NASA, Other

Griffin channels Howard Beale

Huntsville TV station WAFF scored an exclusive interview with former NASA administrator Mike Griffin recently, with the first part of the interview airing last night. Griffin, who in the past has said it will be “unseemly” for the US to have to rely on Russia to access the ISS, was even blunter in the interview:

“We should be mad as hell and not going to take it any more,” said Griffin on the gap left between the shuttle retirement and Constellation project. “I am tempted to use the word disgusting, but at the very least, it is unseemly.”

Griffin said extending the shuttle would be one way to avoid that gap, but would require spending an additional $3 billion a year, money that neither the current nor the previous administration seemed willing to spend. “So far, President Clinton, President Bush and now President Obama, not one of those presidents has raised their hand and said, ‘we should make sure to provide continuous human access to space,'” he said. He added that he was hoping that the upcoming review chaired by Norm Augustine would help: “Are we going to renew our commitment as a country to being a space-faring nation? I hope this review will settle that if anything can be settled once and for all. I hope that this review will do that.”

18 comments to Griffin channels Howard Beale

  • Mark R. Whittington

    Much he the horror of certain people, Mike Griffin does not intend to shut up. And a good thing too.

  • kert

    ‘we should make sure to provide continuous human access to space,’

    Meh .. why ? If you ask it just like that, the solution is blindingly obvious: pull either X-15 or SpaceShipOne out of the museum and keep it flying. Mission accomplished.

  • sc220

    Much he the horror of certain people, Mike Griffin does not intend to shut up. And a good thing too.

    In other words, he has become the Rush Limbaugh of space flight!

  • @sc220

    In other words, he has become the Rush Limbaugh of space flight!

    I have to disagree with this assessment. Mike Griffin is speaking plainly and clearly. He is not bandying words about or insulting people just for the hell of it. His arguments are nonpartisan. He is no Rush Limbaugh. And I speak as someone who is opposite side of the political aisle from Mike. And much of what he says about NASA funding and space development not being a high priority for Congress the rings true. Whereas Rush Limbaugh shoulda stuck with baseball instead of engaging in fantasy politics.

  • red

    Compliments on the post title.

    Mark: “Much he the horror of certain people, Mike Griffin does not intend to shut up. And a good thing too.”

    I agree. I’m already stocking up on popcorn. This should be fun! My suggestion for the next Griffin movie quote:

    movie: Aliens
    character: Hudson
    lines: [the drop-ship crashes]
    Hudson: Well that’s great, that’s just *** great, man. Now what the *** are we supposed to do? We’re in some real pretty *** now man…

    Maybe someone will get a debate interview between Dr. Griffin and whoever it was that picked the architecture that’s creating such a huge gap. They should also invite whoever it was that didn’t fund COTS-D or something similar.

    (I should say that I actually agreed with some of Griffin’s decisions – but certainly not the ESAS financial remake of another film: The Black Hole).

  • si_atwork

    It sure is interesting to see Dr. Griffin going all Dr. Doom on The Evils Of The Gap (queue in Bach’s Tocatta in D Minor for organ). What’s the big deal with this gap anyway? There was a gap before Apollo, and before STS. Long ‘gaps’ several years long, even. Anyway, extending the shuttle will not fix any gaps as NASA has no CRV for ISS of its own, and the shuttle is no CRV.

  • It’s a pity really. Dr Griffin’s doing his darndest to make sure people remember him for his biggest failures, not for the things he did right. Being clear and dispassionate is great, but it helps if you’re also correct.

    That said, I got the biggest laugh out of this comment:
    “Are we going to renew our commitment as a country to being a space-faring nation?”

    Renewing our commitment to spacefaring would imply that at some point in our history as a nation we had such a commitment. We didn’t. If we did commit ourselves to actual space-faring, the first step would be scrapping Constellation and working on an developing the infrastructure that could actually enable a spacefaring society. Constellation, even if fully funded, even if it didn’t have a single technical problem, and came off perfectly as originally intended, would still fall far short of getting our nation to be a spacefaring one. The fact that it has an unrealistic budget, and is riddled with technical flaws, and is likely going to be less safe than those evil EELVs just makes the case all the more damning.

