This architecture would support a crew of four people on the lunar surface for seven days, Griffin said. \u201cThe straightforward approach outlined here could put US-led expeditions on the Moon beginning in 2029, given bold action by Congress and expeditious decision-making and firm contractor direction by NASA,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n
With this plan, Griffin is essentially returning NASA to the Constellation Program that Griffin helped create in 2005 and 2006. The spacecraft (Orion) is the same, and the rocket (SLS Block II instead of Ares V) is similar. The proposed lunar lander looks somewhat like the Altair lunar lander. He is trying to put the band back together, relying on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to get astronauts back to the Moon in a quick and efficient manner.<\/p>\n The Griffin Plan to return to the Moon.<\/p>\n Credit: The problem with Griffin\u2019s plan is that it failed miserably 15 years ago. The independent Augustine Commission, which reviewed NASA\u2019s human spaceflight plans in 2009, found that \u201c[t]he US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practices of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.\u201d And that is probably putting it politely.<\/p>\n There are some huge fictions in Griffin\u2019s plan. One is that there would be two SLS Block II rockets ready to launch in 2029. Recall that it took 12 years and $30 billion to develop the Block I version of the rocket. The earliest NASA expects an interim version, Block 1B, to be ready is 2028. But magically, NASA will have two builds of the more advanced Block II rocket (with more powerful side-mounted boosters) ready by 2029.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Then there is the lunar lander. It has not been designed. It is not funded. And if it were built through the cost-plus acquisition strategy outlined by Griffin, it undoubtedly would cost $10 to $20 billion and take a decade based on past performance. A reasonable estimate of Griffin\u2019s plan, based on contractor performance with Orion (in development since 2005) and the SLS rocket, is that if NASA\u2019s budget roughly doubled, humans might land on the Moon by the late 2030s.<\/p>\n One of the ironies of the career of Mike Griffin is that, at the direction of the George W. Bush administration, he helped launch the commercial space revolution. Griffin created the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, program in 2006; it funded the development of cargo spacecraft by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences. It is no exaggeration to say that this program and its successor in 2008 to fund cargo supply missions to the International Space Station saved SpaceX. Without them, the company founded by Elon Musk would probably not exist today.<\/p>\n But even before he left NASA in early 2009, Griffin was already turning on the commercial space industry. He did not support NASA\u2019s funding of companies because he did not believe they were putting enough \u201cskin in the game\u201d as a part of their fixed-price contracts. Griffin ended up opposing the creation of the \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program that ultimately led to the Crew Dragon vehicle that broke NASA\u2019s dependence on Russia for rides to the International Space Station.<\/p>\n \u201cThe plan to use commercial capabilities certainly departed from what I saw as the correct path,\u201d Griffin said in 2013. \u201cIn our view, activating a crew provision would come only after substantial\u2014even enormous\u2014progress had been made on cargo. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk. We set the COTS agreements up initially to allow for money to be invested in crew development. But in our plan, we certainly weren\u2019t going to invest in crew development until cargo capability had been amply demonstrated.\u201d<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Michael Griffin in 2008 as the NASA administrator, with Constellation rockets.<\/p>\n Credit: Griffin has also called the money NASA spent on cargo and crew services provided by SpaceX \u201cexcessive.\u201d Griffin has carried forward this animus toward SpaceX and the US commercial space industry\u2014which the present-day NASA deputy administrator has called \u201cthe envy of the world\u201d\u2014into the present day.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fundamental flaw in the Artemis acquisition approach is the assumption that the US government can and should leverage so-called \u2018commercial space\u2019 for national purposes and that this paradigm is applicable to human spaceflight,\u201d he wrote in his prepared statement.<\/p>\n This is an interesting viewpoint given that SpaceX\u2019s Crew-7 mission launched on a Dragon in September, and a private mission, Axiom-3, is due to launch later today. This is just the mix of government and commercial missions flying on a private spacecraft that Griffin contends is not feasible.<\/p>\n As part of his plan, Griffin says the contracts NASA has awarded to SpaceX and Blue Origin should be \u201cterminated\u201d for the convenience of the government. \u201cTo continue programs that we know will not achieve our goals distracts us from what must be done and damages NASA\u2019s and the nation\u2019s reputation, even if they are being executed for free.\u201d<\/p>\n This is rich. When the Obama administration sought to cancel the Constellation contracts in 2009, Griffin and others fought hard to pay termination costs to the contractors, estimated at about $1 billion. NASA\u2019s deputy administrator at the time, Lori Garver, describes this incident in her book Escaping Gravity<\/em>. \u201cI was incredulous that any non-contractual assurance would have been enough for company CEOs to take on hundreds of millions of dollars in liability on behalf of their shareholders\u2014even if the promise had been made by the NASA Administrator himself.\u201d<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Griffin is not wrong when he characterizes NASA\u2019s present plans for Artemis as \u201ccomplex.\u201d They are. They require SpaceX, and eventually Blue Origin, to develop large and sophisticated rockets and spacecraft, prove out the capability to store and transfer cryogenic fuels in orbit, and perform myriad rendezvous and docking operations in Earth and lunar orbit. NASA\u2019s current timeline for a 2026 lunar landing is not at all realistic, but 2028 does seem possible.<\/p>\n There will undoubtedly be teething pains for Artemis. But the plan initially developed by Administrator Jim Bridenstine during the Trump administration, and then advanced by Administrator Bill Nelson under the Biden administration, is a nice bit of bipartisan policy that brings together the traditional and commercial space industries in the United States, and it has added a strong element of international partnerships through the Artemis Accords.<\/p>\n To chuck this all out of the window for an uber-expensive dash to the Moon that would be nothing more than Apollo part two, and completely unsustainable, makes no sense. Who cares if China lands two taikonauts on the Moon before NASA later this decade or in the early 2030s? I would give that a low probability of happening, as China will have technical and funding problems, too. But even if it happens, China isn\u2019t going to establish \u201cnorms\u201d on the Moon with a single two-day mission. Those norms will be set by the nations that go to the Moon and then send a fleet of spacecraft over time.<\/p>\n That is the future that NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin are trying to bring about. They\u2019re looking to move away from a few titanic launches of entirely expendable spacecraft that establish nothing of permanence on the Moon. They want to develop reusable launchers, in-space refueling, and reusable spacecraft and landers. It won\u2019t happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But that is the way one ushers in a new era of affordable spaceflight in the 21st century\u2014by looking forward to what is possible, not back at what worked six decades ago but was wholly unsustainable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Wednesday, former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, 73, put forward a deferential but determined countenance as he addressed a House subcommittee that was conducting a hearing on NASA\u2019s Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon. \u201cI will be direct,\u201d Griffin said. \u201cIn my judgment, the Artemis Program is excessively complex, unrealistically priced, compromises crew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45535"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Griffin-01.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Michael Griffin testimony<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nCommercial space sucks, Griffin says<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/griffin-02.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n NASA<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nCancel the contracts<\/h2>\n