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Former NASA Chief On US Space Policy: "No Vision, No Plan, No Budget" (arstechnica.com)

Posted by whipslash on from the washington-we-have-a-problem dept.

An anonymous reader writes: During a congressional hearing Thursday, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin had harsh words for the space agency and the space policy crafted by President Obama's administration. Under the Obama administration's guidance, NASA has established Mars as a goal for human spaceflight and said that astronauts will visit the red planet by the 2030s. However, a growing number of critics say the agency's approach is neither affordable nor sustainable.

On Thursday, Griffin, administrator of NASA from 2005 to 2009, joined those critics. The United States has not had a serious discussion about space policy, he testified, and as a result, the space agency is making little discernible progress. NASA simply cannot justify its claims of being on a credible path toward Mars, he added.

16 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Money will return once China lands on the moon by Thanshin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    China, Europe or India have to put people on the moon to relight US population's push to get back to the head of the race.

    Until then, it seems simply too hard to get enough political support.

    1. Re:Money will return once China lands on the moon by DerekLyons · · Score: 3, Insightful

      China, Europe or India have to put people on the moon to relight US population's push to get back to the head of the race.

      No, it won't. Not only is the Space Race long over, the political conditions that lead to it no longer exist, and the general public of the US never supported the race that much in the first place.
       

      Until then, it seems simply too hard to get enough political support.

      Apollo only had political support because JFK took a bullet to the head in Dallas. And even then that support barely lasted two years before the budgets started getting slashed - by the time we actually landed, the program was already running on vapors.

    2. Re:Money will return once China lands on the moon by Nutria · · Score: 2

      Without that drive to dominate other men and impress females with what great offspring we'd sire, we'd still be frightened primates on the plains of Africa.

      BTW, chimps and apes have that same dominant, show-off streak.

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
    3. Re:Money will return once China lands on the moon by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A good indication of how public feeling was fading was that Apollo 13 wasn't going to be televised during the lunar approach, and doubts were being had about the landing itself.

    4. Re:Money will return once China lands on the moon by Salgak1 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Technically, only tropical jungles and savannas have the environment and resources to sustain homo sapiens sapiens. It is, after all, the niche we evolved it.

      Other environments require technological modifications to allow successful human habitation. Perhaps you've heard of them: Clothing. Buildings. Et cetera.

      We, as a species, modify the local environment to suit habitation. We can already sustain life deep underwater, and in extreme Arctic conditions. Space and other planets ability to sustain life are technological and political problems, but are eminently doable if and when the decision is made to proceed. . .

    5. Re:Money will return once China lands on the moon by Salgak1 · · Score: 2

      No, we'll colonize once China and the US join to form the Confederation. Downside: Creepy guys in suits with Blue Hands. Upside: Companions. . . Trust me, it'll be shiny. . .

    6. Re:Money will return once China lands on the moon by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 2

      You don't think that China putting a railgun on the moon won't reinvigorate space exploration?

      That, or we will buy one from them. If China can pull that off, it means we didn't do squat to either prevent it or do it first. And that will be the moment when we jump the shark as a nation... but we will be too busy fucking and drinking electrolytes as we cheer for President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.

    7. Re:Money will return once China lands on the moon by slashping · · Score: 2

      And so is taking a stroll on the Sun. Throw enough money at it, and easy peasey.

      Just go at night...

    8. Re:Money will return once China lands on the moon by Pumpkin+Tuna · · Score: 2

      I live in the relatively gentle climate of the southern United States. Yet if you dump me outside in February with no house, no clothes and no tools, and I would be dead in a day. Most of this planet is a hostile environment that we have to use our brains and tools to survive in. Mars would be harder, but not essentially different.

    9. Re:Money will return once China lands on the moon by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 2

      > Too far, and simply not worth the trouble.

      There are genuine and quite expensive difficulties, certainly. Please note that this is a quite different claim than "Only the Earth has anything remotely like the environment and resources that we need to sustain life."

      The difference has reminded me of the very, very old joke described at http://quoteinvestigator.com/2.... The situation is somewhat reversed: instead of establishing that we'd "sleep with another world" if paid millions of dollars, and now haggling over whether we'd do it for $5, you're saying that "it would cost too much to sleep on another world". But how low would the price have to be to allocate the budget to pursue this?

      For example, there are potentially very profitable reasons to establish bases near Saturn. If and as space industry grows, water is an expensive commodity to ship to orbit: Most hydrogen and oxygen in modern spacecraft are used as rocket propellant, unrecoverable for use in space industry.Hydrogen is relatively easy to gather from solar wind, but oxygen becomes a commodity for both life support and energy supplies. The icy rings of Saturn are a _tremendous_ source of solar sail portable water. It takes long-term investment to harvest them, and careful management to deliver them safely and usefully to Earth orbit space industries. But in the long terms of space exploration, it could indeed be profitable to have stable, regularly harvested water deliveries from the moons of Saturn. And a stable base on a moon like Enceladus could provide tremendous scientific research benefit on possible water based life there, and also serve as a stable navigation, communications, and repair center. And with a whole local moon for material resources, one much less susceptible to orbital perturbations than a ship or space station, it could be an invaluable location for stored or emergency resources.

      I'm not suggesting this is the best option or best project to pursue. But it's precisely the kind of speculative engineering and multi-purpose mission planning that NASA should be considering for longer term projects.

