On Sept. 2, in the wake of news
that he had ordered a study of what it would take to extend space shuttle
operations from 2010 to 2015, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin discussed his
reasoning in an interview with Space News. The following is a transcript
of that interview.
When and why did you order an assessment of what it would take
to extend shuttle operations beyond the current fleet retirement date?
Some time in the last week or so. I'm not being deliberately
vague, but within the last week or so.
Clearly we're going to have to answer questions. We have been
having to answer questions. Whether you connect it to INKSNA [the Iran-North
Korea-Syria Nonproliferation Act] or whether you connect it to an upcoming
election and transition, inevitably questions are going to be asked about what
would it take to continue to supply ISS [international space station] logistics
via the space shuttle. In order that we not start on answering the question
when we do get asked in the future, depending on the outcome of the discussion
on INSKNA or the preference of a new president, I thought it prudent to begin
planning now because there are a lot of very difficult questions to answer if
somebody does want to continue to
fly shuttle and we need to think it through rather than be cavalier about
it.
Hasn't NASA already thought this through?
As I think you know, presidential policy has been that shuttle
will be retired at the end of 2010 and that certainly is a position I have
agreed with and I've made no bones about it. We need to get the shuttle behind
us so we can move forward with new systems that will take us back to the Moon
and later on be the building blocks for going to Mars. I think you guys both
know that nobody believes that more strongly than I do.
But what I think is important is not the question. The question
that matters is if NASA gets directed to continue flying the shuttle, how do we
do it in the most prudent and least damaging manner and what will the impacts
be? We need to have those answers in some amount of detail because they might
influence such a decision.
Are you saying NASA has not studied the question of extending
shuttle operations to the level you intend to study it now?
Exactly, because we have been on a retirement path, an
unambiguous retirement path. And yet the current issues in Georgia, the debate
over whether there will or will not be continuation of our INKSNA exemption,
the letter from the three senators — I'm sure this is not the last we will hear
on the topic. It seemed to me to be prudent to start getting thoughtful
answers, careful answers while we have the time to do so.
But didn't you say you asked for the study before Sens. John
McCain, Kay Bailey Hutchison and David Vitter wrote Bush asking that he direct
NASA to take no action that would preclude operating shuttle beyond 2010?
Yes, I did direct it before all of this because I could see it
coming. I'm not as stupid as many people like to assume. I mean I could see it
coming and we will give better answers if we have time to plan.
There's another factor. I've been asked in testimony — you guys
have been sitting in the room — I've been asked in testimony eight or 10 times
over the last three-and-a-half years what it would take to accelerate
Constellation and I have given the answers as best we had them. Those are on
the record and I'm not going to waste your time repeating all that. But the
point is that time now has essentially run out. We really can no longer
significantly accelerate
Constellation. And so as I judge it there is not a possibility that the
Congress is going to provide a sufficient increment of near-term funds, using
its discretion, to accelerate Orion and
Ares.
And while that was still possible I considered the probability
of NASA being directed to extend shuttle's lifetime was lesser rather than
greater. But with the substantial gap we have between shuttle retirement and
the 2015 deployment of Orion and Ares I do think it likely that policy makers
in the next administration or next Congress will want to know what it would
cost and what the impacts would be to keep shuttle around, and I think we
better answer the question.
Roughly what will it cost?
It's not an easy question to answer. When I've been asked before
in congressional hearings I said around $3 billion. That's a quick estimate
based on what we know today. But If one wants to think it through in detail and
to provide the lowest cost estimate possible we'd have to consider various
scenarios that would have to be thought out and that we just haven't done.
To clarify, $3 billion is an annual figure?
Yes, that's an annual cost of owning a shuttle program.
Bill Gerstenmaier said earlier this year that NASA was
approaching the point of no return on shuttle retirement. Will this assessment
find out if you have in fact reached that point?
If the answer is we have already reached the point of no return,
then in all good conscience we need to be able to inform the nation's policy
makers of that fact. Now I think that neither Gerst nor I think we actually are
at that point. But we need to understand it... I want to be really clear we are
not making any changes at this point in direction or policy and certainly I
have no change in my own preferences, to the extent that anyone cares.
Have you received any direction from the White House since
McCain, Hutchison and Vitter asked Bush to halt any actions that would keep
NASA from flying shuttle past 2010?
No.
Do you anticipate NASA taking any such action?
