Posted by
Far_view on Thursday, March 13, 2008 9:14:45 AM
I am down south of Houston this week at the Lunar & Planetary
Science Conference. On Monday night, NASA administrator Mike Griffin
spoke. The ballroom where he spoke was packed beyond standing room
only, it was really crowded. He had about a 15 minute speech and took
about 45 minutes of questions. Among the things that he said in his
prepared speech that caught my attention, he said that the opening
statement of "Star Trek" ("to explore strange new worlds, to seek out
new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone
before!") is a better mission statement for NASA than its actual one.
He cited a surprising statistic: that approximately 50% (50%!!!) of the
people in a poll thought that NASA consumed 24% of the U.S. budget! Can
you believe it? (the actual amount is less than 1%). There were several
questions related to the drop in funding in the Mars exploration
program after MSL is launched. I am biased on this and believe that no
matter how you slice it, Mars is getting the shaft at the expense of
outer planets and the Moon. Griffin tried to explain it away by saying
that budgets go up and down based on which program is getting a
flagship mission. He said there were "no entitlements at NASA". Oh
yeah? What about the engineers who have to come up with a new design
for every mission when tried and true designs (such as the MER rovers)
get relegated to the scrap heap. Anyway... there was also a question
about NASA support of a COTS style program for lunar robotic
spacecraft. He said that if COTS is successful, then there might be a
COTS style program for planetary programs. I think that would
definitely be the way to go. He had a great line in response to a
question about whether he's gotten any insights from politicians with
respect to NASA's education program, he said "I don't get many insights
from politicians." I loudly applauded that line. Since most of the
people in the room are big libs there were a few questions about
international participation and "why can't we leverage other nations
resources for our programs?". The response being that other nations
don't want us to leverage their resources, the U.S. has to lead, not be
a follower.
I think Griffin did a good job in front of a
semi-hostile audience. He did point out several times that under Bush
NASA has had stable funding with moderate growth and no real cuts,
where under Clinton it did have real cuts. Again, that is something
most of the people in that room would like to ignore.