NASA, Other

Griffin on long-term space exploration plans and a return to the Moon

At the Global Space Exploration Conference, or GLEX, in Washington two weeks ago, one of the conference’s organizers, the AIAA, issued a press release stating that its new president, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin, would hold a press conference where the organization “will call on Congress to establish space exploration policy goals which transcend partisan political differences, enhancing the future of the US space program and its ability to cooperate more fully with its international partners.” That made it sound like Griffin and AIAA would announce some specific goals it believed the nation should pursue.

At the press conference, though, Griffin announced no specific goals, prompting one reporter to ask just what those goals should be. “Our central theme… is that the purpose of the human spaceflight program is to move human activity off the surface of the Earth,” he said, citing the final report of the 2009 Augustine Committee. “That does not seem to me to be a Democratic or a Republican goal. I believe it’s a human goal.” He said human space exploration was inherently international in nature, and not something accomplished in the short term. “We will not reach long-term goals without a stable, coherent, sensible plan that transcends elections and leaders,” he said. “We must have plans and intermediate goals that transcend elections or largely we will just waste money.”

But how do you develop the consensus to enable those plans and achieve those goals? Griffin said conferences like GLEX could help achieve that by bringing together experts to help create such a consensus. “And when we can take an active role in doing that, it can have political influence in our various countries,” he said. He did not elaborate on the details on how to transfer that consensus from a small group of experts—GLEX had “over 630 representatives” in attendance—to a broader political base.

Griffin, though, did have some of his own ideas of what those long-term plans should be. “We had, in my view, an extremely good [NASA] authorization in 2008, that was even a little bit better than the 2005 act, which I thought was excellent,” he said. He cited provisions in the act that endorsed a human return to the Moon and utilization of the ISS. “That’s the kind of thing that we need. All of the goals espoused by that act were long-term, generational, and strategic in scope.”

As I noted in an article in The Space Review this week, Griffin—speaking only for himself and not the AIAA—also endorsed comments made by Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin earlier in the day at GLEX that called for a human return to the Moon as the next step for human space exploration, as opposed to NASA’s current plans for a human asteroid mission by 2025. “I think General Popovkin’s comments this morning were on target,” Griffin said. “I think the starting point beyond space station is the Moon for a host of engineering and operational reasons that, to me, make sense.”

“The next learning step, the next outward step, is the Moon,” Griffin said. “I think in the longer, broader reach of space policy, that is the path to which we will return.”

32 comments to Griffin on long-term space exploration plans and a return to the Moon

  • Dark Blue Nine

    Both Griffin and Popovkin’s comments appear empty of specific reasons for their lunar preference. Or of a substantive rationale for why their respective governments should invest in a human lunar effort.

    I can think of some possibilities, but you’d think former and current space agency leaders would be more concrete in justifying their argument and articulating it to their political leadership.

    The argument “I think it’s right” is an empty one.

  • tom hancock

    “The next learning step, the next outward step, is the Moon,” Griffin said. “I think in the longer, broader reach of space policy, that is the path to which we will return.”

    Wisdom.

  • E.P. Grondine

    “Our central theme… is that the purpose of the human spaceflight program is to move human activity off the surface of the Earth,”

    For a “central theme”, how about keeping the human species alive on planet Earth?

    No matter their economic system, political systems, social systems, or religious beliefs (though there are excpetions there), people pretty much want to stay alive.

  • Coastal Ron

    tom hancock wrote @ June 5th, 2012 at 8:51 am

    Wisdom.

    Why?

    We’ve been to the Moon many times already, we know how to land people, drive around to explore, and then return those people safely to Earth.

    Contrast that to going to an asteroid, which simulates a transportation capability we need for reaching Mars. We don’t know how to do that yet, or at least have not demonstrated that we can successfully do it.

    If the ultimate goal is Mars, then why does returning to the Moon get us there quicker than heading straight for an asteroid?

  • Vladislaw

    Griffin going off the reservation with the ESAS, rigging data to exclude EELV’s and trying to keep heritage hardware/systems/labor pool.

    UNwise.

