NASA Administrator Mike Griffin had an interview with the Orlando Sentinel on his first nine months on the job.

On Challenger/Columbia:

What we need to be mindful of is that a common theme runs through Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia. If you spend much time on this stuff and aviation accidents, a common theme is that of not listening to the signals the hardware is sending – the test results, the flight results, the dissenting opinions of the people involved. So a common theme is not listening. And I don’t mean actively shutting out. I mean being so focused on what we’re trying to do that we’re not aware of what nature is telling us. I think about that a lot to be very honest with you. I wonder on an almost daily basis what am I doing that would keep us from listening as we should and what am I not doing that would cause us to have our eyes and ears open as we should and must. I hope everybody in the program is thinking that way. I really hope they are. I can’t check with each one personally, of course, but I hope they are. That’s what I think about. Our procedures work when we follow them. Okay, they’ve worked 112 out of 114 times when we’ve followed them. So we don’t need in the final years of the shuttle to invent new procedures or to invent new ways of doing business. We need to follow what we know how to do. So that’s part of it and we’re going to work on that. But even more importantly, we didn’t fail to follow our procedures on Challenger and Columbia; we weren’t listening to what the hardware was telling us. If we see anything like that again, I hope we have learned.

On the moon/mars program:

Some have characterized it as boring and for the same reason, others have been upset that there is not a lot of new technology in it. I said earlier that we do believe we’re accorded sufficient money to do the job. We were not allocated sufficient money to do the job by way of a new technology development program. We do not have that money. Now, I have run multi-billion dollar technology programs, or one of them, for the DOD [Department of Defense] in the old strategic defense days. I would love to do that. I would love to have the equivalent of what I had then, $4-5 billion dollars in today’s dollars each year, just to advance the technology front. We don’t. So yes, the architecture is rather prosaic, but it gets the job done with what we can bring to bear.

It doesn't strike me that he is whining for money, but he does recognize that with limited public interest in space, combined with the emerging private sector, limits the amount of money that Congress can appropriate.

Posted by Ryan S. on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 at 12:00 AM | Permalink |