This is the tape-recorded transcript of NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, speaking unexpectedly and extemporaneously, and then the scheduled speaker, Sen. Bill Nelson (D- Fla.), chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee space, aeronautics and related sciences subcommittee. They spoke at a luncheon of the Washington Space Business Roundtable at the University Club, 1135 16th Street N.W., in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, May 22, 2008.
Michael Griffin
“I speak best from extensive notes.” [holding a small piece of paper – laughter in audience]
“You guys are going to be victims of the ultimate bait and switch, because Sen. Nelson is much better looking, much more eloquent and much more influential than I am. But I’m glad I was able to be here to fill in. I was looking forward to hearing his remarks too, and I’ll have to get that another time. [laughter].
“Why would Sen. Nelson have a topic called ‘NASA In the Crosshairs’ — ? Well the obvious answer is, because we are. And it’s not so much that people are shooting at us. I mean, truthfully, the arguments about NASA … usually don’t involve people being immensely irritated with us. The major arguments we’ve had over NASA are space policy arguments. What do we want to do from a very large set of choices about what NASA could do with the relatively small amount of money that’s allocated to it, and the arguments in the space community [policy] arguments.
“We have to pick and choose what we want to do. And that means that for everything that we want to do, something else can’t get done. So I’ll parrot [a] phrase, and say [there’s] good news and bad news. The good news is people love what NASA does. And people want more of it. But as [former Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] chairman/CEO and NASA leader] Norm Augustine famously said, and I love this quote of Norm’s, as with most of with most of Norm’s … quotes, ‘Everyone agrees that they want a strong space program. No two people agree on what they want exactly that to be.’ So in that vein, we are in the crosshairs right now, because, why?
“Times are tough. Why are times tough? Times are tough because we’re – we may not be in the crosshairs, but we certainly are at the crossroads. We are trying as a country, with NASA being the executing entity of relevance in this particular discussion, but as a nation, we’re trying to phase out — what by the time we fly it will be a 30-year-old space transportation system, that is the most marvelous vehicle that human beings have ever created. And yet it falls short of the goals that we originally set for it, and, even more important, is restricted to low Earth orbit.
“Even if – and we probably could spend the money to do it — the space shuttle could be made to be a very much more perfect machine, we could spend that money. But even if one spent that money, that vehicle can’t take us where we want to go for a long-term space program, which is, once again, out beyond low Earth orbit. So we are trying as a nation, as a matter of considered policy at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and [garble] – as a matter of considered policy, we’re trying to retire the space shuttle in a disciplined and orderly manner. We’re trying to use it in its last few years to finish the job to which we committed ourselves and 15 other nations: the assembly of the space station.
“And then we want to phase in a new system that won’t be better than the space shuttle, but it will be different, and it will be capable of doing different things. And most crucially, it will be capable of taking us and our partners, once again, out beyond low Earth orbit. We’re trying to do all that because of the timing of the Columbia accident, and the policy considerations which followed it, and necessary time for thorough and ordered discussion, both at 1600 Pennsylvania [Avenue] and on Capitol Hill. And by the time all that got done, and the new team got appointed to make it happen, we were only a few years away from a presidential transition year.
“Presidential transitions years aren’t ever smooth. We’re extraordinarily fortunate in this country that we’ve never had a presidential election that was so tough it had to be settled with guns. But they’re never smooth. And the expectation that they’ll be smooth is a silly expectation. They are accompanied by quite a lot of turmoil, as a new team gets elected and begins to pursue their agenda after they can figure out where the bathrooms are.
“Because, let’s face it, getting elected is not governing. And the team which has spent all its energies getting elected probably has not been spending all of its energies trying to figure out how to govern. And that takes a while to happen. And that’s even if there were no changes in priorities, and there will be changes in priorities.
“So presidential transition years are tough years. And this tough year falls in the middle of a tough period for NASA and the space community. Not because it’s a presidential transition, but accompanying that is the high likelihood that we won’t have a presidentially approved budget this year, either from a new president or from an old president.
