There has been a lot of coverage about Friday’s announcement that the President will nominate Michael Griffin as the next NASA administrator. NASA Watch has a good collection of press releases from organizations and members of Congress that pretty much all say the same thing: they like him, they really, really like him.
Over the weekend I looked through some of Griffin’s recent public comments, primarily in Congressional testimony, and summarized them in this article for The Space Review. Briefly, Griffin is a big supporter of space exploration who, if anything, would like to speed up the pace of the current Vision for Space Exploration. He’s also not exactly the biggest fan of the shuttle or ISS. He strongly supports the development of a heavy-lift vehicle, preferably shuttle-derived, but also wants to see development of smaller vehicles, and thinks crewed spacecraft can be launched on EELVs without the need to “man rate” those launchers. Just don’t confuse Griffin with the escape artist with bad spelling skills.
I just saw Space Review linked on the front page at google news. The Griffin article.
Well done!
Dr. Foust has written a good summary of Dr. Griffin’s recent statements on space exploration. It is worth noting that Griffin’s comments on the costs of the human lunar exploration plan compared to the First Lunar Outpost (FLO) program that he proposed when he was at NASA are slightly mistaken. I too wondered why NASA’s proposal now seemed so much more expensive than a similar proposal a little more than a decade before.
However, it turns out that the figure Griffin cited for FLO did not include the government’s own management costs, only the money that would be paid to contractors. Once you add those projected costs to the FLO costs, then the total FLO number and the current projected cost for the lunar portion of the VSE are much closer to each other.
I had a few e-mail conversations with Griffin back in the first several months of 2004 when I was preparing several articles on the costs of the VSE. I cannot remember if this specific issue came up, but we did discuss some of the Space Exploration Initiative cost figures. However, the Congressional Budget Office produced a report that adjusted the figures. (I was involved as an unpaid consultant and later a reviewer of that report.) The CBO report can be found online.