Griffin told Space News in 2003 that the first Space Exploration Initiative never took hold because back in the early 1990s the Congress did not see the value in investing heavily in space exploration.

In an interview last November, Griffin said he felt today’s political atmosphere was different from what it was the last time the White House set big exploration goals for the space agency. But he said he was under no illusions that maintaining political support for the new effort would be in any way easy.

“Circumstances have changed in the years since I worked for NASA on the exploration initiative. We have a Republican White House and a Republican Congress,” he said in the interview. “I don’t know if the United States’ fiscal position is better or worse, but it is certainly different. We are also at war.”

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Crucial time
Griffin is poised to take over a NASA that is preparing to fly the space shuttle for the first time since the February 2003 loss of the space shuttle Columbia.

He would also be taking over leadership of an agency that has been given a presidential directive to return to the moon by 2020 as a first step to human missions to Mars.

Bush, in laying out his vision for space exploration early last year, called for NASA to finish assembly of the international space station by 2010 and then retire the space shuttle fleet.

Writing in Space News last March, Griffin made clear that he supports that goal.

“What is needed is to retire the shuttle orbiter and its expensive support infrastructure,” Griffin wrote. “It simply does not serve the needs of exploration and it is too expensive, too logistically fragile, and insufficiently safe for continued use as a low Earth orbit transport vehicle.”

NASA’s latest space shuttle launch manifest calls for conducting 28 missions by 2010 to complete the space station. Space agency officials are currently reviewing that manifest with an eye to cutting some of those flights.

Griffin has said in interviews that he thinks NASA ought to look at ways to retire the space shuttle sooner than 2010, such as using expendable rockets to launch some of the space station hardware still on the ground.

“If you truly believe that the shuttle can fly all 28 planned station assembly flights between now and 2010, then it’s unlikely that the switch would pay off,” he said last November. “But if you believe that it will take until 2014 or later, then it is quite logical to ask if we could save time and money by integrating some space station assembly payloads onto larger expendables.”

Heavy-lift debate
Griffin has said that returning to the moon will require the United States to build a new heavy-lift launch vehicle. He told the House Science Committee in October 2003 during a hearing on the future of human spaceflight that “it may not be impossible to consider returning to the moon or going to Mars without a robust heavy-lift launch capability, but it is certainly silly.”

Griffin has also stated his preference that United States use existing space shuttle hardware, such as the main engines, solid rocket booster and external tank, as the foundation for building the new heavy-lift launcher NASA may need to return to the moon.

Worden, who replaced Griffin as the technology deputy at the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization in the late 1980s, said he does not think Griffin would let his stated preferences for a shuttle-derived heavy-lifter interfere with NASA’s effort to reach an honest conclusion about the best way to go.

“I think he is going to be very open to whatever the best solution is,” Worden said. “He is a superb engineer and he listens to people.”

But even as NASA administrator, the decision would not be Griffin’s to make. The National Space Transportation Policy, updated by the White House late last year, decreed that any heavy-lift launcher decision would be made by the president after hearing the joint recommendation of the NASA administrator and the defense secretary.

That policy also says the preference should be given to heavy-lift launch designs based on the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 evolved expendable launch vehicles.

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