New NASA Chief Sets Sights on Mars

NASA’s new administrator, Michael D. Griffin, faced the media Monday for the first time since being confirmed by the Senate last week and vigorously defended the Bush administration’s ambitious plan to send astronauts to the moon and Mars.

“We could probably go to Mars for what we spent on Apollo” in today’s dollars, he said.

“It is a journey, not a race,” Griffin said. If the country put aside “a few billion a year,” the Mars plan would be “very affordable.”

President Bush announced his space exploration vision last year. Critics complained that Mars is so much farther away than the moon that it would pose daunting financial and technological barriers.

The Apollo moon program of the 1960s and 1970s cost about $150 billion in current dollars, but some estimates of the cost of going to Mars surpass $500 billion. At the same time, NASA’s share of the federal budget has shrunk from a high of 4% during the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to about 1% in recent years. That funding trend would have to be reversed if Mars is to become a realistic goal.

In wide-ranging remarks before reporters in Washington, Griffin also expressed frustrations with plans to replace the aging space shuttle with a new “crew exploration vehicle.”

Over the life of the shuttle program, two orbiters and their crews have been lost in accidents. Plans call for decommissioning the shuttle in 2010, after it finishes assembling the International Space Station. But NASA’s schedule doesn’t bring a new vehicle into service until 2014.

Griffin, a former NASA engineer who was most recently head of the space department at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, said he was concerned about “a five-year gap in the ability of the U.S. to access space with human crews.”

He also reiterated recent statements that he would take another look at his predecessor’s refusal to use the shuttle to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, which could fail as early as 2007. Former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe said a repair mission to Hubble would be too dangerous because there would be no escape for the astronauts if something went wrong. Trips to the space station are considered less risky because the crew could abandon the shuttle for the station if the orbiter was damaged on liftoff.

Griffin said a second look at a Hubble mission would begin as soon as the space shuttle Discovery returned safely from space. Discovery is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on May 15, the first flight in the more than two years since the Columbia orbiter broke up on reentry, killing its seven crew members.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued a report in the wake of the shuttle disaster condemning NASA’s decision-making and recommending changes to improve the shuttle and the space agency bureaucracy.

The Return to Flight Task Group, an outside safety panel, has been monitoring NASA’s progress in meeting the recommendations. Griffin made it clear, however, that the task group was merely an advisory body and the final decision to launch would be NASA’s.

One of the investigation board’s recommendations was that shuttle crews should have the ability to make repairs in orbit of damaged heat-protection tiles and panels. A reinforced carbon-carbon panel on the Columbia’s left wing was damaged by foam that fell off the shuttle’s external fuel tank during its launch in January 2003. When the orbiter returned to Earth 16 days later, the 3,000-degree heat of reentering the atmosphere burned through the damaged wing and destroyed Columbia.

Engineers have designed five repair methods for Discovery. Two of them are to be tested during one of three scheduled space walks. NASA mission managers say they are confident the repairs will work. Discovery crew members, on the other hand, have expressed doubts about trusting their lives to unproven repair techniques.

On Monday, Griffin appeared to side with the astronauts, saying it was “not clear that tile repair will ever be an easy thing.”

For one thing, even if the repair methods could be guaranteed to keep the searing heat at bay, there is no certainty that the repairs won’t interfere with the orbiter’s aerodynamics, possibly causing the vehicle to spin out of control on reentry, he said.

The decision to “go or no-go can’t be based on whether you can repair tiles on orbit,” Griffin said.