This wasteful attachment to human space flight is tenderly cultivated by NASA’s public relations operation. This is no ordinary collection of flacks. They are more like the Borg: a soulless, unstoppable hive mind.

Their plan is fiendishly simple: Get more taxpayer cash from Congress. Use it to send astronauts into space. Aggressively promote the astronaut program to build public support for NASA. Use public support as a tool to get more taxpayer cash from Congress.

It doesn’t require superhuman intelligence or capability to realize the budgetary and political realities and adjust to them. Griffin or any other reasonably competent individual should be able to do just that. If he can’t, he should get the boot and quickly so someone else can come in and do the job he can’t seem to do.

Personally, I think twenty years from now Griffin will go down as the guy whose inept bungling got government-funded American human spaceflight terminated and led to the shutdown of Kennedy, Johnson, Stennis and Marshall Space Flight Centers.

Again, in the real world, the point is moot. Griffin is going to get his way for the next two years and by then it will be too late to stop Ares 1/big Orion.

But in the perfect world with a more perfect Administrator, I don’t think so. Orion has a very flexible contract, many Ares contracts are not signed yet, and two years is plenty of time by government reckoning to expend a few billion dollars on heavy lift and lander hardware.

“That is why I still think that, however unfortunate, we should go with what we can get — Orion and Ares-1 — and try to fix it later.”

Even if we were in that perfect world, I’m not sure the oversized Orion can easily switch to an EELV without creating a major EELV variant that no one else wants to buy. I think we’d be better off modifying the contract today for a smaller Orion that is more compatible with commercially proven EELV variants.

“The alternatives when that window closes is continuing to use the Shuttle or nothing.”

“Nothing” includes Soyuzes/Progresses/ATVs/HTVs and any minor miracles on COTS, all of which is what we’re stuck with now through 2015 anyway. If we’re smart with the requirements, a human-rated EELV and smaller Orion could be ready well before then — shrinking the gap — with change to spare for some actual lunar hardware.

“Why not just go with COTS for LEO? 1). Because that’s not in the political cards because it doesn’t keep most of the Shuttle workforce employed, which is of some importance even to politicians outside of the affected states,”

No, you put your NASA workforce on the stuff with no near-term commercial application, i.e., heavy lift and lander. That’s plenty to keep them occupied while BoeLockMartULA build your small CEV/human-rated EELV backup to COTS.

“2). because at least we have a lunar capable spacecraft at the end, and that’s a lot better off than we’ve been at any time since the mid-1970s.”

Wrong, Orion is not lunar capable without either heavy lift or in-space fuel provisioning. Under the current plan, none of that gets developed before the election, and (if you agree with my political assessment) it gets lost for another 10 or 20 years after the election. If NASA made a change of course now, they could get the heavy lift or fuel depot camel’s nose under the tent before the election, and have a much better shot at retaining the lunar return effort intact afterwards.

And again, I’m arguing the hypothetical, perfect-world case where the NASA Administrator is no mere mortal, recognizes the political and budgetary threats, and is capable of changing tracks. I readily admit that none of the above is going to happen as long as Griffin is at the helm.

I think it is already too late for this. That is why I still think that, however unfortunate, we should go with what we can get — Orion and Ares-1 — and try to fix it later. The alternatives when that window closes is continuing to use the Shuttle or nothing. Why not just go with COTS for LEO? 1). Because that’s not in the political cards because it doesn’t keep most of the Shuttle workforce employed, which is of some importance even to politicians outside of the affected states, and 2). because at least we have a lunar capable spacecraft at the end, and that’s a lot better off than we’ve been at any time since the mid-1970s.

My 2 cent theory is that Griffin is technically smart and powerful but politically naive and weak.

I fully agree. I first developed this opinion when he made enemies of the space science community long before he had to, and almost everything that has happened since has only confirmed me in this opinion.

I only fear that we are playing the same politically naive card by opposing Orion for something better at this late date.

— Donald

The real problem of using the pork-argument as the only justification for a gov’t human spaceflight program is that pork can take a lot of different forms, and unless you happen to live in Houston, Huntsville, or Titusville, your pork won’t necessarily look like a shuttle.

Now that many of the powerful republicans from those locations are out of power we will see new flavors of space pork coming from places like Maryland that won’t get Griffin or Horowitz the Moon program they claim to want.

Courageous leaders would restructure a program for maximum efficiency and maximum national benefit. They would make hard choices about what REALLY needs to be done to make a human spaceflight program a valuable contribution to the national economy (in a productive, not parasitic way) and national technological competitiveness.

Courageous leaders would sit down and come up with one or two viable reasons for a lunar or Martian exploration plan, and then drive all development around those reasons, with technological development as a dependent function of the reasons.

For instance, if NASA assesses an economic opportunity in asteroid mining, for instance, they would design vehicles and infrastructure around making that economically viable. If that meant humans were a part of the mining campaign, fine, if not, fine. Every decision would be based around how to make the most money for the least amount of expenditure. Maybe you don’t mine the asteroid in space; maybe the whole trick would be to direct chunks of the asteroid on reentry trajectories for mining on earth.

Of course, this isn’t how our space program works. But it should. In the end, all government programs are about what they return, whether it’s security, wealth, competitiveness, or prestige.

Worse, the situation is going to deteriorate in the 2008 budget, when NASA needs about a six percent increase to its topline budget over 2007 to keep Ares 1/Orion on schedule. … Barring a minor appropriations miracle, exploration is looking at another multi-hundred million dollar shortfall and another year’s delay to Ares 1/Orion.

Anonymous,

I think you are being optimistic by suggesting only a “multi-hundred million dollar shortfall”. Unless “multi” is a big single digit, or even a double-digit, number.

If you take the following assumptions:

1) NASA only gets a 3% increase instead of a 6% increase, the impact is ~$500M on NASA’s budget. If the 2007 CR precedent is followed, 90% of this will come out of ESMD budget.

2) The Dems & Chairwoman Mikulski increase NASA’s Earth Remote Sensing budget by $500M per year — consistent with the recent NAS report. Since global warming is a powwerful political wedge issue, and they have a scientific report to back them up, and Sen. Mikulski priority is to send $$ to GSFC, all the political stars are lined up for this. If the 2007 CR precedent is followed, then most of this increase to the remote sensing budget would come out of ESMD budget.

Combined these two political impacts could have a $1 Billion impact on ESMD’s budget in FY2008.

In this case “multi” = 10.

– Al

PS — If the space science, or aeronautics, or the ISS research budgets are increased, the damage to ESMD’s Constellation program could be even larger.

“Griffin’s co-author on the book was James French, who’s no knuckle-dragger. Maybe he did most of the work and got the least of the credit.”

“This guy has a theory about why the decisions were made the way they were made,”

My 2 cent theory is that Griffin is technically smart and powerful but politically naive and weak. Unlike O’Keefe, who was so politically powerful and adept that he could thumb his nose at Congress regarding NASA workforce issues and make the right programmatic decisions from a national perspective regardless of what parochial interests were at stake, Griffin has no political connections and probably had to make certain promises to certain Senators for his confirmation that compromised his programmatic decisionmaking. Worse, Griffin’s political naivete has compounded the problem by taking those parochial congressional concerns to such an extreme in ESAS that they have seriously undermined the budget and political sustainability of the VSE at a national level over multiple elections.

Hopefully someone will do a history or biography someday that will lend some real insight into what happened.