“We will likely have a continuing resolution going into the next year almost certainly, most people tell me, and I agree that that is the highly likely case. And the question is whether it will be for six months or a full year. So any time that you have a continuing resolution in an economy with inflation in it, it is essentially a budget cut.
“And so we will be cutting the budget at NASA. And the only question is, how much. And the second question after how much is decided, will the continuing resolution be broadly applied and left to the discretion of agency heads to implement, or will special programs be targeted to be either favored or disfavored? And those are questions that only the Congress can [decide]. We are one of the executing agencies. We’ll take the answers we are given and implement them, because that’s what we do in democracy. But we don’t know what those answers are yet.
“So it’s a time of incredible turmoil at NASA. But we know before we start that we’re arguing about the difference between bad and worse — not between good and better.
“A presidential transition is not a fun time. A continuing resolution is not a fun time. There will be damage. It will be unintended damage, but there will be damage. It’s part of the collateral damage of having a free and open democracy, of the kind we’re all glad we have because the alternatives are worse. So, the task falls to us to cope with all of that. And as a consequence those who care deeply about space policy – which means, on the civil space policy side, which literally means what NASA does – those of us who care deeply about it have difficult choices. The top-level choice that we have to make is whether we’re going to fight or cooperate, as best we can. And I strongly favor … cooperate, and come to some kind of a common ground. And I’d like everybody to remember what I often say to my team, which is contrary to what you think, and I may be the boss, but I don’t win every argument. If I win 70 percent of them, I think I’m doing well. I can, at NASA, win every argument, but that has costs. It has costs in terms of behavioral consequences of other staff. It has costs in terms of the fact that I may not always be right. I’m not always sure I’m right. Lots of times we’ll have managerial arguments, discussions, difficulty in determining what to do. And we don’t always pick the path that I would necessarily have picked. It usually works out OK. Sometimes not. Sometimes it doesn’t work out well when they do follow the path I picked. We do very hard things. We try very hard to get it right. It is hard to get it right, and we don’t always do that. The discussions that we have are helpful to getting the right answer, but even so, it doesn’t always come out right [garble] all the arguments. And so none of you with any individual particular interest that you have, are well motivated — I suspect no one of evil intent, but people do have different goals.
“But no one of you is going to get all of the goals that you want implemented in any civil space policy that the nation can afford to buy, and certainly not one which is going to fall out of the budgetary consequences as we cope with a presidential transition and a congressional continuing resolution over the next year or so. So I think we have to decide — and we have to actually think about it and decide — that the benefits of, I’ll say, cohering together outweigh the benefits of trying to strike out in a unique direction, in a Lone Ranger mode, and hoping for the best.
“Now given that, we have today, captured in the 2005 authorization act, which substantially endorsed the president’s civil space policy enunciated in January of ’04, the authorization act signed in December of ’05 almost two years later, captures what I personally believe to be the best civil space policy that’s been written down since the early years of NASA. It’s not without flaw. I could have done with less than 55 reports to the Congress, and been happy about that. But it’s a very, very good policy.
“The proposed authorization bill that the House has just produced, that is now out there for public comment, on public record, I think extends and augments the good features of that [earlier] bill, while, as best I can tell, adding no bad features. So I like what I am seeing so far.
“But that bill – those bills – preserve the direction that we’re on. So think of space policy in the United States as a vector. After Columbia, we changed vectors. We had been on a path that the Columbia Accident Investigation Board specifically decried. We had been on a path where U.S. space policy consisted of flying ourselves and our partners to and from the space station, indefinitely, with no further specific goal in sight. The CAIB said, not a good plan. Most of us who had been in the space community for decades, many of us certainly being at the very head of that parade, agreed.
