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Atlantis on the pad
Space shuttle Atlantis is delivered to Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39B on August 2 to begin final preparations for blastoff on the STS-115 mission to resume construction of the International Space Station.

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Atlantis rollout begins
Just after 1 a.m. local time August 2, the crawler-transporter began the slow move out of the Vehicle Assembly Building carrying space shuttle Atlantis toward the launch pad.

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Atlantis on the move
Space shuttle Atlantis is transported to the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building where the ship will be mated to the external fuel tank and twin solid rocket boosters for a late-August liftoff.

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Interview with NASA's chief
Griffin defends budget, shuttle plans
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: August 15, 2006



 
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin watches the launch of shuttle Discovery from Firing Room 4 on Independence Day. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
 
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin is known for being a straight shooter willing to make tough decisions. Brought on board by the Bush administration to implement a new initiative to return to the moon by the end of the next decade, Griffin is overseeing a difficult transition as NASA works to complete the international space station by 2010, phase out the space shuttle and develop a new manned spacecraft that will be safer and cheaper to operate.

Griffin discussed that transition with CBS News space writer William Harwood last month, a few hours before Discovery took off on the second post-Columbia shuttle mission. With NASA managers assessing their readiness to restart space station assembly with launch of the shuttle Atlantis later this month, here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:

Q: How important is it for NASA to restart space station assembly after such a long hiatus?

A: We're doing this so we can build a toehold for humanity off the Earth, our first, a permanent facility, a long-term facility to learn how to live and work in space. We're half done. We're the leader of a project that's got (many) nations involved in it and we need to get on with it. That's why we're flying shuttles and yeah, I want to get started back on that job and I want to get it done and I want to move on with going back to the moon.

Q: What's the primary value of the space station in your view?

A: From my perspective as an engineer, which I admit is biased, the main purpose of the station is to learn how to live and work in space. Whenever humans are ready to go to Mars, we're going to need an amount of hardware in space about the size of the space station when it's done. That's how much we need to go to Mars. And hopefully we will have learned so much from how we've assembled station that we'll do a great job on it. It won't take us 20 years to put together the hardware to go to Mars because we'll have learned.

Q: There is a widespread perception, among reporters at least, that the only reason NASA is pressing ahead with the space station is because of the agency's earlier commitment to launch research modules for Japan and the European Space Agency. There is a perception that if Mike Griffin had his way, this would all stop today. Why does that perception exist?

A: People misunderstand and given a few moments, I can actually explain what I think as opposed to having people make it up. People should understand, from where we are at this point in time, the right thing to do is to fly out the shuttle to retirement and use it to assemble the station. OK? Because otherwise, we're not taking advantage of the investment we've made. Now, what is true is that I think we did things in the wrong order. The right approach to running the nation's space program would, in my mind, never have been to abandon going to the moon as we did in the early 70s. I've characterized that over and over again as one of the many unfortunate decisions to come out of the Nixon administration. In my opinion that was a poor decision and I think I'm entitled to say that.

That said, that decision was made and other consequences followed from it, one of which is we built the shuttle and declared the space station to be the major project we would use it for. And we've been working on the station now for 22 years.

Now if you ask me, when people say i would never do this, they've got it wrong. If you want to go to Mars, the building of a space station is an important step along that way. It's possible to go to Mars without having built a space station, but I think in preparing for a voyage to Mars, a space station is a step along the way and I would have done that. I would not have done it in this way, I would not have done it in 25,000- or 30,000-pound chunks at a time over dozens of shuttle flights. i would have done it more like we did Skylab, where we put up 200,000 pounds at a time. As an engineer, the way we went about it, because of the order in which we made our decisions, offends me. I'm offended as a technical person, because I don't like the way in which we did it. But no one will ever get me to say that a space station is not a valuable step along the road to Mars. If I've not been clear with these comments, ask me again and I'll clarify. Because what Mike thinks is often misreported by those who don't even bother to ask me the question.

Q: As long as you don't have to understand it for me! (laughter) How do you view station in the context of returning to the moon?

A: Station is not relevant to the moon. That's why I said the order of the things we've done is not what I would have had it be as a technical person. That said, we'll use the station, maybe to check out hardware that will be used on a lunar base in the future. i think we can make some use of the station for our development of a lunar base in the longer run. But really, in my mind the station is far more useful in terms of thinking about Mars. Which gets back to my issue, we didn't get things in the right chronological order to get the maximum utility out of it.

Q: How do you envision the end game for the space station? When the CEV comes on line, will you be able to deliver spares? Can station survive without the shuttle?

