One of the big questions about the incoming NASA administrator is whether or not he’ll reinstate the Hubble mission. Keith Cowing has doubts:

…Mike Griffin will work for the very same White House which endorsed Sean O’Keefe’s decisions regarding Hubble – and adjusted the agency’s budget profiles accordingly – two fiscal years in a row. Such a reversal would be a change in Bush Administration policy – and we don’t really see a lot of that, now do we?

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. For example, Dr. Griffin could have made such a policy change a condition of his accepting the job (I’m not saying that he did, just that he could have). As a sweetener, he might have offered other savings (such as his postulated plan to reduce Shuttle support to complete ISS from the planned two-dozen plus missions to just a few, with earlier phaseout). That would allow the mission to be accomplished with no increase in budget.

My sense, from knowing him, is that he has some big ideas about how to implement the president’s goals that aren’t necessarily completely in synch with current plans. Many consider him (not Dan Goldin) the true father of “faster, better, cheaper”–a legacy from when he left the agency in the early nineties that he probably considers to have been poorly implemented by Goldin.

I’ll bet that he’s coming up with what he thinks are “faster, better, cheaper” ways of getting back to the moon, and on to Mars, and he could very well include keeping the popular Hubble alive as part of the overall deal. And I doubt if the administration is all that wedded to the specifics of the plan laid out a year ago, as long as the goals are achieved. I also doubt that the administration has any innate desire to end the Hubble program–they just didn’t want to pay for it, so if Mike can come up with a way to do both, I doubt if they’d view it as a “policy reversal.”

I’m not claiming any special insight into what he will do, or wants to do, just what he could do. Hubble may yet live. The confirmation hearings will be very interesting.