“Not a good plan. Not that there was anything wrong with that piece of the plan. It was just that it wasn’t enough plan. And there needed to be, as the CAIB said, something beyond. We have that. We’re specifically targeting the moon. Mars after that. I have been quite vocal in my comments at various speeches that we really ought to include things like the near Earth objects, and other potential destinations, not instead of the moon, but in addition to the moon. So we could improve things a bit. But by and large, we have an outward-focused civil space policy now of human and robotic exploration, and we have the choice confronting us in tough times of what do we do when the going gets tough.
“How is the going tough? Well, I mentioned the financial problems we’ve had, and everybody knows we have now approaching a five-year gap in human space flight between the last shuttle flight and the first Orion-Ares flight. Would I like that to be a lot less? I would. I think everybody in this room would. When I came in I had proposed a plan by which we could essentially do what we’re going now by 2012, even within the confines of NASA’s existing budget. That plan would have required some sacrifices in other areas, and it was not approved.
“So we’re at 2015. Could get worse, in the face of funding challenges.
“So should we abandon the plan? I don’t think so, because I think that’s not what the United States does, or what any successful people do, when the going gets tough. We can adopt lesser goals, to try to close the gap, or to deal with our funding constraints. But realistically what does that mean?
“If we adopt lesser goals, that means drop the moon, again, as was done in the early 1970s. Actually, in the late 1960s, when President Nixon decided that he’d had enough of Apollo. If we drop the moon, we get the kinds of space transportation architecture solutions to replace the shuttle that some have espoused: put simple capsules on top of EELV, and just fly with what you’ve got, and fly back and forth to the station. Well, I’m not that — I mean, I loved the hardware, I loved being an engineer, I loved it more than anything. But this is not about the hardware. It’s about what you can do. The hardware is a means to an end.
“And if we decide to abandon our goals of an outward-focused program going once again beyond low Earth orbit, and for temporary financial exigency optimizing again for low Earth orbit, even if we’re successful, what will we have done? We will have designed another system for low Earth orbit. Well, the shuttle’s better than that, and you don’t have to invest any nonrecurring engineering [funds] to do it.
“Let’s not … in face of temporary exigency, when the going gets tough, let’s not re-optimize for low Earth orbit. What is the point? Because when we do that, we give up two things, both of which are very important to me: Thing One, which I just spoke of, is we give up for the United States an outward-focused program where we go new places, do new things, and one day eventually create new places and create new societies in our future. That’s what we do, as a people. We give that up [if we surrender the vision of going to the moon and Mars]. I don’t want to give that up.
“The Other Thing that we give up if we, the government, optimize another transportation system for low Earth orbit, is, we give up on the engine of capitalism. Because, in the NASA architecture that’s out there today, and we’re busily trying to implement with contracts that are running hard — contractors that are running hard, sorry — that architecture optimizes for the moon. It’s really pretty good for the moon. [It can] be used in low Earth orbit, just like Apollo could be used for Skylab, but it’s by no means optimized for low Earth orbit. Now, from where I sit, that’s a good thing.
“Why is that a good thing? If we have to use it to service the space station, because we’re sure as hell not going to abandon a $100 billion space station and have no means of U.S. government access to it. But we’ve deliberately — and it was deliberate — left open the first run of space transportation, which is crew transportation to low Earth orbit and cargo transportation to low Earth orbit, we’ve left that run open for commercial entities. We’ve left it open to the engine of capitalism, in which I completely and firmly believe. Nothing that the government can do will be done as efficiently as industry can do it, if it lies within the state of the art, and by that I mean the business picture has to close as well as the technical picture. If it lies within the state of the art, industry will do it better, and more efficiently. We do not make efficient decisions in government, we make fair decisions, or we try very hard to do that. Government is optimized for fairness.
“So, if we give up on the moon, and we restrict ourselves to low Earth orbit, we lose two things: we lose the ability to engage the engine of capitalism in letting industry fill in the niche that the government will again have filled by creating an Earth-orbit-only specific transportation system, and we lose our future. And I don’t want to lose either one of those two things.
