Michael D. Griffin, “Developing the Hardware for Future Space Exploration” - MA Space Grant Consortium Public Lecture at MIT (3/8/2006)

HOFFMAN: Good afternoon, everyone. So it looks like we've pretty much seated as much as possible. So those of you on the side will enjoy the show too. So good afternoon, I'm Jeff Hoffman, Professor in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department and Director of the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium. And as Director of the Massachusetts Space Grant, it's really my great pleasure to welcome you all here today to hear our Annual Space Grant Distinguished Lecturer.

MIT is the leading institution of the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium, which consists of over a dozen colleges and universities, as well as research institutes, museums, spanning the state from Cape Cod to the Berkshires. We're 1 of 52 national space grant organizations supported by NASA in every state, as well as Washington DC and Puerto Rico. Space grant programs vary according to the needs of individual cities, but the overriding purpose of space grant is to encourage students to participate in space-related research and pursue space-related careers, to assist teachers in producing space-related material into their curriculum, and to inform the public about space-related activities.

And here in Massachusetts, for example, we provide fellowship support for dozens of students every year, enabling them to participate in summer programs at NASA centers as well as in space research activities at their own home institutions. Together with the Museum of Science, every fall we put on a Massachusetts Space Day, where hundreds of high school students get to hear about the research done by university students sponsored by Space Grant and then listen to a NASA astronaut talk about spaceflight. A longstanding tradition of the Massachusetts Space Grant is to invite a distinguished lecturer to address the public every spring. Well, it's almost spring. Anyway, in this series, we've had a Nobel Laureate, several aerospace company CEOs, a few NASA associate administrators, senior directors, astronauts, and NASA chief scientists, but never before a NASA administrator, as we have today.

Mike Griffin took over the leadership of NASA nearly one year ago. You can read all about Dr. Griffin's distinguished career in the brochure that was handed out as you came in. And I'm not going to repeat it here.

What was not in the brochure is the fact that Dr. Griffin does not like to stand on ceremony. And hence, Dr. Griffin usually gives way to a much more simple and informal life. And what was also not in the brochure is an insight into the enormous challenges that Mike has been dealing with at NASA. He's trying to lead our country back to the Moon and beyond, recreating the capabilities that we once had back in the time of Apollo, but which we allowed to disappear.

Now, most of you students who are here weren't even alive during the Apollo program. It's ancient history. It's a heroic age. But I know from speaking with a lot of you that the idea that you students can now once again take part personally in the human exploration of the solar system has spread incredible excitement through your ranks.

Remember though, this time we want the exploration to be sustainable so that we don't just go to the Moon a few times and stop, but use it as a stepping-off place to the rest of the solar system. And we have to do it with a relatively constant budget, not with a crash program that was Apollo. And while we're recreating this capability, we have to bring the shuttle back to flight status and operate it safely for another five years while we're completing the construction of the International Space Station, and hopefully service the Hubble Space Telescope one last time, and we have to do our best to maintain the science program that have won NASA worldwide admiration.

Well, by any standards, this is a tall order. Maybe it's trying to put 10 gallons into a 5-gallon can, but Mike has accepted this challenge with determination and with humility. He's certainly is uniquely qualified to lead NASA into this new era, with experience in government, industry, the military, and academia.

He's a true rocket scientist and knows the space business like few others. He's brought about major changes in NASA in just the one year that he's been at the helm. And we'll watch with great interest the continued evolution of the agency.

Mike, I know you give lots of talks to many different audiences, but I doubt if you'll meet up with an audience containing as many absolute space nuts as we have here today. We're impressed by the magnitude of the task ahead. And we wish you success in meeting these challenges.

MIT shares a very long and proud history of cooperation with NASA. And we look forward to working with you to make the vision for space exploration a reality. We're delighted that you've been able to come to speak with us today. And we look forward to hearing what you have to say. Ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome the NASA administrator, Mike Griffin.

[APPLAUSE]

GRIFFIN: Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. Raise your hand in the back if you can hear me, somebody. Great, thanks, worthwhile to check that now and then. Jeff, what time do we need to be done by?

HOFFMAN: Well, we'll have a cab waiting for you at 4:30. It's only 10 past 3:00. And we have time for questions.

GRIFFIN: So we're good. Okay, great. I just didn't--

HOFFMAN: I'll make sure you [INAUDIBLE] time.

GRIFFIN: Sure, I just didn't want to rush if everyone had to be out, or--

HOFFMAN: [INAUDIBLE]

GRIFFIN: Good. Thanks for the introduction. That's way better than I deserve by a whole lot. I only have so much distinguishedness to go in me. And I have to save most of it for Congress. So you'll only get a little bit of any distinguishedness that I might have to go around.

I wanted to talk with you all today about our exploration architecture, how we intend to return to the Moon, how it fits as we fast forward to go to Mars, a little bit maybe in Q&A about why it is, what it is. I could almost say I'm here with NASA, so read my view graphs, but I'm not going to read them to you. I'm going to talk about what's important about each one, because they're going to be on your website.

And you're going to have those to read more carefully yourselves. And I've always hated presentations where somebody sat and read the view graphs to me. So with that, let's step forward.

Why are we doing this? As I've had occasion to remark a couple of times today to some students who have asked the question, you know, what is all this about, the vision for space exploration comes about, sadly, in the wake of the loss of our second space shuttle, Columbia, in flight, and the realization on the part of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board that what we do in spaceflight is expensive, difficult, and dangerous, but that it is also strategic for the United States in many different ways. And we should not cease.

But if we're going to do it, the goals of the enterprise have to be worthy of the costs, the risks, the difficulty. We need loftier goals, in Hal Gehman's words, and that flying the shuttle to the space station can, at most, be a step along the way. It is not the goal, as it had been for the last 30 years and more in the American space program.

Most of that, and in fact much more, was captured in Chapter Nine of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report. I think we are, as a nation, indebted to Admiral Gehman and the people who assisted him in going beyond the proximate cause of the loss of the orbiter and getting to deeper issues. I think without that, I would not be standing here today, because the president listened. His assistants in the administration listened. And they crafted a far-reaching policy for NASA that goes beyond the shuttle, and the station, and what we are doing today, or in any given administration.

After the kind of discussion and debate that you would expect-- and I was privileged to be a part of that debate as someone outside NASA, and therefore an expert witness. Once I joined NASA, my IQ went way down. And I'm no longer considered an expert. But while I was outside NASA, I was privileged to be part of that debate.

And after a year or two of discussion, this vision for space exploration for NASA and the civil space program was adopted by the Congress, and in fact, hugely ratified. It was adopted unanimously in the final passage of the 2005 Space Act Authorization for NASA, in which it is declared substantively that the goals of the US space program are as you see them here.

We will finish the Space Station. We will use the shuttle to do so. We will retire the shuttle in 2010. We will develop a replacement capability to put humans in orbit and beyond, as well as cargo that will substantially replace the capabilities of the space shuttle, but in a different way.

We will return to the Moon no later than 2020. And we will work to extend human presence across the solar system. In concert, we will implement a sustained and affordable balance between the human and robotic program. And we will use all this to promote international and commercial participation.

Why do we do it? For me, there are many reasons. Some of them are captured here on this slide. The principal ones are captured. But I will say that for me, bullets one and two are the most important.

The human curiosity that leads to the desire to explore is quite literally wired into our DNA. All of us here in North America or in the Americas are the descendants of people who chose to leave their homes and come here. In fact, all of us who aren't living in Africa are the descendants of people who chose to come somewhere else.

It is wired into us. And when humans could only master the land, that's what we did. When we learned to master the sea, that's what we did. The 20th century was about the conquest of the air. It will be a while before we can say that we have conquered space, if we ever do, so but it is something that makes us what we are.

We can't afford to spend a significant portion of our national treasure on it, but we spend some. And I think we should. We spend 0.7% of our budget on it, $0.15 for the average person for every day. I've said this several times, because it usually gets at least a chuckle, but I spend more than that on chewing gum. And every time I hit a golf ball into a lake, I use up my month of NASA's budget. So we don't spend a lot on space exploration, but it is not an expenditure that we should do without.

