Story updated at 4:38 p.m. EST
The
White House confirmed Friday that President Bush intends to nominate Mike
Griffin, head of the space department at Johns Hopkins University's Applied
Physics Laboratory (APL) to be the next NASA Administrator.
Griffin, a rocket
scientist with an MBA, is a veteran aerospace executive who has held a variety
of senior-level positions at the Pentagon, NASA and in industry. Word of
Griffin's nomination had first been reported earlier in the day by SPACE.com's sister publication Space
News.
He
is replacing former NASA chief administrator Sean O'Keefe who resigned last
December citing personal and financial reasons for his decision. O'Keefe took a
job as chancellor of Louisiana State University's
Baton Rouge
campus. He served three years as NASA's chief. At present, veteran shuttle
astronaut Frederick Gregory has been acting as interim administrator.
Griffin's nomination
met with the immediate approval of several lawmakers who would have to work
closely with him if he is confirmed by the Senate.
Sen.
Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), an influential member of
the Senate Appropriations Committee who knows Griffin as the head of the space department
at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, said the president made "an
outstanding choice."
"[Griffin] has the right
combination of experience in industry, academia and government service. He has
a proven record of leadership and a passion for science and exploration. I
welcome his nomination," Mikulski said in a statement issued this afternoon.
House
Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, whose committee has called on Griffin to testify as an
expert witness on NASA issues, also endorsed the president's choice.
"We
are extremely pleased that the President has nominated Mike Griffin to be NASA
Administrator," Boehlert said in a statement. "Dr. Griffin has long been a
resource to the Science Committee, both as a public witness and in providing
private counsel. He has broad expertise, knows NASA inside and out, and is an
imaginative and creative thinker and leader. He is also known for his candor
and directness. We look very forward to working with Dr. Griffin at this
critical time for NASA."
When
the first President Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative in 1989 in
an attempt to move NASA out of its low-Earth orbit rut and onto Mars, Griffin was picked to
lead the ill-fated effort serving as NASA's chief technologist and associate
administrator for exploration before leaving the agency in 1993.
During
much of the 1990s, Griffin
worked in several leadership positions at Orbital Sciences Corp., a Dulles,
Va.-based company that builds satellites and rockets.
Before
returning to APL in April 2004 to lead the lab's space work, Griffin was the chief operating officer of
In-Q-Tel, a private non-profit enterprise funded by the Central Intelligence
Agency to invest in companies developing leading edge technologies.
During
the late 1980s, Griffin
worked as the technology deputy for the Strategic Defense Initiative
Organization, an early predecessor to the Missile Defense Agency.
Retired
Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon "Pete" Worden, who has known Griffin
for more than 20 years, said Griffin
is an "absolutely superb choice" for NASA administrator.
"This
means the administration is serious about a new direction for the program,"
Worden said. "He will make the president's vision a reality."
Courtney
Stadd, an aerospace management consultant who headed up
the NASA transition for Bush and served as NASA's White House liaison and chief
of staff until July 2003, said Griffin has the right mix of technical savvy and
management experience to lead NASA. "He brings a really unique and really
important set of skills that is exactly what the agency needs at this point in
its history," Stadd said.
Griffin has a
doctorate degree in aerospace engineering and master's degrees in aerospace
science, electrical engineering, applied physics, civil engineering and business
administration.
Worden
said that he believes Griffin
will "make maximum use of the true private sector" in implementing the space
exploration vision, heading one of the central recommendations of a blue ribbon
panel Bush chartered last year to advise him turning the exploration goals into
reality.
Stadd said some of
the smaller, entrepreneurial firms vying for a role in NASA's new exploration
plans ought to be very happy the White House picked Griffin.
"From
an entrepreneurial standpoint he has someone who has actually experienced what
it is like to be on the other side of the table dealing with the government,"
he said. "We haven't had that before."
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
is different than it was the last time the White House set big exploration goals
for he U.S. Space agency. But he said he was under no illusions that
maintaining political support for the new effort will be in anyway easy.
"Circumstances
have changed in the years since I worked for NASA on the exploration
initiative. We have a Republican White House and a Republication 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."
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, to 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."
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 space flight 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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