  • You can do the ISS program plus a lunar sortie program with the current budget constraints on NASA but you can’t do the ISS and a lunar base program together unless you raise the NASA budget by about $3 billion a year– as was recommended by the Augustine Commission. Not a big deal, IMO, for a $3.5 trillion a year Federal budget. But it is for the penny wise and pound foolish Congress.

    With a constrained NASA budget, the $3 billion a year ISS budget sucks the life out of almost any beyond LEO agenda.

    Marcel F. Williams

  • Coastal Ron

    Marcel F. Williams wrote @ June 5th, 2012 at 11:23 am

    You can do the ISS program plus a lunar sortie program with the current budget constraints on NASA but you can’t do the ISS and a lunar base program together unless you raise the NASA budget by about $3 billion a year

    If we wanted to go back to the Moon, then the MPCV won’t be needed because it’s not reusable and it’s life support system will only keep four people alive for 21 days – it’s the wrong vehicle for supporting any sustained return to the Moon. Instead of destroying a $500M vehicle each time we need to rotate crews on the Moon, we need a reusable transportation vehicle for LEO-to-L1.

    And if we wanted to go back to the Moon, as per Chris Kraft, the SLS is not needed either. Our existing international fleet of rockets can take care of our needs.

    So right there Marcel we see where we can get your $3B/year – by canceling the MPCV and SLS programs. Budget problem solved, and we didn’t even need to raise NASA’s budget (which wouldn’t happen anyways).

  • The SLS will make setting up a lunar base a lot easier and cheaper than current rockets. The Delta IV heavy only lifts around 23 tonnes into orbit at a price nearly as high as a shuttle launch due to low demand for the vehicle. The SLS will be able to launch 70 to 130 tonnes into orbit at close to shuttle launch cost.

    The command module for the MPCV is reusable (up to ten times) but the hypergolic fueled Service Module is not. Eventually, I believe that the SM will be replaced by a LOX/LH2 ACES type of Service Module. I also believe that the Orion CM will eventually be replaced by Boeing or Lockheed-Martin’s newer command modules which can accommodate up to 7 people. Part of the SLS philosophy is to utilize newer and cheaper components when available.

    However, no one is going to continuously occupy a cramped CM for 21 days outside of the Earth’s magnetosphere and be fully exposed to galactic radiation– including brain damaging heavy nuclei. That would be crazy!

    After the MPCV reached L1, they would probably take a single stage LOX/LH2 ETLV (extraterrestrial landing vehicle) down to the lunar surface to a fully shielded facility. A reusable ETLV (5 round trips) operating between will probably have more impact in reducing cost.

    Anyone staying at L1 would probably have to do so at an L1 space station fully shielded with several hundred tonnes of water. Such a station would probably require an SLS launch. Additionally, heavy lift launches will probably be required to transport the large amounts of water shielding from Earth. Alternatively, large reusable lunar tankers could be used to transport water from the Moon to L1, but such large tankers would probably also require an SLS launch.

    Marcel F. Williams

  • vulture4

    “to move human activity off the surface of the Earth,”

    ALL human activity? Nine billion of us? Why? How? What about cost? Who will pay? What about robotics and science? I can’t imagine what Dr. Griffin is thinking. I haven’t heard Mr. Romney offering to pony up an extra $3B a year, in fact he said the exact opposite.

  • Doug Lassiter

    Marcel F. Williams wrote @ June 5th, 2012 at 11:23 am
    “With a constrained NASA budget, the $3 billion a year ISS budget sucks the life out of almost any beyond LEO agenda.”

    When the U.S. leaves its international partners in the dust by abruptly pulling out of ISS, the sucking sound you hear will be international partnership opportunities going down the drain, and with it, any hope that the U.S. will find itself credibly beyond LEO. THat’s because ISS is a model for such collaborations. A realistic lifetime for ISS deserves careful assessment, but any illusion that it’s going to hit the water in the next decade or so, and free up huge amounts of money on that timescale, is just not realistic. That’s where Mike Griffin stumbled badly with Constellation. He figured that tanking ISS would be easy to do. It wasn’t.