I don't know. It's too soon to answer that because I would have
to know what the actions are. Part of the reason for doing the study is to understand
what those actions might be. You mentioned having talked to Gerst and he said,
'well, we are either at or close to the point of no return.' Well sure. And I
have consistently said it would be around the end of this year or early next
year. But clearly we are still able to fly shuttles. We have 10 more of them
scheduled. I don't think it's even possible to take an action right now which
would preclude continuing to fly shuttle. One can only make it more expensive
or less expensive. One of the things I want to understand is if NASA is
directed by a future administration or future Congress to continue to fly
shuttles I want to do it in the least damaging way possible.
What are the upcoming closeout activities that would prevent
NASA from flying the orbiter until 2015?
I don't know yet. That's why I asked the question. Now obviously
[external] tanks would be the first thing to come to anyone's minds. It's not
that you can't continue to produce them. We haven't changed the tooling yet.
Contracts can always be reinitiated. The tooling is there, the design is there,
but what would it take? We don't know that right now.
The other thing is when you talk about extending the shuttle do
you talk about adding new flights or just spacing out the ones we have to
get through the gap?
That has to be considered, those two options, or some mixture of
them. I don't have any answers for you. The purpose of asking the questions was
to get a range of possible answers.
As I consistently try to remind people NASA doesn't make policy
we execute it. But policy directives from the new White House or the next
Congress I am certain will be conditioned on what the cost of those policy
choices are. We need to provide that information and it needs to be solid and
defensible and thoughtful. So starting early to get those answers seemed to me
to be prudent.
With or without shuttle, can NASA keep its astronauts on the ISS
without having access to Soyuz vehicles for crew rescue?
No, unless you agree to take the risk of no crew rescue. If
that's what you want to do.
What about NASA staffing station only while shuttle is there?
So you can get a couple of weeks for every shuttle mission,
maybe a little bit more, maybe 17-18 days at the most, three times a year, so
you get what? Fifty days a year for a very high price. If I am going to follow
my usual policy of trying to tell the truth, we lose station for the first
several years without a crew rescue capability. That's not something we would
want to do. And if one insists on having crew rescue capability then until we
have Orion or until a commercial vehicle emerges and is qualified to do the
job, then the Russians are the only game in town for crew rescue.
Is it fair to say that unless the United States is willing to
accept the risk of putting astronauts on station with no means of coming home
in an emergency, or paying $3 billion or more a year for 50 days on orbit, then
regardless of whether the shuttle keeps flying or not, NASA is going to need
INKSNA relief?
I wouldn't phrase it that way because I don't like buying into
someone else's words, although you are substantially correct. Let me say how I
would phrase it. The nation's policymakers need to understand one of four
options will occur.
Those four options are we will get INKSNA relief again and buy
transportation for ourselves, and our international partners, from Russia.
That's option 1. That's my preferred option.
The second option is we would fly Americans and our
international partners to the station on the shuttle with no crew rescue
capability for as long as we are directed to do it. That's the option we are
studying here. That would be highly damaging to exploration and other agency
initiatives.
Third, we could fly U.S. and international crew for limited
stays on the space station, which would of course give us crew rescue
capability because the shuttle would be that vehicle.
Finally we could have a scenario where there is just no U.S. or
international partner crew. So one of those four things will occur.
How soon do you expect to get results of this study and make
them public?
I don't know that we will make the results public until and
unless our congressional oversight committees or the White House, or later on a
transition team, asks for the information. This is internal work which has come
to your attention by means of a leaked memo. It's classic pre-decisional stuff.
When will it be done? I can't imagine that a thoughtful study would be done in
anything less than a few months.
You guys know me after all these years. I just don't sit around
and make it up. To get an answer that peels the onion a few layers below...if
you look at the Space Ops budget in round numbers and say, 'okay if we want to
own a shuttle program and not fly' there is a fixed program of around $3
billion. That's the cursory answer. But the real answer — in terms of contracts
that have to be novated or reinitiated, in terms of conflicts between
Constellation's need for the hardware and shuttle's need for the hardware, the
existence of appropriate tooling — all the stuff that contributes to the real
answer requires some care if we are going to get it right. It's going to take a
few months.
Might this assessment serve up answers policymakers won't like?
It is almost impossible that we would produce an answer that
would be likeable. This is not a pretty picture.
In ordering this study, do you take a risk that you might be
sending space shuttle workers, who are worried about their futures, a message
of false hope that the shuttle will keep flying?