“So in the face of difficulties that we certainly will incur in a transition year, [garble] we expect a continuing resolution — if we allow temporary exigency to cause us to make short-sighted decisions, we will lose a lot. And I would urge all of us to keep that in mind.
Thank you. I now yield the floor ….
[laughter and applause]
Sen. Bill Nelson
[speaking to Griffin] “You stepped in. We did not know until just moments ago that we were going to be able to get out [from votes in Congress], because they had four votes, all having to do with funding on the Iraq war. And of course that’s a vote that you cannot miss. And, as a matter of fact, two of the presidential [candidates running for election to the White House] came back for the votes. And one of the votes was not necessary because it was, basically, an enhanced GI Bill for veterans. And we thought we were going to have to get a separate vote of the first vote that included that and a bunch of other goodies, including $200 million for NASA. (applause) All of these votes were 60-vote thresholds. And lo and behold, we got 61 votes, and then I headed to the other side of the aisle, and started pigeonholing people like Mel Martinez from Florida, and saying, ‘Mel, do you know what’s in here? You need to change your vote.’ And so it ended up 75 to 22 on that first one.
“And that had a whole bunch of things in it, including the GI Bill, and $200 million that [Sen.] Barbara Mikulski [(D-Md.)] had put in, and this is the emergency funding bill primarily for Iraq, but emergency funding to science, about $1 billion, $200 million of that is to NASA to try to begin to chip away at replacing the funds, $2.8 billion of funds that NASA had to expend in the recovery to flight. Now, if we — since we passed that in the Senate — if we can hold that in the negotiations with the House, and then if we can avoid a presidential veto, at least we’ve got a veto-proof bill that we can override the veto.
“Since you need 2/3rds vote, and that’s just speaking for the Senate. But if all those ifs take place, then what we do is go to the NASA appropriations bill for fiscal year 2009, which starts this Oct. 1. And we’ll try to get at least another $800 million, so that the total funding in this year would be $1 billion extra, on the theory of the testimony of Dr. Griffin that if he can get an extra $1 billion over the president’s request this year, and an extra $1 billion next year, under the new president, he can shorten the gap [between the space shuttle fleet retiring and the first manned flight of the next-generation U.S. spaceship system Orion-Ares] of five years to three years, to the fall and winter of 2013, “That does a number of things for us. First of all, we don’t have to spend as much money paying the Russians [to transport U.S. astronauts and cargo during the gap aboard Russian Soyuz space vehicles]. Second thing is, we don’t have to have the massive layoffs if you’re dealing with three years instead of five years which could extend to six or seven years. And, in other words, we don’t have to lay off Americans at the Kennedy Space Center in order to hire Russians in Moscow to build Soyuzes that we can buy a ride to go to the space station that we’ve spent $75 billion of American money on a $100 billion investment up there.
“Now we tried this last year. And [Sen.] Kay Bailey Hutchison [(R-Texas)] were down on the House side in a meeting with House Republican and Democratic congressmen, in a meeting with the new budget director from the White House, Jim Nussle. And I some of the most eloquent statements that I’ve heard made, on a bipartisan basis, since both of the Republicans and Democrats were speaking in trying to make the case for that extra $1 billion last year. But it was like talking to that wall. And of course, when we — we got the money in the Senate. The question was, once we got that in the conference with the House, since we weren’t going to get the support of the Democratic chairman of the House, [Rep.] David Obey [(D-Wis.)] without the support of the White House, then that deal collapsed.
“So we’re going to try it again. We’re going to try it this year, and see if we can get it. And of course, you’re looking at the guy who is most vigorously exercised in the Congress about this, because of the potential devastation to our folks at the Kennedy Space Center, a devastation that we had lived through once. Now this wouldn’t be as bad as Apollo. But it’s bad enough. And of course, what I’ve been doing, whether its five years, seven years, or hopefully three years that’s the gap, is running around and trying to find out what every little job that we could pull in there [to fill the gap when there is no U.S. space transport program with other work].