    It’s been said many times before here, but I can’t resist repeating it. SLS is what is going to suck the life out of almost any beyond-LEO agenda. It’s a launcher without affordable payloads, that we’ll be able to afford to use only rarely. It’s a path for fiscal expansion of an agency that is simply not going to fiscally expand.

  • Vladislaw

    Vulture, it doesn’t matter that Republican candidate for President, Mitt Romney, raised his hand in a political debate that he would not raise NASA’s budget, it doesn’t matter he would fire anyone that came to him with an idea for a lunar base.

    What does matter is that he is not President Obama and will therefore give NASA a blank check to fix everything that President Obama has ruined with the current American space policy.

  • “What does matter is that he is not President Obama and will therefore give NASA a blank check to fix everything that President Obama has ruined with the current American space policy.”

    What? NASA has been busted since the Nixon administration, with successive series of administrators and Presidential administrations playing political games with the agency and turning it into a federal jobs program for aerospace engineers. Reagan tried to “fix” the agency, but the bureaucracy was already too ossified to be able to make much of an impact. About the only thing that came from the Reagan administration of substance in NASA was the ISS program, originally Space Station Freedom. Admittedly the Clinton administration deserves more than a few kudos for that project too, where the Bush I administration proposed another half-hearted long term goal to Mars that was all but meaningless as when Nixon offered the same goal.

    The Bush II administration produced the fiasco known as Constellation, where the “Vision for Space Exploration” only survived 24 hours before contact with the NASA bureaucracy rendered it useless.

    While there is little I can agree with the Obama administration on in terms of the rest of his domestic agency (or much of his foreign agenda for that matter), there was little of value left in NASA that could have been damaged by Obama. The only real policy change that was proposed under the Obama administration that could have damaged current space policy was changing COTS and CCDev to go away from Space Act Agreements to a FAR contracting model… something that has become an internal squabble within NASA and that the companies involved with those programs legitimately fought against (and for the most part won so the change won’t happen).

    I expect more of the same from a President Romney, assuming he even wins in November (currently it doesn’t look too promising though, but that is merely an early projection). The only presidential candidate in this cycle that even gave more than a second thought about the future of NASA and any real substance of space policy has been Newt Gingrich. Then again he was so controversial that there was no way Gingrich could ever have been President, and that even included his space policy agenda.

    I really don’t expect anything of substance coming from NASA in the next decade if not longer, or perhaps watching the agency gradually be dismantled as a relic of the past. It certainly is running on what little forward momentum it has left from previous programs

  • Bob Steinke

    “The next learning step, the next outward step, is the Moon,” Griffin said.

    That’s fine with me. What I don’t like is when he says the next step should be designing a new unaffordable,unnecessary rocket when we’d be better off spending the same money buying many many launches of rockets that already exist.

  • @Doug Lassiter

    Launching four to six SLS vehicles per year shouldn’t cost NASA much more than launching its former, and much more complex, HLV, the Space Shuttle. And that was a $3 billion a year program within an $8.4 billion a year annual manned spaceflight budget.

    The only way the SLS will be a failure is if future administrations don’t want to travel back to the Moon and beyond and to deploy larger and cheaper space stations within cis-lunar space, and that would be a tragedy not only for NASA but for the future of America and its economic survival.

    Marcel F. Williams

  • Anyone staying at L1 would probably have to do so at an L1 space station fully shielded with several hundred tonnes of water. Such a station would probably require an SLS launch. Additionally, heavy lift launches will probably be required to transport the large amounts of water shielding from Earth. Alternatively, large reusable lunar tankers could be used to transport water from the Moon to L1, but such large tankers would probably also require an SLS launch.

    None of those missions require an SLS launch, and none of them can afford it.

  • Frank Glover

    “The SLS will make setting up a lunar base a lot easier and cheaper than current rockets. The Delta IV heavy only lifts around 23 tonnes into orbit at a price nearly as high as a shuttle launch due to low demand for the vehicle.

    So, that’s about 3 to 5.6 times the payloiad, at how many times the price?

    “The SLS will be able to launch 70 to 130 tonnes into orbit at close to shuttle launch cost. ”

    Ah. okay. If correct, that would seem to be the nail in the coffin, right there…

  • josh

    will this guy ever shut up. he has no credibility left after the constellation fiasco.