    If Mike had really cared about us becoming a spacefaring society, he wouldn’t have tried to give us the Shaft.

    ~Jon

  • Mark R. Whittington

    “In other words, he has become the Rush Limbaugh of space flight!”

    Not a bad thing to be. Twenty million people listen to Rush and people in the White House clearly tremble at the mention of his name.

    Actually Griffin may become more like the Dick Cheney of space flight, hated by all the right people, but speaking plainly about the policy he supported and getting a certain respect and attention for that.

  • richardb

    Mike Griffin has been a voice of reason on the gap since 2005. Congress and the executive knew about the gap for 4 years. Most in Congress, circa 2005, fluent in Nasa programs knew that the gap would expand in all likelihood so its exceedingly cynical for Congress to get exercised over it now. Mike Griffin is getting tarred for the stick but he also got the shaft with endless funding cuts.

    See this from 2005 as Mike Griffin waxes over the “gap”
    http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2005/05/shuttle-to-cev-gap-a-threat-to-us-national-security-lawmaker/

  • Fred

    Let’s be clear. The gap was created by Mike belongs to Mike and any complaints by Mike about the gap are crocodile tears.
    Who was NASA administrator. Mike was.
    Who chose not to spend a few billion qualifying a capsule to fly on an EELV as a gap filler? Mike did. So Mike owns the gap in fee simple.
    In fact he wanted the gap as it locks in Ares 1.
    Mike and his gap has made Ares the only option. The only way forward.
    Turn yor back on Ares and you are turning your back on human spaceflight and any chance of returning man to the moon before 2050.
    Sigh…

  • sc220

    Actually Griffin may become more like the Dick Cheney of space flight, hated by all the right people, but speaking plainly about the policy he supported and getting a certain respect and attention for that.

    Mike Griffin forced an architecture that has gotten us nowhere, and now leaves us with a substantial “gap” in human spaceflight capability. This sounds an awful lot like the current Republican leadership blaming everyone else for the economic woes of the nation. All they need to do is hold up a mirror to find the true cause of the problem.

  • Gary C Hudson

    Following on the aforementioned “Aliens” theme, I was having a telecon with other members my the t/Space team when Griffin’s nomination was announced. I had no choice but to quote my namesake Cpl. Hudson: “Game over, man!”

    Aliens also provides my current thought on how to deal with Ares 1: “The only way to be sure is to take off, and nuke it from orbit.”

    Mike Griffin owns the gap, lock stock and barrel. Time to kill it dead.

  • Gary C Hudson

    Following on the aforementioned “Aliens” theme, I was having a telecon with other members my t/Space team when Griffin’s nomination was announced. I had no choice but to quote my namesake Cpl. Hudson: “Game over, man!”

    Aliens also provides my current thought on how to deal with Ares 1: “The only way to be sure is to take off, and nuke it from orbit.”

    Mike Griffin owns the gap, lock stock and barrel. Time to kill it dead.

  • Rhyolite

    I’ve always though of the VSE as the VWF (Vision Without Funding). The gap is a result of needing to use the shuttle operating budget to fund the shuttle replacement. You can’t have your cake and eat it too – unless you get more budget. For this, the previous administration and congresses are to blame.

    Having said that, the gap has been greatly exacerbated by the form the replacement has taken, for which Griffin is directly to blame. A capsule makes sense if you want to develop a maned space vehicle quickly so I don’t fault him for Orion. However, developing a whole new launch vehicle, essentially from scratch, has never made sense to me from a cost, risk, and schedule basis.