Sure there's a risk. I thought about that very carefully before
issuing the direction. Let me take it from the top. The problem we have of
dealing with the gap is not new and it was not an accident. It was a policy
decision, okay? Proposed by the White House and ratified by the Congress. It is
a policy decision with which NASA must cope and with which I've been trying to
cope.
Recent events have caused a lot of consternation about that in
the space community and we are trying to deal with it. I get all that. One of
the concerns that I had in asking for this study was that people both inside
and outside the agency who would prefer that the decision to retire shuttle had
not been made will, as you say, see that as a hope.
But I have to trade that risk against the risks of being
uninformed about the impacts should we be asked the question for real. And in
my judgment the risks of being uninformed about the real impacts is far greater
than anything else.
You requested the study from NASA's Space Operations Mission
Directorate (SOMD). When will the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation
(PA&E) get involved?
I asked SOMD to do the analysis because they are the only ones
who can. I would expect the results that come back will be vetted by in part
the Office of Chief Engineer, Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, PA&E,
the Office of the Chief Financial Officer — everybody in the management staff
of the agency is going to be taking a look at what comes back from their
individual knothole.
Constellation's internal milestones have been slipping to the
right. SpaceX continues to struggle with Falcon 1. NASA's facing the
possibility of another continuing budget resolution. NASA's exploration plans
called for a pretty delicately balanced transition that's been thrown for a
number of loops these last few years. How do you see this all unfolding?
That calls for speculation that I'm just not ready to get into
right now because I don't know. And attempting to predict it is pretty silly.
I do want to comment when you say Constellation internal
milestones have been slipping to the right. I do want to put that in context
because I don't think that's been done yet. So I'd like you guys to listen up
on this.
We maintained for several years — on purpose and at my direction
— internal milestones for Constellation that were as early as could be credibly
done. Some would have even questioned whether they even were credible. I
maintained the earliest milestones that we could precisely because — and you
guys were in these hearings — there was much consternation about the length of
the gap between shuttle retirement and Ares and Orion deployment and many
questions about how much money would be required to accelerate development of
the new systems by so many months. We had questions like that at virtually
every hearing and so in order to have the program appropriately positioned
should the congress have decided to provide extra money to Constellation, I
didn't want the issue to be moot.
So NASA set more aggressive internal milestones in order to
preserve the option of accelerating the program if more money were made
available?
Exactly. Now as I said earlier, we reached the point after three
years of effort where we were having to make decisions on specific hardware.
We're approaching PDR, right? So we are making decisions on specific designs
and specific hardware that are time and money dependent. Well, if the money is
not there then making decisions earlier than one needs to do it in order to preserve
an artificially earlier date that doesn't have fiscal credibility to it would
be dumb and I wasn't going to do that. Our commitment date to the White House
and the Congress has always been based on the president's budget to the dollar,
nothing more and nothing less. And that's March 2015. Our internal milestones
were the earliest credible ones we could propose. But time has gone by, water
has gone over the dam and some of the earlier milestones are just no longer
credible and we've slipped those out. But I still anticipate, absent changes in
presidential requests or congressional appropriations, if we continue to get
the budgets we are anticipating, our commitment date for Ares and Orion has not
changed. It's still March of 2015."
Will this study you've requested also take into account what it
would cost to defer Constellation?
It's a reaction to the study we will be assessing. We will be
assessing impacts to Constellation. But at this point I'm not ready to say
which of these options we would pursue or not.
If Congress, as expected, adjourns this year without finishing
work on the 2009 spending bills, how will that impact NASA?
I don't know because I don't know the terms of the [continuing
resolution]. Traditionally when you get a CR the manner of coping with it — a
lot of latitude is left to the discretion of agency heads because after all the
CR is evidence that the Congress failed to do its fundamental job of
appropriating a budget for the United States government. In the last instance
that we had a CR we got very specific direction from Congress on how to use the
money.
NASA two years ago took a $575 million cut with regard to the
president's budget, —except that to pay for that cut, $675 million came out of
human space flight, meaning science and aeronautics where plussed up and human
space flight lost more money than was lost in the CR. That obviously would not
have been the choice I would have made. So until I know something about the
kind of choices Congress is going to make with any assumed CR, I just can't
answer your question.
Amid all the uncertainty about NASA's future direction, how do
you expect NASA employees and contractors to stay focused on some of the work
at hand?
I hope and insist that our industrial partners, our contractors,
continue to work according to the contract terms in front of them. If they do
anything else, that's just not responsible and they know it and I have every
confidence they will keep their heads down and keep working. The same thing
goes for our government managers. We have to ask 'what if' kinds of questions.
