I'm struggling through my Internet issues to do a little posting tonight. Mike Griffin was interviewed by the BBC, and had some interesting comments. Think of this less as a fisking, than an analysis of what's really going on in the agency.

...having spent about £1.5bn on returning the shuttle to flight last August, how could the same problem that killed seven astronauts on Columbia have happened again?

The agency did the best it could, according to Dr Griffin. His engineers couldn't carry out test flights to understand what went wrong, so they had to rely on modelling the problem and then try to fix it for Discovery's mission.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem not only with the Shuttle, but with current launchers in general, and the reason that we cannot either reduce costs or improve reliability. We can't "carry out test flights to understand what went wrong." This is because the marginal cost per flight of all of them (including, perhaps exemplified by the Shuttle, which was supposed, by virtue of its reusability, to have low marginal costs) is so high as to be unaffordable for the purposes of doing test flights. And NASA is doing absolutely nothing to change this.

Before the Columbia tragedy, the space station was in trouble - ambitious plans to build a research lab in the sky were being scaled back as its costs began to increase beyond expectations.

Now Nasa has to make up for lost time and somehow finish off the ISS before the remaining shuttle fleet is retired in four years' time.

Dr Griffin claims it can be done, but only by using all the remaining planned shuttle missions to take up and bolt on the outstanding modules.

All of them? What happened to the Hubble mission? I hope that this is a misquote, or a slip of the tongue.

Publicly, Dr Griffin defends the International Space Station and the shuttle programme. But my sense was that he regards them as follies from a bygone age.

He will do whatever he needs to in order to meet international commitments; but he's keen to move on to President Bush's programme to send people back to the Moon, Mars and beyond. So I asked him directly - was the shuttle and all that went with it a mistake?

Dr Griffin says it is time for Nasa to move on and do other things. "I wouldn't characterise the space shuttle as a mistake. I would characterise the decision that America made 35 years ago to retreat from further lunar and Mars missions as a mistake.

No, of course he wouldn't characterize it as that--he learned his lesson from the last time that he committed that faux pas (defined as a politician accidentally telling the truth). But the fact that he now denies it doesn't mean that it isn't true.

And in response, here's a nice bit of understatement by Joe Rothenberg:

Joe Rothenberg, head of NASA's manned space programs from 1995 to 2001, defended the programs for providing lessons about how to operate in space. But he conceded that "in hindsight, there may have been other ways."

Yes. Yes, there may have been.

[Update on Friday afternoon]

Clark Lindsey has additional thoughts on this, and on some other things that Dr. Griffin has said recently.

Based on his speech to the American Astronomical Society, I'd say the issue about all launches going to ISS, thus sans Hubble, was a slip of the tongue. I'm not an apologist for the guy, but I suspect he just meant no more SpaceHab type flights like STS-107, which really isn't news since the CAIB report. His timeframe for a HST mission is late 2007. By my knowledge of NASA usually optimistic scheduling, I'd say NET mid 2008.

"Folly from a bygone time"? This makes it sound as if there is something very badly wrong in the decision-making process at NASA, when all management of long-term projects involves the distinct possibility of making a mistake today that will cost a lot in the future.

No matter what we do today, we're relying on designs from the past. Get on with the work and quit complaining.

> "Folly from a bygone time"? This makes it sound as if there is something very badly wrong in the
> decision-making process at NASA, when all management of long-term projects involves the
> distinct possibility of making a mistake today that will cost a lot in the future.

Yes, all decision-making involves the possibility of making a mistake. That does not mean all decisions are equally bad.

> No matter what we do today, we're relying on designs from the past. Get on with the work and quit complaining.

Do you think there are no new designs? That we've learned nothing in the 40 years since Project Apollo?

Even if that were true, there are other designs from the past that had far more promise than Apollo but were not pursued for political reasons. Lunar Gemini, Dyna-Soar, Reusable Atlas, etc.

If we must "rely on designs from the past," why shouldn't we consider those other designs, which might make space development more cost-effective, instead of fixating on Apollo, which can only make it more expensive?

Definitely a slip of the tongue! Griffin has said repeatedly that he considers SM-4 to be the top priority for the remaining shuttle missions. Trust me, as someone whose job depends on the successful execution of SM4.