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29 Sept 2005
USA: NASA Administrator Says Space Shuttle was a Mistake
By
Traci Watson
USA TODAY
The
space shuttle and International Space Station – nearly the
whole of the US manned space program for the past three decades
– were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.
In
a meeting with USA TODAY's editorial board, Griffin said NASA lost
its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo Moon missions
in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can
only orbit Earth.
"It
is now commonly accepted that was not the right path," Griffin
said. "We are now trying to change the path while doing as
little damage as we can."
The
shuttle has cost the lives of 14 astronauts since the first flight
in 1982. Roger Pielke Jr, a space policy expert at the University
of Colorado, estimates that NASA has spent about $150 billion on
the program since its inception in 1971. The total cost of the space
station by the time it's finished – in 2010 or later –
may exceed $100 billion, though other nations will bear some of
that.
Only
now is the nation's space program getting back on track, Griffin
said. He announced last week that NASA aims to send astronauts back
to the Moon in 2018 in a spacecraft that would look like the Apollo
capsule.
The
goal of sending Americans to the Moon was laid out by President
Bush in 2004, before Griffin took the top job at NASA. Bush also
said the shuttle would be retired in 2010.
Griffin
has made clear in previous statements that he regards the shuttle
and space station as misguided. He told the Senate earlier this
year that the shuttle was "deeply flawed" and that the
space station was not worth "the expense, the risk and the
difficulty" of flying humans to space.
But
since he became NASA administrator, Griffin hasn't been so blunt
about the two programs.
Asked
Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, "My
opinion is that it was. ...It was a design which was extremely aggressive
and just barely possible." Asked whether the space station
had been a mistake, he said, "Had the decision been mine, we
would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit
we're building it in."
Joe
Rothenberg, head of NASA's manned space programs from 1995 to 2001,
defended the programs for providing lessons about how to operate
in space. But he conceded that "in hindsight, there may have
been other ways."
© 2005 USA TODAY a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
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