earth orbit will be seen, to me, a mistake.”

Mr. Griffin has made similar comments before, notably a year ago in an interview with USA Today. This time, his remarks came as he waited for Thursday’s down-to-the-wire effort to launch the shuttle on a 12-day mission to rewire the International Space Station. The liftoff was scrubbed at the last minute because of weather concerns...

Mr. Griffin was appointed to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 2005, a year after President Bush announced his “vision for space exploration,” which calls for returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and then moving on to send humans to Mars. Mr. Griffin has from the start been an enthusiastic proponent of that plan.

But it has put him in a delicate situation, as he has shifted NASA financing to the Moon initiative, while moving to complete the space station and shut down the shuttle program by 2010, and cutting back on its science activities. And in doing so, he has occasionally expressed doubts about the wisdom underlying the nation’s decision to build the shuttle and the station.

After his remarks a year ago, he issued an apologetic memorandum to NASA employees.

But if there was any discomfort in expressing such opinions once again at the Kennedy Space Center in the midst of preparations for launching, Mr. Griffin showed none. He said in the interview that his comments had been broadly misconstrued as a slap against the people who build and maintain the shuttle and space station, and emphasized that he admired the people of NASA who took on enormous challenges to create the shuttle and station.

The fault is not NASA’s, he said, adding: “The space shuttle is a response to a policy mistake — it isn’t the mistake. The mistake was tearing up all the infrastructure that we built for Apollo and saying, ‘let’s just focus on low Earth orbit...’ ”

The plan to return to the Moon by 2020 has been met with some skepticism, especially among those who doubt that the space agency can take on such a daunting project within its $17 billion annual budget. Dr. Griffin said that NASA could do the job — and could reach the moon even more quickly, with more money.

“I’m tempted to say, ‘Why the skepticism?’ ” he said, adding, “but in fairness, NASA’s recent history has not had the on-time, on-budget performance characteristic of the Apollo era. And I’m trying to restore that.”

The fact that Democrats won the majority of seats in Congress in the November election, and other political changes that will occur over time, should have little effect on the plan, he said...

DINOcrats being as easily bought as Rethuglicans.

The low orbit space station concept was boneheaded from the beginning, serving as a potential weapons plaform. A low orbit space station is constantly falling towards earth. Better to build in the more stable LaGrange orbits.

The space program has largely existed to feed the aerospace defense industry since its inception. There has been some really impressive science done, but that hasn't been the major focus even in the unmanned era. Science has served as an excuse, not a motivation for these people.

Similarly, Griffin's motivation remains Company based- as might be expected for an ex-CIA ex-CSC/ DynCorp CEA. It's just now there's the likelihood the Chinese will have a moonbase soon. [thanks Xenophon] A little competition tends to focus one on the realities.