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Correspondence

Aviation Week & Space Technology

04/18/2005, page 8

Name Withheld By Request

If the space shuttle arrives at the International Space Station (ISS) with significant thermal protection system damage, NASA may not have enough confidence in unproven repair methods to risk the lives of the crew to bring the vehicle back for a landing. The damaged shuttle probably would be abandoned and discarded.

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World News & Analysis

Aviation Week & Space Technology

04/18/2005, page 28

Frank Morring, Jr.

Washington

Griffin lifts off at NASA with calls for speeding shuttle replacement, reopening Hubble decision

Michael D. Griffin launched his tenure as NASA's 11th administrator on a fast track, using his "emergency" confirmation by the U.S. Senate to plug himself into space shuttle return-to-flight decision-making and urging faster development of the shuttle replacement.

He also deftly sidestepped the treacherous issue of letting the aging Hubble Space Telescope die that was left behind by former Administrator Sean O'Keefe. Griffin told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that he would take another look at a shuttle mission to service the telescope, but not until the redesigned shuttle system makes a couple of test flights.

Griffin made clear at his confirmation hearing Apr. 12 that he has long supported the ideas embodied in President Bush's push to move human exploration out of low Earth orbit, while finishing the International Space Station and retiring the space shuttle as soon as possible. And he showed right out of the blocks that his technical training and management background should serve him well in implementing Bush's directives.

At the top of his agenda this week will be preparations for the shuttle's return to flight, now scheduled for a 19-day launch window that opens May 15. Griffin says he "absolutely" will make the final decision on whether the shuttle program has incorporated the lessons learned from the Columbia accident well enough for a reasonably safe mission. In doing so, he says he will draw on his own experience overseeing aerospace accident investigations.

"I'm very aware that accident boards make recommendations that seem good to them at the time, but which may not in all cases be capable of implementation," he said. "We will, of course, face that same thing when we return to flight . . . . Nothing will be more important to me than looking into all that."

Griffin ordered a briefing Apr. 18 on the status of getting the space shuttle Discovery off the ground on the STS-114 mission to the International Space Station, and vowed to make the return to flight his top priority until it happens.

"I'm going to listen," he said in a brief interview. "I want to hear from the Stafford-Covey team and the NASA return-to-flight team, understand the status as they see it, and make the best evaluation that I can."

A panel headed by former astronauts Thomas Stafford and Richard Covey is overseeing the agency's compliance with the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB). The group postponed a planned final meeting Mar. 31 to give agency engineers more time to complete their work on post-accident changes in the shuttle system.

THE INDEPENDENT NASA Advisory Council also postponed its regular quarterly meeting this week to give Griffin time to get "fully on board and up to speed." With the power vacuum at the top of NASA in mind, Commerce committee members from both parties called for an "emergency" confirmation so Griffin could get to work right away. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the committee chairman, scheduled a follow-up meeting right off the Senate chamber a few hours after the hearing so Griffin's confirmation could be moved straight to the Senate floor.

That meeting never happened. It was thwarted by a procedural "hold" inserted by Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) after Griffin was unable to explain the deep cuts in NASA's aeronautics budget to Allen's satisfaction. Allen constituents at Langley Research Center face the loss of their jobs as a result of the cuts (AW&ST Mar. 7, p. 28).

The incident had no lasting effect on Griffin's confirmation or the general enthusiasm with which his nomination was received on Capitol Hill. Allen later lifted his hold, after some hasty answer-drafting in Griffin's future office suite on the ninth floor of NASA headquarters, and the Senate unanimously confirmed Griffin's nomination that evening. But it illustrated the fine line he must walk as he applies his acknowledged technical and managerial skills in a political environment that doesn't always reward the most logical solution.

"Aeronautics is hard hit right now, coping with some of the transitional dislocations," Griffin told NASA employees the day after his hurry-up confirmation. "I don't see a way to avoid some of those dislocations at present. We do live in a world of limited resources and we do have to set priorities."

Griffin was more deft in the way he handled the future of the International Space Station, which he has publicly opposed in the past as a poor use of resources and risk (AW&ST Mar. 21, p. 28).

"The faith and credence of the U.S. in meeting its obligations means quite a lot to me," he said. "We have undergone a trauma in our space program, and we are still recovering from that. There has been damage to the program, and there have been delays to the program, but we are committed to meeting our obligations to our partners."

In his televised session with employees, Griffin said he hoped to strike a balance between using commercial competition to spur development of the technologies that will be needed to fulfill Bush's exploration goals, and using existing NASA assets for "core" developments too big for industry to tackle. Johnson Space Center will be responsible for developing the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) that will replace the shuttle, and Marshall Space Flight Center will continue to handle launch vehicle development. "Some things are simply too big to compete," he declared.

The rocket scientist in Griffin came to the fore when he tackled the access-to-space gap that will make U.S. astronauts dependent on Russian vehicles from the time the shuttle is retired in 2010 until the CEV begins operations in about 2014 under current planning. Why, he asked, should it take that long to get the CEV flying? "President Bush said no later than 2014," he said. "That didn't say we couldn't be smart and do it earlier, and that would be my call."

Aviation Week & Space Technology

04/18/2005, page 30

Frank Morring, Jr.

Washington

Let's Work Together

Civil-military space cooperation, which never seemed to take off under past NASA leadership, finally may get a big boost under newly confirmed Administrator Michael D. Griffin.

That's important not just for the broader policy implications, but because it could give him another option for one of the thorniest problems he faces coming into office--what to do about the aging Hubble Space Telescope.

A joint effort between NASA and the military/intelligence space organizations on Hubble servicing, or anything else, could stretch funding for all. Griffin's wide technical experience on both sides of the secrecy line may make cooperation easier.

The incoming NASA chief testified last week that he agreed with the decision not to try a robotic servicing mission to the telescope, but he promised to take another look at the human mission his predecessor killed (see p. 28). If that doesn't work out, a former colleague who now works at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has an idea for using the two Hubble instruments built before the Columbia disaster for a final servicing mission.

Pedro Rustan, director of advanced systems and technology at the NRO, says work underway at his agency on lightweight segmented mirrors could support a rapid-development space telescope that would serve the interests of NASA and the NRO. The latter has its Earth-reconnaissance mission, and NASA could use the technology to collect light for the new Wide Field Camera (WFC-3) and a Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) built for Hubble at a cost of $83 million and $65 million, respectively.

"The only difference is their telescope points outward and ours points in," says Rustan. "We're interested in looking at the Earth; they're interested in looking at the galaxy, but the technology is the same. Photons are photons."

Researchers at NRO are trying to halve the aerial density of the segmented mirror for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a Hubble follow-on scheduled for a 2011 launch. While the JWST is targeting a density of 15 kg./sq. meter, the NRO is building a ground test article with a density of 7.5 kg./m2, says Rustan. Rustan says he plans to broach a possible joint mission once Griffin settles in at NASA.

Other areas of mutually advantageous cooperation include space-based synthetic aperture radars (SARs). The two agencies have a memorandum of agreement on a mini-SAR for use in mapping the Moon, and NRO is working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on an L-band interferometric SAR that might be able to penetrate planetary surfaces to some extent.

Former Administrator Sean O'Keefe launched his three-year tenure with a call for closer cooperation between NASA and military space organizations, coordinated through a top-level "Space Partnership Council." Although there have been few tangible results of that effort, Rustan says lower-level contacts under the aegis of the partnership council have kept the various agencies up to date on work underway to prevent duplication.

"I don't think we can work in isolation in this business," he says. "Anybody who's doing any research in space must be part of the overall agenda. There's so much to do and there are limited dollars."

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