Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin launched a broadside against President Barack Obama's space policy in the pages of the aerospace industry newspaper Space News in which he made a number of accusations.
"Unfortunately, this administration is focused on killing human spaceflight by the death of a thousand cuts. Its plan wastes money, unnecessarily targets NASA's highly skilled work force, jeopardizes future national security and, most importantly, cedes U.S. space leadership for the next two decades. The mischaracterized $38 billion estimate and the uninspiring schedule estimates that go with it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if NASA continues to dither. Meanwhile, the work force and the industrial base are being decimated by the administration's political poker games and general lack of leadership."
The only criticism one might have of Griffin's polemic is that he seems to ascribe to malice what might better be attributed to incompetence. The International Space Station may be abandoned on President Obama's watch and perhaps even lost. Thus the era of American space flight really will have ended.
Griffin's criticism of current NASA policy, which is scheduled to continue before Congress in September, is almost unprecedented. His points, however, are spot on, which suggest that the next president is going to have to add NASA to the list of agencies that he or she will have to repair after the destruction wrought by Hurricane Obama. One wonders if Griffin, who left NASA unwillingly, has anyone in mind for that task.
A Griffin restoration would not be without precedence. President Ronald Reagan brought back the NASA administrator under Nixon and Ford, James Fletcher, to helm NASA in the wake of the Challenger accident. A new president might well turn to Griffin, a man of many talents and much experience, to rebuild NASA's decimated space exploration program.
But a Griffin restoration would likely be under certain conditions. One of Griffin's complaints about the Constellation program is that it was underfunded and thus undermined during the out years of the Bush administration. Griffin would insist on assurances of adequate funding of any Constellation 2.0 should he be asked to head NASA again.
Griffin's approach to do space exploration would likely be some version of a Constellation 2.0, using something like the Space Launch System to get Americans back to the Moon as soon as funding, schedule, and technical challenges allow.
Currently NASA is looking at two 25 year "road maps" one of which goes to the moon and the other, as ordered by President Obama, to an asteroid before going to Mars. MSNBC's Alan Boyle presents an intriguing idea of building a "habitat" at the L1 point between Earth and moon before proceeding outward, similar to the Nautilus-X proposed by a group of NASA engineers.
Thus the next president, in choosing a new head of NASA, would also be choosing the direction of human space fight for decades to come. Griffin would seem to prefer a more traditional approach, building big rockets and going to the moon. It is unknown what his opinion is about more outside the box approaches, but one suspects that another NASA head would likely favor such more than him.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker . He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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