“THE idea of humans expanding our presence out into the solar system is the vision driving NASA,” says Louis Friedman, president of the US-based Planetary Society. “It’s about exploration, and always has been.”
It is also a vision President Bush has articulated for the US, arguing for human missions to the moon and Mars at a time when NASA is floundering, its space shuttles still grounded and its astronauts embarrassed into using the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to fly to and fro between the International Space Station (ISS) and Earth. It is against this backdrop that Michael Griffin took over from Sean O’Keefe as NASA’s chief in April.
This week, Griffin completes his first 100 days in office, a period of time after which presidents and heads of corporations are ruthlessly examined on their performance. Besides his efforts at getting the shuttle back into space, it is clear that he is being judged on his priorities for NASA’s research programmes, including the space station, on his plans for vehicles for long-term space exploration and for changing the way the agency works with private companies both large and small. Griffin’s report card is decidedly mixed so far, but most space scientists and engineers remain guardedly hopeful.
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Part of Griffin’s allure is that he is the first rocket scientist to head NASA. He arrived when NASA was under fire for propagating a culture that inhibited, rather than fostered, honest communication – a culture that was blamed for both the Columbia disaster in February 2003, and the Challenger accident 17 years earlier. Griffin arrived to high hopes and expectations of fixing what was broken. And he told NASA’s staff the right things from the start: “People need to know that there is encouragement and not retribution for having something to say which is different from the common thought of the common herd.”
One of his first acts was to emphasise that the shuttle had to start flying again. “Nothing is more important to our future than flying the shuttle successfully,” he acknowledged. Despite this urgency, Griffin put safety first and delayed the space shuttle’s return to flight from May to July to ensure that all concerns had been addressed. As żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ went to press, the shuttle Discovery had been sitting on its launch pad for a week, as engineers worked to fix a faulty fuel sensor. Further delays could push back the shuttle’s much-anticipated return to flight into September.
Yet Griffin’s most important decisions may turn out to have more to do with the shuttle’s final flights than the one that gets it back off the ground. Before his appointment, NASA announced that the shuttle fleet would be retired by 2010. And with only two dozen shuttle missions remaining under the present schedule, the assembly lines for some components such as the external fuel tanks, booster rockets and engines were to begin shutting down next year.
But many feel that those components represent the most logical path toward new vehicles. So they welcome Griffin’s decision to keep the shuttle’s assembly lines open while sticking to the shuttle’s retirement deadlines. Designs for future rockets and vehicles based on shuttle components are already on the drawing board and could be implemented quite quickly if the parts are still being built in the existing assembly lines. “If you understand that you’re going to need a heavy-lift vehicle to go to the moon and Mars, you don’t want to let [the shuttle assembly lines] be dismantled,” says Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and president of the Mars Society in Indian Hills, Colorado. “That’s a bad O’Keefe decision that Griffin has reversed.”
Under O’Keefe, NASA had planned to replace the shuttle with a capsule called the Crew Exploration Vehicle. The CEV was designed to serve the needs of the space station and also operate as a spacecraft to be sent to the moon. But it was to be available only by 2014, four years after the demise of the shuttle. During the intervening years, astronauts would again have no way of getting to the space station. Griffin has pushed to speed up the development of the CEV, so that it might be ready by the time the shuttle retires.
Even if the CEV is completed by then, there would be no launch vehicle big enough to send it to the moon. O’Keefe’s plan was to assemble a larger rocket in orbit, using pieces carried up on four conventional rockets. “That multiplied the risk by four,” says Zubrin. “It would have guaranteed failure of the moon mission, let alone Mars.” Griffin “ripped it to pieces – he trashed it the first day”.
“Part of Griffin’s allure is that he is the first rocket scientist to head NASA. He arrived to high hopes of fixing what was broken”
But despite Griffin’s efforts in this direction, it remains unclear whether NASA will go ahead with the development of a new heavy-lift vehicle that would perhaps be capable of lifting the same loads as Saturn V, the rocket that took men to the moon. The Saturn Vs were taken out of production after their final flights in the 1970s, and it would now take at least as long to redevelop them as it took to build them in the first place. “If the hardware we developed for the shuttle was allowed to go the way of the Saturn V, it would be a terrible loss,” says Zubrin
On the science front, Griffin has earned applause for reopening the question of whether to send a shuttle crew to rescue the ailing Hubble space telescope, something that O’Keefe opposed. But on other science issues, many who had high hopes for Griffin have been disappointed. “The scientific community is very nervous,” says Larry Young, Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT and a former astronaut, about cutbacks in NASA’s science funding despite an increase in the agency’s overall budget. “Everything except what’s being directed toward the moon and Mars is being shelved,” says Young.
For instance, the long-awaited mission to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa and its frozen-over ocean has been postponed. Entire divisions of NASA devoted to basic research have been eliminated, with their functions subsumed under other programmes, including the division devoted to life sciences and microgravity research. And virtually all research inside the ISS, one of the main reasons for building the station, has been stopped, says Young.
Others, meanwhile, say that NASA’s decision to keep the shuttle flying until 2010 is siphoning money away from developing new approaches to space flight. “We should kill that programme as fast as possible, before more money gets wasted,” says Rick Tumlinson, president of the Space Frontier Foundation in Nyack, New York. He says NASA should concentrate on harnessing the creativity of the small privately funded firms that are finding innovative ways to build rockets.
A host of such companies are trying to develop space vehicles, mostly geared toward a space tourism industry. They have been spurred on by the success of SpaceShipOne, which won the $10 million Ansari X prize last year when it became the first privately funded spacecraft to carry the weight of three people to the edge of space twice within a fortnight. The money that would be saved by retiring the shuttles just one year early could fund a whole new generation of rockets, says Tumlinson. “There are private firms who could take over the job now being done by the [shuttle], if some certainty could be created for timing,” he says. Private vehicles could then ferry both supplies and people to the space station.
“The scientific community is very nervous. Everything but what’s directed toward the moon and Mars is being shelved”
Griffin has made some moves in this direction. In June he called for “non-traditional contractors and contracting” to meet some of NASA’s needs, such as carrying cargo and crew to the space station. But industry watchers argue that such comments mean nothing if NASA doesn’t actually change its old ways, such as giving out fat, traditional contracts to giant aerospace companies, which provide no financial incentives for efficiency or innovation and would do little for exploring the moon, Mars and beyond.
NASA’s targets will be outlined in a report due to be released next week, outlining the agency’s future plans, priorities and timetables. The Exploration Systems Architecture Study will include, among other things, details on the new CEV and the technologies needed for lunar and Mars missions. Regardless of how Griffin’s NASA achieves it, almost everyone agrees that getting humans to the moon and Mars is the agency’s primary goal. As Griffin himself put it, such a goal is “more worthy than sending astronauts to circle the Earth time after time.”