  2. "No Vision, No Plan, No Budget" ? by Weirsbaski · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "No Vision, No Plan, No Budget" ?

    You know, that third one might be the cause of the first two...

    --

    I am not a sig.
  3. Sad state of affairs and how we got here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, the Apollo program was already winding down. NASA had purchased the final Saturn IB and Saturn V rockets and Apollo spacecraft. As much as President Johnson supported NASA, he valued his Vietnam war and his "Great Society" programs, including his "War on poverty" even more.

    When Nixon walked into the oval office, he inherited the space program of JFK, the man he believed had cheated him out of the White House in the 1960 election. Every success of the program that landed a man on the moon in Nixon's time was attributed to JFK and LBJ, and this probably made the deeply flawed man even more insecure. The Apollo13 incident occurred on his watch and his administration was certain that it would be blamed for any fatalities, so they wanted NASA to stop the missions that went to places where rescue was not possible. The number of moon landings was cut on top of the Johnson cuts and hardware was re-purposed for safer Earth-orbit uses like Skylab and Nixon's Apollo-Soyuz. Nixon approved the space shuttle program but selected the least-expensive-to-develop option (reusable orbiter on the side of the stack, boosted by 2 SRBs). There were designs that would have been cheaper and safer to OPERATE, but cost more to develop including one that flew inline atop a Saturn V 1st stage, one that flew mated to the side of a manned fully-reusable flyback booster, and others - but as a typical politician he picked the one that would look best on the books during his time in office.

    Ford ignored NASA. He was focused on the post Watergate mess. With NASA in an R&D and building phase, there was nothing there to provide him with the photo-ops that all politicians crave, and as a congressman from michigan with barely enough IQ points to play football and who'd been appointed VP (rather than being elected) and then elevated to President (again, without an election) he lacked any sort of mandate to do anything.

    Carter ignored NASA. He inherited a program with no available spacecraft, and poor non-human-rated Launch Vehicles and with no desire to do anything with NASA he just neglected it. NASA just used the Carter years to quietly push ahead with the money congress provided to do the development of the shuttles.

    Reagan loved NASA, embraced the Shuttle program including showing up at Edwards to welcome one of the early missions home. He called for a winged single-stage-to-orbit "national aerospace plane" to be developed to eventually replace the shuttles, called for a permanent American space station (which he named "Freedom") and ordered NASA to plan to eventually transition shuttles to commercial service like an airline with private sector operators. When Challenger exploded, he made sure the congress provided the funds to build a replacement orbiter. Unfortunately, with political problems in his last two years, his attention was elsewhere and he lacked the political power to get his higher priority items funded and still have the clout for the NASA items. The Space station and NASP were both funded, but not to the levels needed. Both survived his administration, but not with much inertia.

    Bush41 had been involved with NASA during the Reagan years (it's customary for the VP to be involved with NASA) but seemed tepid. He is famous for saying that he just did not get "the vision thing". On the 20th anniversary of the moon landing he announced a "Space Exploration Initiative" to return to the moon, then move on to Mars, but rather than doing it on a pile of new money like Apollo, he proposed a pay-as-you-go pace .... then he never funded it, and he was booted out of office after only one term. in the middle of his one term, Bush appointed Norm Augustine to run a committee, which recommended ending human exploration beyond Earth orbit.

    Clinton seems to have taken no real interest in NASA (presumably it did not help anyone but Astronauts "get the chicks", so it was of little use (yes, I'm joking here)) but his VP Gore did appear genuinely interest

  4. Mike Griffen always has harsh words. by duckintheface · · Score: 2

    Mike Griffin has complained about NASA priorities ever since he was fired in 2009 and stopped setting the priorities. You may remember the public campaign he and his wife waged to keep his government job. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/2845... And he hopes a new incoming President will re-appoint him as NASA head.

      Griffin wants to go back to the expensive paradigm of sending humans to the surface of the moon. This may be an engineering objective (it's fun to build cool stuff) but it is not a top scientific objective. NASA is planning for exploration and eventual colonization of Mars. The truth is that it is astronomically (pun intended) expensive to put humans in such a hostile environment as space. There is really only one goal that makes such expenditures worthwhile. That is the establishment of a permanent self-sustaining human colony off the Earth. The rest, including further exploration of the Moon, can be better carried out by AI or remote controlled robotic vehicles.

    --
    "He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
    1. Re:Mike Griffen always has harsh words. by NotDrWho · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Just because he's an asshole doesn't mean he's not telling the truth.It could just mean that he's finally free to say what he should have been saying when he was director.

      --
      SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
  5. Re:Mike Griffen has always had a hard-on for Mars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I took a class from him in the 90s (space vehicle guidance and nav). Final exam: plan a trip to Mars. It's no secret he really, really wants a Mars mission. I haven't seen him since '95 or so, but I wouldn't doubt that, with all this talk of Mars, he would really, really like to be in the drivers seat.

    IMHO he's very smart, but in an assholish way. Sort of the opposite of NDT's smart but very affable public persona.

  6. Re:"NO BUDGET"???? by Thud457 · · Score: 2

    Steely Eyed Missile Man

    Well there's your problem...
    We just need another program that the military can use as a stalking horse for their priorities.

    Of course, that didn't work out too well with v2.0 (the Shuttle program)...

    --

    the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff