On Wednesday, former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, 73, put forward a deferential but determined countenance as he addressed a House subcommittee that was conducting a hearing on NASA's Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon.
“I will be direct," Griffin said. "In my judgment, the Artemis Program is excessively complex, unrealistically priced, compromises crew safety, poses very high mission risk of completion, and is highly unlikely to be completed in a timely manner even if successful.”
Essentially, Griffin told the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, NASA could not afford to faff around with a complex, partly commercial plan to put humans back on the Moon, with an eye toward long-term settlement. Instead, he said, the agency must get back to the basics and get to the Moon as fast as possible. China, which has a competing lunar program, must not be allowed to beat NASA and its allies back to the Moon. The space agency, he said, needed to "restart" the Moon program and chuck out all of the commercial space nonsense.
The Griffin plan
The House members in attendance never pressed Griffin for details about this plan, but they are outlined in his written testimony. It's an enlightening read for anyone who wants to understand where some traditional space advocates would take the US space program if they had their way. It may not be entirely theoretical, as Griffin could be angling for a comeback as NASA administrator if Donald Trump is elected president.
In Griffin’s case, he would return the country to the cozy confines of 2008, just before the era of commercial space took off and when he was at the height of his power before being removed as NASA administrator. Griffin's plan for an accelerated lunar mission, in short, calls for:
Two launches of the Space Launch System Block II rocket
A Centaur III upper stage
An Orion spacecraft
A two-stage, storable-propellant lunar lander
This architecture would support a crew of four people on the lunar surface for seven days, Griffin said. "The straightforward approach outlined here could put US-led expeditions on the Moon beginning in 2029, given bold action by Congress and expeditious decision-making and firm contractor direction by NASA," he concluded.
With this plan, Griffin is essentially returning NASA to the Constellation Program that Griffin helped create in 2005 and 2006. The spacecraft (Orion) is the same, and the rocket (SLS Block II instead of Ares V) is similar. The proposed lunar lander looks somewhat like the Altair lunar lander. He is trying to put the band back together, relying on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to get astronauts back to the Moon in a quick and efficient manner.
The problem with Griffin's plan is that it failed miserably 15 years ago. The independent Augustine Commission, which reviewed NASA's human spaceflight plans in 2009, found that “[t]he US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practices of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." And that is probably putting it politely.
There are some huge fictions in Griffin's plan. One is that there would be two SLS Block II rockets ready to launch in 2029. Recall that it took 12 years and $30 billion to develop the Block I version of the rocket. The earliest NASA expects an interim version, Block 1B, to be ready is 2028. But magically, NASA will have two builds of the more advanced Block II rocket (with more powerful side-mounted boosters) ready by 2029.
Then there is the lunar lander. It has not been designed. It is not funded. And if it were built through the cost-plus acquisition strategy outlined by Griffin, it undoubtedly would cost $10 to $20 billion and take a decade based on past performance. A reasonable estimate of Griffin's plan, based on contractor performance with Orion (in development since 2005) and the SLS rocket, is that if NASA's budget roughly doubled, humans might land on the Moon by the late 2030s.
Commercial space sucks, Griffin says
One of the ironies of the career of Mike Griffin is that, at the direction of the George W. Bush administration, he helped launch the commercial space revolution. Griffin created the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, program in 2006; it funded the development of cargo spacecraft by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences. It is no exaggeration to say that this program and its successor in 2008 to fund cargo supply missions to the International Space Station saved SpaceX. Without them, the company founded by Elon Musk would probably not exist today.
But even before he left NASA in early 2009, Griffin was already turning on the commercial space industry. He did not support NASA's funding of companies because he did not believe they were putting enough "skin in the game" as a part of their fixed-price contracts. Griffin ended up opposing the creation of the "commercial crew" program that ultimately led to the Crew Dragon vehicle that broke NASA's dependence on Russia for rides to the International Space Station.
"The plan to use commercial capabilities certainly departed from what I saw as the correct path," Griffin said in 2013. "In our view, activating a crew provision would come only after substantial—even enormous—progress had been made on cargo. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk. We set the COTS agreements up initially to allow for money to be invested in crew development. But in our plan, we certainly weren’t going to invest in crew development until cargo capability had been amply demonstrated."
Griffin has also called the money NASA spent on cargo and crew services provided by SpaceX "excessive." Griffin has carried forward this animus toward SpaceX and the US commercial space industry—which the present-day NASA deputy administrator has called "the envy of the world"—into the present day.
"The fundamental flaw in the Artemis acquisition approach is the assumption that the US government can and should leverage so-called 'commercial space' for national purposes and that this paradigm is applicable to human spaceflight," he wrote in his prepared statement.
This is an interesting viewpoint given that SpaceX's Crew-7 mission launched on a Dragon in September, and a private mission, Axiom-3, is due to launch later today. This is just the mix of government and commercial missions flying on a private spacecraft that Griffin contends is not feasible.
Cancel the contracts
As part of his plan, Griffin says the contracts NASA has awarded to SpaceX and Blue Origin should be "terminated" for the convenience of the government. "To continue programs that we know will not achieve our goals distracts us from what must be done and damages NASA’s and the nation’s reputation, even if they are being executed for free."
This is rich. When the Obama administration sought to cancel the Constellation contracts in 2009, Griffin and others fought hard to pay termination costs to the contractors, estimated at about $1 billion. NASA's deputy administrator at the time, Lori Garver, describes this incident in her book Escaping Gravity. "I was incredulous that any non-contractual assurance would have been enough for company CEOs to take on hundreds of millions of dollars in liability on behalf of their shareholders—even if the promise had been made by the NASA Administrator himself."
Griffin is not wrong when he characterizes NASA's present plans for Artemis as "complex." They are. They require SpaceX, and eventually Blue Origin, to develop large and sophisticated rockets and spacecraft, prove out the capability to store and transfer cryogenic fuels in orbit, and perform myriad rendezvous and docking operations in Earth and lunar orbit. NASA's current timeline for a 2026 lunar landing is not at all realistic, but 2028 does seem possible.
There will undoubtedly be teething pains for Artemis. But the plan initially developed by Administrator Jim Bridenstine during the Trump administration, and then advanced by Administrator Bill Nelson under the Biden administration, is a nice bit of bipartisan policy that brings together the traditional and commercial space industries in the United States, and it has added a strong element of international partnerships through the Artemis Accords.
To chuck this all out of the window for an uber-expensive dash to the Moon that would be nothing more than Apollo part two, and completely unsustainable, makes no sense. Who cares if China lands two taikonauts on the Moon before NASA later this decade or in the early 2030s? I would give that a low probability of happening, as China will have technical and funding problems, too. But even if it happens, China isn't going to establish "norms" on the Moon with a single two-day mission. Those norms will be set by the nations that go to the Moon and then send a fleet of spacecraft over time.
That is the future that NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin are trying to bring about. They're looking to move away from a few titanic launches of entirely expendable spacecraft that establish nothing of permanence on the Moon. They want to develop reusable launchers, in-space refueling, and reusable spacecraft and landers. It won't happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But that is the way one ushers in a new era of affordable spaceflight in the 21st century—by looking forward to what is possible, not back at what worked six decades ago but was wholly unsustainable.