A: They will have a way to get up there. I think that's not perceived correctly. With the Ares 1 launch vehicle and the CEV, we're deliberately building in a substantial amount of flexibility. The Ares 1 can be launched in an unmanned mode, it can be launched with the service module and not with the command module and can be used to take up unpressurized cargo in that fashion to the station, including (gyroscopes) and other (large) things. The CEV command module will have a fair-size door in it on purpose to allow us to fly, if we choose, with a minimum number of crew and take up a large amount of pressurized cargo. We've got a good deal of volume inside that thing. The service module on the CEV will have a trunk, if you will, (and) we can take up unpressurized cargo in the trunk. So we're designing the system to be modular and adaptable and flexible so it can do much, not all, but much of what the shuttle does today. The shuttle has enormous capabilities, not all of which we will be able to replicate in the CEV system. But we're going to capture a good deal of it and we can, we absolutely can use the CEV and the Ares 1 launch vehicle to sustain the space station.

Q: How long will NASA continue to fund the space station as the agency ramps up for flights to the moon?

A: You're talking about 10 years in the future. Let's put it this way. I am not making or allowing any decisions to be made which would cause the space station to be terminated on some particular date. I'm sure there will come a day when we decide that we've gotten out of it what we can and that it's more expensive to keep the replacement hardware flying than the utility we're getting from it and we'll make a technical and fiscal decision to say OK, we're done, let's put it in the Pacific. I would not care to speculate about what date that might be."

Q: Can I assume funding at least 10 years past 2010? Can you bound it for me?

A: I would not want to attach a date to it. Once we get hardware in space, it tends to live longer than we think because we design it pretty robustly. The hard job is always getting it into space. It's still a hard job today, 50 years into the era of space flight, getting stuff up there is hard, harder than it ought to be. We're working to fix that. But once we get it there, it lives for a long time.

Q: Why should America send astronauts to Mars?

A: I can give you a bunch of different answers that matter to me. But why did Spain bankroll Magellan to leave port with five ships and head out around the world, two of which never made it past the Canary Islands and two more of which were lost on the way? They got one ship back three years later with something like 20 or so people out of an initial crew of 122 across all the ships. Why'd they do that? It is in the nature of humans to find, to define, to explore and to push back the frontier. And in our time, the frontier is space and will be for a very long time.

Give me a counter example to the statement I'm about to make. When the history books are written, the nations that are preeminent in their time are those nations that dominate the frontiers of their time. The failed societies are the ones that pull back from the frontier. I want our society, America, western society, to be preeminent in the world of the future and I want us not to be a failed society. And the way to do that, universally so, is to push the frontier.

Now we don't do that with every dollar we've got. Obviously, most of our money has to be spent on today's concerns. But we're talking about something here that uses six tenths of a percent of the federal budget. This is not exactly spending money like a drunken sailor. This is an investment for our grandchildren's grandchildren.

I could make a very good argument on the basis of economics, that the European investment in the New World didn't pay off, really, for Europeans for 400 years. I could make an argument for you that the biggest payoff of European investment in the New World was the existence of America to bail them out of World War 2. Europe would have sunk into a dark age in the 20th century with the set of political activities and behaviors that led to World War 1 and then World War 2, which followed from that. Without the investment in the New World, there would not have been another society elsewhere on the planet to prevent Europe from falling back into a second dark age. And I could make an argument that European investment in the New World was a net loss for hundreds of years and finally was worth the effort.

These kinds of activities, as I say, they're not large in the grand scheme of things, although it looks large when you write down the budget numbers, and they don't pay off today. They pay off for our grandchildren's grandchildren. And I care about that and I think everyone else should, too.

Q: Looking at it like that, NASA's budget is not all that huge. So why do you have so much trouble getting adequate funding?

A: That's the budgeting process that we have in a representative democracy. It's difficult for every discretionary program, all of whom have to earn their way. This nation spends this year $1.9 trillion on entitlement programs and interest on the public debt. This nation spends just under $900 billion on all domestic discretionary programs, including defense. When you extract defense, we spend just under $400 billion on all non-defense domestic discretionary programs. We basically finance our discretionary programs on the debt. That's how we do our budgeting. It's an outgrowth of political behavior in a representative democracy. I might wish it to be otherwise, but this is what it is.

The space program actually has been treated well. The president gave us a 3.2 percent increase this year when the average domestic non-defense discretionary program got minus .5 percent. So we did 3.7 percent better than the average. So far, the Congress seems inclined to sustain that. I hope that they will. So I can't claim that we've been treated badly at all.

