WASHINGTON
-- NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said the U.S. space agency would begin a
formal assessment in 2007 of potential approaches for sending humans to Mars,
but that he did not foresee astronauts embarking on a journey to the red planet
for another 20 years or longer.
"I don't
want to leave my term of office without having done at least a preliminary Mars
architecture," Griffin said, noting that the preliminary planning effort would
begin next year. Actually sending astronauts to Mars, under NASA's current
plans, would not happen until after the agency leads the way back to the Moon,
an objective NASA hopes to accomplish by no later than 2020. Because of that,
Griffin said, he would not expect the first human Mars expedition to begin until
at least "the late 2020s."
Speaking to
the ninth international convention of the Mars Society here, Griffin said he
understood the timetable was too slow for many in attendance at the gathering,
but encouraged the group to support NASA's stepwise approach that entails
finishing the international space station and going to the Moon before setting
out for Mars.
"I know
that some of you are frustrated by how arduous the journey has been even to
this point and by the many challenges we still face before we embark on
mankind's first voyage to Mars," Griffin said.
"As someone who has devoted his career to the space business I share
these frustrations."
Griffin
went on to explain that even though the White House and Congress have endorsed
a plan for NASA to lead the way out of low Earth orbit, the space agency is
still expected to push the envelope in such diverse areas as aeronautics,
astronomy and environmental monitoring.
"There are
many disparate goals that are held by NASA's various stakeholders and we try,
very hard, to move the agency forward in a manner that promotes unity among
rather than division between these stakeholders. It is not easy," Griffin said. "If the blunt
truth be told, prior to the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia a few years ago,
NASA suffered from a long period of benign neglect both by the public and our
government stakeholders concerning the broader purposes of our nation's space
enterprise, and especially human spaceflight."
Griffin
also sought to assure the group that NASA's return to the Moon does help set
the stage for missions to Mars.
"We are
going to be using the Moon as much as possible to help us learn how to go to
Mars," he said.
Noting that
future Mars expeditions would have to do a fair amount of living off the land,
Griffin said NASA still has a lot to learn about so-called in-situ resource
utilization.
"In-situ
resource utilization is going to be crucial to going to Mars. We need to start
learning how to do that on the Moon. Yes, they are not the same environment,"
Griffin said, adding that he did not buy arguments that lessons learned on the
Moon would not be applicable to Mars.
"That
cannot be true," he said. "That would be like saying people who do oil rigs in
deep ocean would have nothing of value to contribute to people who drill for
oil on the North Slope or Siberia. There are huge differences. There are also
great commonalities."
Griffin
also said that NASA chose the exploration launch vehicles that it did to help
set the stage for eventual Mars missions.
"If I were
just designing a lunar architecture, the most elementary common sense would
have told me to make both of those vehicles the same size so I could benefit
from economies of production, economies of building two of the same vehicle. I
didn't do that," Griffin said. Why did we not do that? We didn't do that
because if I want to go to Mars and believe we need something like a million
pounds to low Earth orbit to do that, then I want to do that in five or six
launches not 10 or 12."
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