LOGAN, Utah - NASA is marching
forward on its Moon, Mars and beyond planning, a multi-step action agenda
enunciated by President George W. Bush as the vision for space exploration in
January 2004. One goal of that plan is returning humans to the Moon as early as
2015 and no later than 2020.
NASA's
top official, Mike Griffin, has his multi-tasking hands full in shaping and
implementing the vision strategy--from the ground up: new launch vehicles for
crew and cargo, a six-person Crew Exploration Vehicle, as well as looking at
the future of international cooperation in putting verve to the vision.
Griffin spoke to SPACE.com
during the 20th Annual Conference on Small Satellites held here
earlier this month at Utah State University.
CEV: stressing requirements
NASA
is set to announce on August 31 the prime contractor to design, develop, and build the
Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV)--now dubbed Orion--a replacement of the government's
space shuttle. As a system, the CEV will accomplish in many areas what the
shuttle offers, Griffin said, but also must fly back and forth between the
Earth and the Moon.
"In
later decades, the CEV will be one piece of the Mars architecture. It's how
people will come home from Mars through the atmosphere. So the CEV has some
pretty stressing requirements on it," Griffin explained.
But
the ultimate goal of the CEV program is not the creation of new technologies, Griffin warned.
"The
CEV is primarily a tool for getting humans up through the atmosphere and back
down through the atmosphere. And my goal is to do it as simply and safely as
possible."
What
needs to be shaken off is the idea that the U.S. civilian space program is all
about flying from Earth's surface to low Earth orbit, Griffin added.
"The
excitement is what we're going to do at the Moon; when we're going to go to
Mars and what we're going to do there," he said. "It's not about the first and
last hundred miles."
Given
the vision's long-term strategy, harmonized with tight budgets, is the quest
more a mission impossible?
"Certainly
not," Griffin responded. "I just keep putting one foot in front of the other
and moving forward. And I think that's the strategy that is going to help us
now."
Griffin said the space
agency has enough money to do the core things that it wants to do for
exploration and science. "Science is well funded," he said, however "we don't
have enough money to do ... things as rapidly as all of us would like."
Enlisting international partners
Griffin outlined his
thoughts on the role of international cooperation within the vision.
"We
hope to enlist international partners, to bring some of the elements that we won't
be able to afford to build," Griffin said. "We don't have big habitats,
laboratories, power stations, things like that for a lunar base. We don't have
them in our budget. We have got transportation 'to and from' in our budget."
The
arrangement that NASA's hoping for is much like that of the International Space
Station (ISS), Griffin said. But that's also a pact that has been roundly
criticized by non-U.S. ISS partners in the past.
"The
criticism that--to put slightly more detail on it--is that America dictated everyone's role," he said. "I'm not for exploration dictating anyone's
role except America's. I'm saying this is what the United States will do."
There
are a myriad of other things that international partners or commercial entities
could bring to the vision table, Griffin suggested, such as launching robotic
cargo landers on Europe's Ariane 5 to deliver scientific instruments and telescopes
to the Moon.
"We
will be very receptive to that. But I'm not prescribing any of them. And I've
been very clear about that," Griffin added. "The role of international
cooperation is not to help figure out what the United States will spend its
money on."
Three days from home
Griffin was blunt about
NASA's need to rekindle its engineering might to return humans to the Moon--a
repeat feat done in 1969 through 1972.
"People
seem to have an attitude that because people two generations ago went to the Moon
that we have all that experience, that we have the equipment just waiting in
reserve. We don't. We don't have the equipment. We don't have the tooling. In
some cases, we don't even have the basic technology any more. And we certainly
don't have the experience base in the people for spaceflight beyond low Earth
orbit," Griffin observed.
Before
NASA can send an expedition to Mars, the space agency needs to recreate that
full infrastructure, Griffin said. "And the place to apply it is at the Moon
when you're three days from home."
In
looking outward beyond the Moon, Griffin said he envisions Mars as a human
destination for the United States in the mid-2020's or beyond.
"I
don't think anybody thinks that 2025 or beyond is unrealistic. You could go to
Mars sooner if we didn't have a policy that says we're doing other things. But
our nation's space policy says that we will finish the space station (and) that
we will return to the Moon. So if you're going to do those things then Mars is
going to have to wait a bit. It's a fiscal matter more than it is a technical
matter," Griffin concluded.
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