  • Coastal Ron

    Bob Steinke wrote @ June 5th, 2012 at 4:41 pm

    That’s fine with me [Moon next]. What I don’t like is when he says the next step should be designing a new unaffordable,unnecessary rocket…

    I’m really destination agnostic myself. What I focus on is those things that lower the cost to access space, since once you lower the cost far enough, ALL destinations start becoming affordable and reachable.

    And because of that I agree that the SLS is unaffordable, and will in fact retard our ability to expand out past LEO.

  • John Malkin

    Vladislaw wrote @ June 5th, 2012 at 3:19 pm

    What does matter is that he is not President Obama and will therefore give NASA a blank check to fix everything that President Obama has ruined with the current American space policy.

    Griffin wanted 3.7B (2010), 7.6B (2011) and 7.9B (2012) and so on for Constellation. He didn’t even get the 2008 amounts so I don’t understand how SLS aka Ares V and a moon program can be more affordable. What magic did Bolden and Obama do to make it so affordable?

    Also that doesn’t include the Advance Capabilities budget, he wanted funded approximately .973B (2010), 1B (2011) and 1B (2012).

    Congress won’t give a blank check to anyone not even themselves.

    (Source: proposed 2008 budget)

  • Coastal Ron

    Marcel F. Williams wrote @ June 5th, 2012 at 4:51 pm

    Launching four to six SLS vehicles per year shouldn’t cost NASA much more than launching its former, and much more complex, HLV, the Space Shuttle.

    Wrong. NASA has already estimated that it will cost $1.4B to fly the 70mt SLS ($2B/launch with development costs), and $1.6B for the 130mt version ($2.5B/launch with development costs). That assumes a volume purchase of 18 flights.

    The current pricing assumption for Delta IV Heavy is $450M/ea, but that is a single buy price. If ULA were in competition with SpaceX, ESA and Russia for a large volume buy, that price would come down. Right now the low end of the pricing is the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, which can lift 117,000 lbs to LEO for $128M ($1,094/lb). In order for the SLS to match that price, NASA would have to lower the 130mt SLS cost to $262M – which would be impossible.

    Why would that price point be impossible? When the Shuttle program was running along at 4-5 flights per year building out the ISS, NASA had made volume buys for the external tank and the SRM’s (minus the SRB specific components). The ET cost $173M each, and a SRM set cost $68.5M, for total material cost of $242.5M.

    The SLS uses much larger version of both the ET and the SRM sets, and instead of the reusable Shuttle for an upper stage, the SLS disposes of five RS-25E (at least $14M – $70M total) and the entire 2nd stage. So material cost alone, not to mention those little things called “labor” and “overhead”, is going to push the cost much higher. And you have to add in the $30B development cost, since that is not free money.

    As usual Marcel, you are all fiction and no fact.

  • common sense

    I have nothing to do with Constellation!!!

    Ah.

  • John Malkin

    In addition Griffin proposed 1.7B (2012) for planetary science and 2.6B (2012) for ISS up from the 1.7B (2007).

    “I believe that the assembly of the International Space Station is a more difficult engineering feat than was the Apollo program. Certainly, completing the International Space Station, retiring the Space Shuttle by 2010, and managing the effective transition from the Space Shuttle to new commercial cargo and crew transportation capabilities, the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, and Ares launch vehicles are the greatest management challenges facing NASA since the Apollo era. Science continues to be a high priority at NASA.” — Michael D. Griffin

    Is a Lunar base less complex than ISS?

    (Source: proposed 2008 budget)

  • Jason

    “Griffin said conferences like GLEX could help achieve that by bringing together experts to help create such a consensus.”

    I thought he told Rand Simberg it wasn’t the time or place. Or does he just mean “experts” he already has a consensus with? The AIAA should have picked a better leader.

  • Doug Lassiter

    Marcel F. Williams wrote @ June 5th, 2012 at 4:51 pm
    “Launching four to six SLS vehicles per year shouldn’t cost NASA much more than launching its former, and much more complex, HLV, the Space Shuttle.”