The second reason, of course, is that, well, I am an American. I am proud to be one. I think that our nation is, and should be, and should continue to be a leader among nations. I think the more opportunities that we have to partner with other nations, to create allies rather than adversaries, make our nation, make the human species stronger and better.

Space exploration affords us an opportunity for benign cooperative American leadership on a basis that I believe, given our stature in the world, should be and should continue to be a first among equals, but recognizing that we do have equals, but that this is something we want to do and want to do together. I think it strengthens our nation, strengthens our society, strengthens the species. And if there were no other value that we got from space exploration other than the cooperative benefits from working with other nations in the world, I believe it would justify itself on those merits alone. That's a personal belief, but it is mine.

Why are we going back to the Moon? I get asked that question at nearly every venue at which I pop up. And so I'll just preemptively answer it.

We want to go to Mars and beyond. We've been to the Moon, so why are we going back? Well first of all, yes, people have been to the Moon for a cumulative time of one man month on a landmass the size of Africa. I don't think that we can claim to have explored the Moon.

I personally find the Moon to be an interesting place from a scientific perspective, and especially from an engineering perspective in terms of what we will learn to do with it in learning how to fly in space, and live in space, and work off planet. A long time ago, I believe it was Craft Iraqi, one of the Penamundi pioneers who said that, if God had wanted us, had wanted man to explore space, he would have given us a moon. He was tongue in cheek. He knew we had a moon.

So I think it is important to use that moon, both for what may be there that we don't know about, for what is there that we do know about, and for what we can learn about living off planet before we extend our reach further. As I said earlier today and have said in other venues, before we can go to Mars, we need to learn how to assemble a space-station-sized payload, 400, 500 metric tons in low Earth orbit without taking 15 years to do it. We need to do it in a few months.

And before we can go to Mars, we need to know how to seal a crew inside a submarine, tell them to push off and not show their heads again for two and a half years. We can't do that today, not with any certainty that they in fact will come back alive. And until we can do it, we aren't ready to go to Mars. We will learn to do it by voyaging to the Moon and living on the Moon.

And again, the Moon is interesting of itself. There are fundamental issues of astronomy, physics, astrobiology, historical geology which we may be able to settle in utilizing the Moon. What we've proposed is an architecture-- and this was a discussion about our space architecture.

What we've proposed is an architecture that, with as little fuss and bother as possible, and making use to the maximum extent that we could do it possibly the things that we already owned and creating the fewest new things, does the following. It meets our human spaceflight goals. It offers us a reasonably significant advance over Apollo in terms of crew time on the Moon for the money. It is sized to operate with reasonable efficiency at two lunar emissions per year, six months apart, sort of like a space station crew rotation cycle, but of course could do more.

It leaves behind 125-metric-ton launch capacity for going to Mars. And you'll appreciate that if I need 400 or 500 tons to go to Mars, that's four or five launches of this vehicle, even allowing for some tare weight, as opposed to how many dozen space shuttle and Soyuz and Progress launches to build the space station-- a much better approach.

This is a much safer system. The probabilities of loss of crew are cited there. It does meet our agreed upon international obligations for servicing the space station, provides an orderly transition to the shuttle workforce, and can be bought by the yard, allows us-- pardon me, allows go-as-you-pay budget planning.

Lunar surface activities offer us an early demonstration of human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. We learn how to operate away from the Earth, but only three days from home. I think no one will be surprised if I say that there are things about living off planet that we don't yet know despite having had six voyages to the Moon 35 years ago.

I believe we should keep our hubris in check, recognizing that we need to learn a few things. We certainly can conduct numerous scientific investigations with the Moon as a natural laboratory. One of the most important things in developing a more efficient spaceflight architecture will be learning to, in quotes, "live off the land," in space or on the planets and asteroids that we visit.

In places, the lunar crust is as much as 40% oxygen by weight. It's at least 15% by weight most everywhere that we've sampled. And the oxygen is available for human use by heating it up.