“And at the end of the day, [whomever] the new president is, I’m going to be all over them like a June bug in trying to bring in additional NASA work into Kennedy so that we don’t have those economic dislocations.
“Because remember, one of the principles of NASA is 10 healthy centers. And, of course, if you went to the extreme on this thing, you’d have nine healthy centers and you’d have one center on life support. And we just don’t want to go through that again. And we don’t want to – what [Kennedy Space Center Director] Bill Parsons down there is concerned about is that people, to use a Southern expression, at home, they’re down in the mouth. Well, you don’t want your people down in the mouth when you’re getting ready to launch another space shuttle [Saturday]. You want your people up, a lot of esprit de corps, so that they’re doing everything that they can to make it work, and to be safe for all these other launches. Now we’re getting ready to mark up in the — and we’ve had a great deal of conversation going on directly between the two of us [Nelson and Griffin], with Gerstenmaier, and then between our staffs that are talking back and forth with NASA. And as — we’re collaborating with the House, too. We’re going to adopt in the Senate [fiscal 2009] authorization bill a lot of the stuff that has come out in the House bill …
“And the idea from a legislative standpoint is so that we can avoid having to go through all the extra time of appointing a conference committee and so forth. So that, there can be a lot more similarity if bills that we can then negotiate the differences, easy, without having to have a formal conference committee. And then send that back to both of the [congressional] chambers [for final votes of passage in the House and Senate]. And so, you’ll see stuff in there, in the House bill, this is the reauthorization bill. For example, there is nothing magic about October 2010, although that’s when Dr. Griffin wants to stop [space shuttle flights], and he wants to use funding after that to get on with the Constellation Program.
“Well, of course, with the new president, we’re going to try to convince [the next president] to give him [Griffin] another $300 million so he can fly another shuttle flight, and so he can load it up with all those science experiments that ought to be up there, because that’s the reason we have the space station in the first place, is scientific experimentation. So we’re going to do that.
Now, there’s a bunch of things like that. We’re going to authorize additional money, and then we got to go work the appropriations committee. But everything that we’re doing this year, we’ve got to have our eye cocked to Jan. 20 of 2009, and even more so, we’ve got to have our eye cocked on Nov. 4, 2008.
“And I am banking on the fact that I believe that Florida is going to be critical again in this presidential election. And therefore I am going to take this opportunity to educate the two presidential candidates, that if they want to win Florida, this is mightily important.
“Now, I can tell you that I’ve already been trying to educate the two Democratic candidates. And I have spoken to both of them today, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, about the NASA program. And if you read any news accounts of [Sen.] Barak [Obama (D-Ill.), a major Democratic presidential candidate] in Florida yesterday, you will see that he made a different statement. And I thanked him for that this morning, and he said, ‘I’ve been listening to you.’ And I said, ‘I know how to win in Florida.’
“And of course, I’ve been saying the same thing to [Sen.] Hillary [Clinton (D-N.Y.), the other major Democratic presidential candidate] for a long time, and Hillary’s got the best position of all three of them on the space program.
“Now, [Sen. John] McCain [of Arizona, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee] is not exactly a warm and fuzzy guy. [laughter] But I want you to know, I get along with him. And the reason I get along with McCain — and by the way, that’s an interesting commentary. A lot of Democratic senators get along better with McCain, than with [other] Republican senators, because they’re basically jealous of him up to this presidential [election], because McCain’s like a magnet with the press. And the press is always [garble].
“The reason I get along with John McCain is that I just feel that anybody who’s been through what he’s been through, he’s entitled to be prickly. And he is prickly. [laughter] But realizing that, I can figure out how to deal with a porcupine. [laughter] And I have shared thoughts with him before. McCain and I have a mutually respectful relationship, and it is my intention to lean on him pretty hard. A lot of his big supporters are big supporters of mine in Florida.