    You make my point. It’s a launcher without affordable payloads, so launching four to six unaffordable payloads a year makes life easier? Who are you kidding? (But yes, if your fantasizing includes launching tons of shielding for a cis-lunar space hab to allow people to stay up there safely for years at a time, that could be pretty cheap!) Also, as I’ve said, ISS isn’t going away soon, so counting those dollars is just fantasizing. Lots of fantasizing going on here, actually.

  • DCSCA

    The only person on Earth who could come close to doing as much damage to discourse on lunar activities with any commentary as ‘Newt Gingrich – Moon President’ … is Mike Griffin.

    Go away, Mike. You’ve done enough damage to America’s space program.

  • Googaw

    Or of a substantive rationale for why their respective governments should invest in a human lunar effort.

    Who needs any reason other than to build “cathedrals” for the astronaut cult:

    http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Uncommentary.html

    And what heavenly body is more holy than the one that houses the shrines of Apollo?

  • Googaw

    Our central theme… is that the purpose of the human spaceflight program is to move human activity off the surface of the Earth

    This is either hopelessly vague, or a circular definition.

  • Vladislaw

    John Malkin wrote:

    “Congress won’t give a blank check to anyone not even themselves.”

    I was being facetious, when you read some of the posts on space blogs, including here, they seem to think that Governor Romney will be going against what he has already stated and fully fund Constellion v2.0 and start on Griffin’s plan for a lunar base.

  • Leonard Weinstein

    I am a former NASA scientist and presently working at the National Institute for Aerospace. I have given talks on where we should concentrate in space activity, and why, and it is not Luna. The moons of Mars should be our main goal. I am enclosing a ppt giving some details, and suggestions how to best achieve this. Look at:
    https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dnc49xz_124d3fghncc&interval=5

  • Coastal Ron

    Leonard Weinstein wrote @ June 6th, 2012 at 8:53 am

    I have given talks on where we should concentrate in space activity, and why, and it is not Luna.

    I would imagine you and Dr. Spudis are not close friends… ;-)

  • Dennis Wingo

    “The SLS will be able to launch 70 to 130 tonnes into orbit at close to shuttle launch cost. ”

    Please list 10 payloads to the Moon that require this lift capability.

  • Vladislaw

    Actually only the seventy ton version will be close to the shuttle at 1.6 billion, the 130 ton version is 2.5 billion.

    Think about that, for every single launch of the 130 ton we could fund a company like spacex who quote 300 million per launch.

    http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1979/1

    “One estimate of individual SLS launch costs (not including the payload) can be obtained from private launch cost projections, which are now about ten times lower than the current prices for government-sponsored launchers like the Delta 4 Heavy, which are actually increasing due to reduced launch rates. If the projected cost for the Falcon Heavy is about $850–1,000 per pound, or $100 million per 53-ton launch, for about four launches a year, then the cost per pound for an SLS payload would be about ten times higher at $8,500 to $10,000 per pound to low Earth orbit (LEO). This would equate to about $1.3 billion for the 70-ton payload version and $2.45 billion for the 130-ton version. Projected launch costs for the proposed Falcon Super Heavy (150 tons to LEO) are about $300 million, giving cost per pound that are comparable to the Falcon Heavy or still about ten times cheaper per pound than existing costs or projected SLS costs. Some estimates for the SLS test launch costs are as much as 25 times more per pound ($25,000 per pound) than those for the Falcon Heavy. These estimates are based primarily on the development costs. If we include a typical government payload, the cost per mission (vehicle costs, operational launch costs and payload costs) approaches $5 billion or more per launch. It is thus probable that the cost of each SLS launch with payload will be much more than the cost of a shuttle launch, which recent calculations have shown to be about $1.5 billion apiece. The Shuttle did recover the “upper stage” (the Shuttle itself) with all of its expensive rocket engines”

    NASA is not about getting hardware in space and exploring that is now painfully obvious to everyone now.

    If you can not see the reality of the insane costs for NASA’s SLS then therapy is the only answer.

Leave a Reply to Googaw Cancel reply

  

  

  

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>