September 7, 2008 (LPAC)--In an internal e-mail to space agency advisers, sent on August 18th and recently obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin indicates he has thrown in the towel on trying to accomplish the impossible--implementing President Bush's Moon/Mars exploration program without enough money. Former astronaut and Senator John Glenn has described the Moon/Mars mission as an ``unfunded mandate.''
On Capitol Hill, there is a growing chorus of legislators, including the two presidential candidates, lobbying for NASA to keep flying the Space Shuttle past 2010, rather than suffer a five-year hiatus before the replacement vehicle is ready, during which time the United States will not be able to bring its own astronauts to the International Space Station. This call for postponing the Shuttle's retirement past the Bush-mandated 2010 date has gained new traction, through opportunistic and purely political accusations that post-Georgia political tensions mean Russia may become an ``unreliable'' partner in selling Soyuz seats to U.S. astronauts when the Shuttle is retired.
The refusal to invest in a Shuttle replacement vehicle over the past 10 years has created the situation we now face. The Bush Moon/Mars program built in the gap in manned space capability, by mandating that the cost of developing the new Orion vehicle be paid for mainly by the "savings" when the Shuttle stopped flying. In addition, the projected five-year budget that NASA was promised in 2004 has come up short by more than $2 billion, which has stretched the gap between the Shuttle and Orion from the original three to now five years. Plus, NASA never received any compensation for the more than $1 billion in damages suffered during Hurricane Katrina, nor the billions it took to get the Shuttle flying again after the 2003 Columbia accident. Congress has tried for the past two years, unsuccessfully, to add that money in to the NASA budget.
In his e-mail, Griffin lays the blame squarely on the Bush Administration: ``In a rational world, we would have been able to pick a Shuttle retirement date to be consistent with the Ares/Orion availability...[ie, no gap in manned space flight], we would have been provided the necessary budget to make it so. The rational approach didn't happen, primarily because for OSTP [Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House] and OMB, retiring the Shuttle is a jihad rather than an engineering program management decision."
Griffin, and many Shuttle managers, oppose continued operation of the Shuttle past 2010. Production lines for parts have already been shut down, with some components likely impossible to procure. Layoffs will start this month at the Michoud, LA assembly plant which produces the Shuttle's external fuel tanks. And Mike Griffin points out that if NASA's insufficient budget has to be used to pay for more Shuttle flights, development of Orion will be stretched out even more.
Griffin has repeatedly testified that two years could be shaved off the five-year gap, if NASA were given adequate funding. But that decision must be made soon, or the time will be irrevocably lost. At the same time, Congress has the month of September to agree to waive restrictions in the Iran et al nonproliferation law, to allow NASA to purchase the Soyuz seats from the Russians. If not, there will be no way for American astronauts to get to the space station, starting in 2011.
During the wind-down of the Apollo program, in the late 1960s, more than a quarter of a million of this country's most highly skilled, talented, and motivated workers were thrown onto the street. Entire communities in Florida and around other NASA centers disappeared, with homes abandoned and mushrooming rates of divorce, alcoholism, and suicide. It took ten years to rebuild the capability lost during Apollo. The space program today is headed for a repeat of this tragedy.
