Mike Griffin, speaking at the Mars Society Conference:
Griffin offers his summary of White House NASA plan: we’re not going anywhere and spending a lot of money doing it.
No, that was his plan.
[Update after noon]
Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on Mike’s latest economically foolish comments.
I was quite struck by this bit from Jeff Fousts’s live-tweeting: ‘Griffin: Saturn V had the lowest useful payload capability for exploration beyond LEO, critiquing the 70-ton HLV in Senate bill.’
I mean, really?
I have always thought that Mike Griffin’s grasp of reality was quite tenuous. However, this takes the biscuit. Saturn V was designed as a single mission vehicle and it performed very well.
Could it have been modified as a cargo HLV; almost certainly and back then we may have had places to go but the argument remains the same.
“Do we repeat what we have already achieved or do we achieve reliable and safe, preferably relatively cheap, access to space and then decide where to go?”
If the answer is in the affirmative then we only need to develop one piece of hardware at the moment. That would be a small manned spacecraft to take folk from the surface to a base in space and return them. We already have a lot of cargo lift capacity that can be used for all the other stuff that will go to orbit. Once we can do this then we can put in place the propellant depots currently in vogue and perhaps many other things too.