NASA Administrator Mike Griffin speaks at Lunar & Planetary Science Conference

I am down south of Houston this week at the Lunar & Planetary Science Conference. On Monday night, NASA administrator Mike Griffin spoke. The ballroom where he spoke was packed beyond standing room only, it was really crowded. He had about a 15 minute speech and took about 45 minutes of questions. Among the things that he said in his prepared speech that caught my attention, he said that the opening statement of "Star Trek" ("to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before!") is a better mission statement for NASA than its actual one. He cited a surprising statistic: that approximately 50% (50%!!!) of the people in a poll thought that NASA consumed 24% of the U.S. budget! Can you believe it? (the actual amount is less than 1%). There were several questions related to the drop in funding in the Mars exploration program after MSL is launched. I am biased on this and believe that no matter how you slice it, Mars is getting the shaft at the expense of outer planets and the Moon. Griffin tried to explain it away by saying that budgets go up and down based on which program is getting a flagship mission. He said there were "no entitlements at NASA". Oh yeah? What about the engineers who have to come up with a new design for every mission when tried and true designs (such as the MER rovers) get relegated to the scrap heap. Anyway... there was also a question about NASA support of a COTS style program for lunar robotic spacecraft. He said that if COTS is successful, then there might be a COTS style program for planetary programs. I think that would definitely be the way to go. He had a great line in response to a question about whether he's gotten any insights from politicians with respect to NASA's education program, he said "I don't get many insights from politicians." I loudly applauded that line. Since most of the people in the room are big libs there were a few questions about international participation and "why can't we leverage other nations resources for our programs?". The response being that other nations don't want us to leverage their resources, the U.S. has to lead, not be a follower.

I think Griffin did a good job in front of a semi-hostile audience. He did point out several times that under Bush NASA has had stable funding with moderate growth and no real cuts, where under Clinton it did have real cuts. Again, that is something most of the people in that room would like to ignore.