Q: The science community has voiced loud complaints about what many see as major cutbacks in funding.

A: The science community argues with the apportionment of the funds. And that's unfortunate, because all of our different portfolios - science, manned spaceflight, aeronautics - all of them have had to be trimmed, all of them have 'given at the office,' if you will. Science hasn't been singled out. But the science community is not getting as much as some earlier promises would have led them to indicate.

Q: Unmanned science missions generate the very sort of long-term dividends you say are so important.

A: We do a lot of unmanned space exploration. I think we've got 56 or 58 currently operating robotic missions and we're building more of them. Again, this is people of different communities arguing that their piece of the pie should be bigger. I have spent a good portion of my life putting together robotic payloads with space science. I worked on Hubble as a younger engineer, I worked on many others. I'm proud of that. But the fact is that there has not been much acknowledgement on the part of the science community that the manned spaceflight community had the number of shuttle and station flights whacked by a third. We're doing only two thirds of the number of shuttle flights between now and shuttle retirement that the manned spaceflight comm wanted to do. We are delaying the development of follow-on systems for exploration that the exploration community, including me, wanted to have sooner. We're doing less aeronautics than we would like to be doing. And yes, we're doing less science than we would like to be doing. But when the science community cites that their budget has not grown as much as had been promised previously, they don't mention that other portfolios within NASA are also not doing as well as had been promised.

Q: The perception seems to be that development of a new spacecraft to replace the shuttle is eating up the budget.

A: No. CEV and CLV gave at the office as well. The fact is that flying out the shuttle and finishing the station is utilizing money in order to meet that commitment. ... That's a fact. Some people believe, and certainly it's their right to do so, that we should not finish the station, we should not fly out the shuttle. That's a not unreasonable point of view. But that debate was held. In the year following the loss of Columbia, that debate was held. All sides were heard, multiple congressional hearings were held.

I personally, as a private citizen before rejoining NASA, I gave testimony on three different occasions to some of these congressional hearings. Innumerable discussions were held in the executive office of the president about what should be the shape of America's future in space. All of those view points - everything from stop flying the shuttle right now to continue it on indefinitely into the future - every point of view was heard. We have a space policy today that reflects a reasoned consensus among those viewpoints. I support it.

It is a fact that not every participant in these debates got their way! There was no possibility that that could happen because some of the viewpoints were diametrically opposed. The losers in the arguments, of course, would like to refight the arguments because they can't do worse than lose, right? You can refight any argument for as long as you can get people to listen to you. I would offer this. I think the damage done by refighting these arguments, which have been had and which I think have been settled and should be settled, the damage to the American space program by refighting these battles is greater than just going on and accepting the fact that you lost this argument. Let's get the job done and move on to the next step. I think the arguments are valid. The point I'm making is they've been had.

Q: Given the current environment where every little thing triggers enormous scrutiny, how optimistic are you about flying out the shuttle manifest to complete the station?

A: We have to get back to a process which allows engineers, operators, technicians to look at these things, make a determination and move on. I think we're justifiably and correctly concerned about the slightest thing these days. (But) we've got to get moving on and I think we will.

Q: But this environment is difficult in the sense that if you look at something like the foam on the external tank hard enough, you're bound to find something.

A: That's true. Speaking generically, we know foam comes off this ship. Our goal has been over the last three years to remove large pieces of foam so that they can't come off and to contain and control the foam releases to some appropriate threshold. We think we've done that. This ship is going to shed foam until we stop flying it.

Q: Are you surprised it's been this difficult to resolve the foam shedding problem?

A: No, I'm not surprised. To fix it, you'd have to go back to square one and start anew and that would take several years and that's just not a reasonable alternative. We'd have to have a completely different design approach. As I've said on a number of occasions, prior to Columbia no one at NASA really appreciated the hazard of something as apparently insubstantial as foam. So shame on us. Now we appreciate it, we're dealing with it, I think we've kind of got it where we want it. I hope I'm not going too far out on a limb here.

Q: The ice-frost ramps are the latest source of concern on the external tank. You've tested the current design at wind levels far above what they'll ever see in flight and they hold together.

A: I know. They actually behave a lot better than the analytical models would tell you is the case. And that's interesting.

Q: Looking ahead, what do you need to see to approve a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission? A certified ice-frost ramp redesign? Certified heat shield repair techniques?