I again would rather take the risk of a certain amount of uncertainty and
turmoil then to take the risk of being unprepared to give answers when later
asked. I think we need to focus on giving substantive answers to substantive
questions and we intend to do that. Most folks at NASA are not involved in
asking these questions. Most folks at NASA are involved in getting ready for
the next launch or getting ready for the next design review. And that's what
they will continue to do.
The most recent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel report made note
of what it called the unusually low morale among Constellation team members for
a program still relatively early in its development. Is there any concern that looking
at shuttle extension will cause Constellation designers to further question the
purpose of their efforts?
Any time you are working on a new system you have to have a
certain amount of faith in the policy stability that envelops that new system.
I've said many times, quoting from the CAIB report, where Admiral Gehman and
his board wrote down that this new approach — by which they meant replacing the
shuttle — will be successful only if the United States commits the substantial
funds necessary for its accomplishment and ensures the requisite policy
stability. It is a necessary condition if you are going to develop a new system
in a timely and efficient manner that it exists in a context of policy
stability. This has been one of the great debilitating things about the
construction of the space station. For a lot of years every single year was a
question as to whether the space station would continue to exist. Whether you
want it or don't want it, having to deal with that question every year almost
guarantees that it's going to take longer and cost more than it ought to. So
our folks working on Constellation just need to keep faith and keep working
until they are asked to stop. And I don't think that will happen because I
don't think the nation is going abandon human spaceflight. And the shuttle is
not the future of space flight.
The CAIB also said NASA should recertify the shuttle if it
intends to fly it past 2010 but did not spell out what recertification would
entail. Some argue that the post-Columbia shuttle is the safest ever. What do
you think a recertification would entail?
I don't particularly like saying this because I'm not one who
wants to keep the shuttle flying. But I think at this point making a big issue
out of recertification would be specious. In going through return to flight,
most of what you would want to do to certify the shuttle to continue to fly has
been done. I'm sure there would be small, individual things that would be
needed to be taken up. But in my judgment that would not be some huge technical
or programmatic burden.
The reasons not to continue to fly the shuttle involve things
other than recertification. Reasons not to continue to fly the shuttle are
things like if you fly 10 more shuttle flights you have an almost 1 in 8 chance
of losing another crew. Another reason not to fly is that as capable as shuttle
is — and it is incredibly capable — it cannot take us out of low earth orbit
and if the U.S. space program has a future in my judgment it lies in the Moon,
near Earth asteroids and Mars. It lies in exploration. It doesn't lie in being
confined to low Earth orbit. So even if the shuttle were a perfect vehicle, if
we could afford only one system then I believe it needs to be a system to take
us farther. So those are the reasons for retiring the shuttle. The issue of
recertification in my judgment should be not a political issue; it should be an
engineering and technical program management issue and I don't think that's a
major factor.
If NASA is directed to fly shuttle to 2015, what does that mean
for Constellation?
Under the scenario you outline, unless new money is made
available to continue to fly the shuttle while Constellation systems are being
developed it would mean a deferral of Constellation deployment and a gross
deferral of exploration goals.
The gap won't narrow if shuttle is flown past 2010; it will just
be displaced in time. You don't reduce the gap by continuing to fly shuttle
unless new money is provided. You just move the gap out to some other period of
time. Unless money is provided to build news systems in parallel to flying
existing systems there will always be a gap. This part's not rocket science,
guys.
What can you do as NASA administrator to keep the community from
losing faith and freelancing on new policy directions?
I don't think I have any ability to keep the broader community
from, as you say, freelancing. We live in a democracy. That's an artifact of
life in a democracy and if you consider the broader context I don't think I'd
want it to be any different.
Since I took the job I have relied on the strength of our
technical arguments to reinforce the path we've chosen.
So far what you've referred to as freelancing has amounted to
nothing more than noise because no one has produced an alternative which is
safer, cheaper or available in a more timely way than the architecture we've
recommended. And for that reason our oversight committees in Congress and our
oversight branch in the White House have not chosen to redirect us. In brief we
have the most sensible path given the available money. And I am always
confident that more dialogue really doesn't serve to do anything except
validate that conclusion. My responsibility is to keep our programs moving
forward as they've been outlined. I'm sure that the proponents of alternative
paths are acting in what they believe to be good faith. I am absolutely certain
of that. I never suspect evil intent. I do, however, realize that not all of
those people are as informed as they ought to be. So far the conclusions that
have been brought to us just have not held up to engineering scrutiny.
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