“And the thing that worries me about John is that John gets into these rigid positions, and it’s hard to get him off of it. And one of his positions is that he wants to freeze domestic nondiscretionary spending, and if we did that, then, we wouldn’t be able to do all this other [space] stuff.
“And if that’s his position, then I’m going to make sure that the people of Florida know that, especially the people of East Central Florida. And so maybe we’ll have a chance to get a little more flexibility out of him, if Florida becomes a key. There’s a Quinnipiac [University] poll out this morning. The Quinnipiac poll says that Hillary is ahead in Florida over McCain by 48 [percent] to 41 [percent], and that McCain is ahead of Obama by 45 to 41. And I could tell you by my gut, since I pretty well understand Florida, that that’s about right. Now that’s a snapshot now. That of course can change. And some of that is reflective of the tenseness in the Democratic Party over a primary [election contest] that’s virtually split, 50-50. So that can change. But that tells you the volatility.
“Similar figures, by the way, in the state of Ohio, on this Quinnipiac poll, guess who I’ve been talking to. [Former senator and astronaut] John Glenn. And I think he is prepared to do the same thing in Ohio, if Ohio became the critical state …
“So we’ve got to inject some politics — and I don’t talk this around the [NASA] administrator, because he’s above politics. [laughter] But the rest of us are not. [laughter] “Yet we want to have a space program. Now, I’m going to sit down – and just let me say a couple more things.
“First of all, it is a great privilege that I have to be in a position of having some kind of ability to steer things. But I am … quick to state that a senator really can’t lead the space program. It’s got to be the president. One of the reasons I took to the Senate floor yesterday, with the [former President] Lyndon Baines Johnson family in the gallery. And my speech about President Johnson was, his critical part, No. 1 as majority leader, passing the NASA Act in the late ’50s, and then secondly, when Kennedy had the vision, he turned it over to Johnson as the vice president. And they had a great NASA administrator, but they knew they had the backing of the White House, and there was a guy in the White House, namely, Vice President Johnson, that had his hands on the situation. And I hope that we can see that model replicated.
“You don’t have to pass a law to do that. I’ve already checked this out. The president can do that. They can set up the National Space Council, in the White House, in the vice president’s office. And I’m certainly going to recommend that, to [whomever] is the next president. But just the privilege that you give me to work on this, day in and day out, as the result of an experience that you all gave me 22 years ago, when [NASA] Administrator Jim Beggs said, ‘I want you to fly’ [as an astronaut in January 1986 on Space Shuttle Columbia as a mission specialist]. And, I’ll tell you, out of that, it’s a transforming experience. And of course it’s an enormously educational experience. And it’s something that you don’t lose. I mean, it’s in my gut. It’s in my natural instinct now, as a result of that experience. And so I’m very, very grateful for that, and because of that I have a responsibility to try to offer whatever talent I may have to keep this wonderful program going, and for it to become the wonderful, exceptional, energizing program that it has been for the American people in the past. And I’m going to give it, and continue to give it, everything that I have. And at the end of the day, that’s what the American people want.
“The American people want to be enthralled. And kids want to be excited. And we want those kids to be excited. Because then they start getting energized about math, and science and technology. And that’s where America, as she competes in the world of this century, that’s where she competes, and stays as a global economic leader – is our ability to produce in technology. What better way than coming out of our space program.
One final caution: there is an inherent characteristic in the space community. It is an inherent human characteristic, that we like to talk to ourselves. We can’t afford that any more.
“We’ve got to talk to the American people. We can’t keep just giving solace to ourselves, and talking about the glory days among ourselves. We’ve got to talk to them. So that will translate into political action in the allocation of dollars in ever increasingly tightened budgetary situations. And so, that’s how I would leave you.
And if I may be excused, we’ve got this vote on the final passage of the farm bill that’s coming up … So I’m going to race back to [Capitol] Hill. And thank you all very much. [applause]