A: I've got a pretty good background in hypersonic aerodynamics and I do not hold tile repair out as something that I would want to use as an operational work around. That's the last-ditch attempt. I do not want to mess around with the outer mold line of this vehicle if I can help it and I do not want to rely on tile repair as an operational asset. It's a backup to a backup.

Q: So that's not a gate for you.

A: A gate for me is to know that this tank will not shed harmfully large pieces of foam at an inappropriate time. A lot matters about what time it is. Frankly, if the whole damn tank shed every piece of foam on it at T-0, no one would care. It would all fall down and it wouldn't be a problem because there's no relative speed between the foam and the orbiter. Or if all the foam came off once we were out of the sensible atmosphere, again, we wouldn't care. I'm going to extremes here to paint a picture for you.

Q: I'm not sure I understand why the ice-frost ramps got classified as probable/catastrophic in the risk matrix. Do you agree with that classification?

A: We labeled it as probable/catastrophic because subsidiary to that box is a statement everybody keeps missing, 'with no mitigation.' So they look at the no mitigation part - which is true, there is no mitigation - and they put it in the box. But it's not probable. In order to say that the ice-frost ramps would be a probable source of damage, then you've got to pick a level. So what do you think is probable?

Q: Bryan O'Connor (NASA's safety chief) defined it as a 50-50 chance of catastrophic damage over 100 shuttle flights, the original design life of a shuttle.

A: OK. So let's take that. So if I think that I would expect to see damage on a greater than 50-50 shot over a hundred flights, then I've got to now explain to myself why I've flown 114 flights (now 115) and don't see any damage we can attribute to an ice-frost ramp. ... So my assignment of this hazard would not be in the probable/catastrophic box. If it were me, I would label it as an infrequent/catastrophic hazard. And absolutely, we want to get to work on it. But having labeled it in a red box, I think was an error in labeling. What I want to see, by the way, is numbers. When we label it as a hazard we're concerned about, what we're saying is well, that means it rises to a level that makes it stand out among other risks associated with flying the orbiter. So we pay attention to that as we should and we want to fix it.

But you've got to look at the assumptions behind that. What are the assumptions that caused us to raise it to that level? We make assumptions because we don't have data. But here are the assumptions we make in order to get it to be a real concern. First of all, not every flight releases the same amount of mass from the tank. We have a distribution on that. So in order to get this to be a hazard, we have to assume that this flight is going to release the maximum amount of mass we've ever seen. The 99-percent amount we call it. Probably that's not going to happen, right? But that's what we assume. Then we have to assume the mass comes off in chunks that are bigger than we've ever seen. The biggest chunk we've ever seen come off with this mechanism is .084 pounds. So we set the limit on this thing at .25 pounds, which is the biggest chunk of mass that you could get off of an ice-frost ramp because that's what the whole thing weighs. We've never actually seen that, but we assume that could happen. Then we have to assume that all the mass comes off and it comes off in big chunks and it comes off at the worst possible time, which is about a seven- or eight- or 10-second window in there ... And then we have to say it hits the worst place on the orbiter.

So if all that happens, then we have a hazard that we think rises to a level of real concern. Now we're not ignoring it, we're going to redesign the ice-frost ramps and we're going to fix it. But I ask myself as an engineer, what are the odds that all those four bad things are going to come true over the next two or three flights while we do a redesign? And I say to myself, not very high. And in fact, when we go and analytically study that, the odds come down to like 1-in-400 or 500, which is well less than many other risks we're taking on the orbiter.

Q: But complex systems fail in complex ways and worst-case failures are not uncommon in aviation.

A: It absolutely does happen and our analysis says it's one in several hundred that it could happen here, OK? But I'm absorbing a higher risk than that to fly space shuttles at all. Rotating machinery would be well ahead on my list. Our micrometeorite and orbital debris hazard is 1-in-200. I remember flight readiness reviews from my youth where every damn moment of the flight readiness review was soaked up in turbopump seals. There are other hazards on this machine that we accept in order to fly it. Now that's not good either, and we're trying to transition to a new system ... which will be at least 10 times safer than the shuttle on its best day. We can do better and we will do better. A long time ago, the nation accepted the shuttle design. ... But if I can get individual risks like foam debris down to one in many hundreds, then that's very acceptable in comparison to the other risks which we accept to fly this machine at all. And that's where I think we are.

Everyone says why'd you overrule your chief engineer and your safety guy? Well, that's why. Because I believe when we analyze this thing in terms of what is likely to happen as opposed to a worst on worst on worst, the risk is very acceptable.

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