    A capsule on an existing heavy ELV (Dleta IV Heavy, Atlas V Heavy, and possibly Flacon 9 Heavy) always made more sense to me. Save your precious development dollars for the capsule. Other people have built suitable launch vehicles. The Ares I money could pay for man rating more than one heavy ELV, which would allow for price competition. It would also allow the capsule to be swapped between launcher types if one type suffers a launch vehicle failure. Finally, reliability and safety comes with increased flight numbers and rates, which is more likely to happen with an ELV that is use for unmanned and commercial launches as well as maned launches. Ares I will never as often as one of the EELVs and, thus, will probably never be safer than the EELVs.

    Funding COTS-D also seems like a good hedge for the relatively small amout of money involved. I wish Space-X well but it is still a novice in the space industry so I would not want to count on this as the primary route to space access. Boeing and Lockheed are expensive – partly because of the government procurement process – but they do have 50 year track records in space. If Space-X can deliver, then all the better. That would give us a second capsule design, another man rated launcher, and more price competition. Two capsule designs and two or three man rated launch vehicles would give us enough redundancy to avoid the multiple year groundings that followed the Challenger and Columbia accidents. This would be truly assured access to space.

  • First Griffin widened the gap. Now he calls it names (sigh).

  • Major Tom

    “Much he the horror of certain people, Mike Griffin does not intend to shut up.”

    And much to relief of most, what Griffin says these days doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Thankfully, the only individuals who have to listen to him since he left the NASA Administrator’s suite are a secretary and some students at a third-tier engineering school.

    “And a good thing too.”

    It’s not necessarily a good thing for the civil human space flight program that someone as embarrassing as Griffin has appointed himself its spokesman. This is the same former NASA Administrator who:

    — After claiming that it is “arrogant” to view climate change as a threat, was disowned by White House Science Advisor Jack Marburger as not “attempting to represent the [Bush] Administration’s views or broader policy” .

    — After finally releasing a research database of airline crew safety complaints under Congressional pressure, claimed that there was nothing in the database that the “traveling public would care about”.

    — Sent a September 2008 email to top NASA officials, complaining that the Bush White House was on a “jihad” to shut down the Space Shuttle.

    — Told the NASA lead for the Obama transition team that she was calling him “a liar” if she asked to “look under the hood” at his plans.

    — Enlisted his wife’s rolodex, spam marketing, and an astronaut-authored online poll in a failed attempt to retain his position as NASA Administrator with the new White House.

    — Since taking a $350K/yr. position at the University of Alabama at Huntsville in a time of faculty cutbacks, has told public audiences, “I think given my background and experience and my years in this business and the overall space community, that I’m easily worth what I cost.”

    — Now whines that past Administrations should have provided an additional $3B/yr. for NASA’s human space flight program, even though he supported those budgets in testimony to Congress as NASA Administrator and even though his chosen architecture to replace the Shuttle and get NASA astronauts back to the Moon has seen its projected costs grow by $40-58 billion (i.e., double).

    Even if Ares I and Orion, the gap, future ISS crew support, and future exploration plans were not in a such a sad state after Griffin’s tenure, Griffin puts his foot in his mouth so often that the civil human space flight program is much better off if he keeps quiet.

    FWIW…

  • Major Tom

    “Not a bad thing to be. Twenty million people listen to Rush”

    You have to be kidding. You actually think a multiple divorcee with a drug arrest and detention record, who makes false claims about Parkinson’s patients “faking it” and calls certain veterans “phony soldiers”, who thinks it’s funny to play tapes of simulated animal torture and songs that use the word “magic negro” in reference to the President on air, who is repeatedly disowned by the chair of his own party, and who reaches less than seven percent of the U.S. population is the right model for a spokesperson for the nation’s civil space flight program?

    It’s Limbaugh’s right to say and play the things he does and conduct his personal life as he sees fit. But that doesn’t mean that he’s a good model for a spokesperson for the nation’s human space flight program (or anything else). There are much better models in the political commentary biz (conservative or otherwise) to choose from.

    “and people in the White House clearly tremble at the mention of his name.”

    Huh? Who?

    FWIW…

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