Griffin: Blame Nixon

Remember when NASA administrator Mike Griffin got into a bit of hot water when he told USA Today that the shuttle program had not put NASA on "the right path"? Griffin, apparently chastened to some degree by the reaction, clarified his remarks in a memo a short time later. However, in today's New York Times Griffin makes it clear that that he is still critical, if not of the shuttle and ISS programs themselves, but of the decisions that led to them. Griffin: "Viewed from the point of history several decades out… the period where the United States retreated from the Moon and quite deliberately focused only on low Earth orbit will be seen, to me, a mistake."

Griffin, perhaps forestalling another round of internal criticism, said that the problem was not with the agency itself. "The space shuttle is a response to a policy mistake – it isn't the mistake. The mistake was tearing up all the infrastructure that we built for Apollo and saying, 'let's just focus on low Earth orbit.'"

Could another President of Congress make the same mistake? Griffin doesn't seem to be worried about it, even as Democrats take control of Congress: "Unless you believe that a future U.S. president or a future U.S. Congress actually wants to cancel the U.S. spaceflight program, then I actually do not perceive a big threat from changing administrations and changing Congresses." (One could see, though, a future administration preserving a manned spaceflight program but twisting it in another direction, as Nixon did in 1972.)

The only Congressional reaction to Griffin's remarks came from Congressman Bart Gordon, the incoming chairman of the House Science Committee, through his spokesperson: "I would rather focus on where we go from here. I support human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. However, it's got to be paid for." More interesting would have been the reaction from another Democrat and a strong supporter of the shuttle, like Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida.

Posted by Jeff at December 9, 2006 10:04 AM

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