Finally, a discouraging word about Griffin

For the longest time (like, about 72 hours) it seemed like no one would speak ill of the Bush Administration’s choice of Mike Griffin as NASA’s next administrator. But this is Washington, so you knew the lovefest couldn’t last forever. In his “ArmsControlWonk” weblog, Jeffrey Lewis, a research fellow at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies and an opponent of missile defense and space weaponization, takes aim at Griffin. Most of Dr. Lewis’s criticism stems from Griffin’s role as a member of Heritage Foundation study group that issued a 1996 report arguing in favor of a missile defense system, including space-based systems, for the US. (Interestingly, Dr. Lewis does not mention the year of the Heritage report in his blog entry, perhaps giving the reader the misconception that the report is more contemporaneous than it actually is.)

I will not attempt to debate Dr. Lewis’s critique on missile defense: after all, this is not “Missile Defense Politics” and Dr. Griffin has been nominated to head NASA, not the MDA. However, Lewis does stretch his logic a little too far on China: he argues that since the Heritage report included a passage from an article critical of Chinese arms proliferation, this “likely signals the termination of tentative steps toward Sino-US space cooperation” started by former administrator O’Keefe. Dr. Lewis doesn’t point out, though, that while last year’s Planetary Society assessment of space exploration options, co-chaired by Griffin, was somewhat dismissive of Chinese space capabilities, it does suggest a possible role for Sino-US cooperation:

China is, after the United States and Russia, the third country to have developed an indigenous human space flight capability. At present, the Chinese capability is limited both by lift capacity and by the relative immaturity of their technology, which has so far achieved only one human space flight. The Chinese have, however, indicated that they hope to develop a Mir-like space station by 2010 and plan to launch robotic lunar probes in the same time frame; this latter endeavor is potentially cooperative with U.S. goals.

Perhaps someone will think to bring up this topic during Griffin’s Senate confirmation hearings and enlighten us all.

Dr. Lewis concludes that Griffin’s support of missile defense and alleged opposition to Chinese cooperation “should raise alarm”. Lewis goes further and concludes that this is evidence of “an uncurious mind motivated more by ideology than evidence or reason.” However, given Lewis’s rather poor argument on Chinese relations—not to mention his decision to caption a photo of Griffin with the phrase “He’s nuts, too.”—some might argue that the same conclusion could be applied to Lewis.