We need to learn how to do that in an automated fashion, because oxygen is 7/8 by weight of the most efficient chemical propulsion combination we're going to be using for a while, liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. So if you can-- and voyaging to and from the Moon, the mass fraction required for propellant is about 50%. So if 50% of your mass in space is propellant and 7/8 of that is liquid oxygen that you can get from the Moon rather than hauling it up from the surface of the Earth, I would suggest that one of the earliest economic returns from utilizing the Moon would be to generate and ship liquid oxygen. It's going to be a while before we learn how to do it, but I think we will. And of course, we begin to establish an Antarctic-style outpost one mission at a time, and also testing of the techniques and technologies that we're going to need to go to Mars, and pass that.

Now, in contrast to Apollo, we are planning an architecture that offers global access, because to scientists and engineers both, the polar regions of the Moon offer some of the most interesting sights, whereas Apollo, as you can see from this chart, was restricted to the near-equatorial band. The far side, of course, is also of interest. One of the more interesting places is near the lunar south pole on the far side in the Aitken basin, where within close proximity to one another, there are sites for possible lunar bases that have access to 24-hour-a-day-- well, full-time sunlight, as well as to permanently shadowed craters.

There is evidence from Lunar Prospector and Clementine of elevated quantities of hydrogen. And if we can find both hydrogen and oxygen on the Moon, then that will be the germ of a truly valuable space economy. We won't find it out without going there. And so some of our early plans are focused on the Aitken base and in Shackleton crater.

We will also need many different things besides merely the transportation to get to the Moon. Power systems, communications, rovers, habitat, laboratory modules-- I'll talk a little bit about those in a moment in the context of international and commercial opportunities. Let me review the flight plan with you. I think maybe many of you here who do have an interest in space-- and if anybody does, it's MIT students and faculty. 33 of your compatriots have been NASA astronauts, including my host today. A good portion of you may be looking at the hardware that one day some of you will fly.

So the flight plan starts with a heavy lift launch that allows us to take the Earth departure stage and the lander into low Earth orbit. We're utilizing a combined Earth orbit rendezvous and lunar orbit rendezvous scheme. For a variety of reasons, it seemed to us to come out ahead in the architectural studies that we did. And following the heavy lifter, if that gets to orbit safely, we would launch the crew. Crew docks, departs from Earth orbit, flies to the Moon, deploys into low Earth orbit, leaves the crew exploration behind without crew in at this time, and lands on the Moon. Once on the Moon, you do what you're going to do, eventually come home, rendezvous, dock, return, return to Earth-- nothing magic here and not much that you didn't see in Apollo.

One thing, as I say in every venue in which I give this demonstration, the heavy lifter, and the crew launch vehicle, and the crew exploration vehicle are probably pretty solid. If you look at those, you'll see the designs will be flying in just a few years. As I commented earlier to my old friend Ed Crawley, don't fall in love with the lunar lander. In fact, don't even do any heavy dating, because what the lunar lander is at this point is a weight allocation. And we don't want to commit too early to what the systems designed for the lander ought to be. And in fact, I think Ed and some of his students are taking a look at that as one independent body for us.

But the CEV, while not very elegant, offered a number of advantages to us. First of all, we ended up deciding on the Apollo shape, the outer mode lines. We have an extensive aero database on that. The five and a half meters there has since been downsized to five meters to make it fit within the-- well actually, there were several issues. One was the weight margin that we wanted to have with the launch vehicle. Another was if we have to do a launch abort, the five-and-a-half-meter base diameter gave us a fairly large projected area, which produced a fair amount of aerodynamic drag in getting off the launch vehicle. And in order to reduce that to tolerable levels that we could deal with with an escape rocket, we shrunk it from five and a half to five meters.

But it still offers a quite significant increase in volume from Apollo. We can carry six people to low Earth orbit, per the terms of NASA's Authorization Act. So we can service the space station, as required. We can carry four to the Moon.

As part of a larger mission, this can serve as the vehicle to get the crew up and back at the start or end of a Mars mission. It offers us the flexibility, the service-- we expect to have a design in which the service module can fly by itself with unpressurized cargo or operate in a space tug capacity. We are putting forward a system that we think has a pretty good amount of flexibility to do what we need to do with getting people and medium cargo up and down from space for the next several decades.

And when I say several decades, I think all of you here appreciate that aerospace systems generally, from DC3s and B52s, to Soyuz, and space shuttles, and things like that, expendable launch vehicles, tend to have a very long operational lifetime, decades. They're expensive to design, expensive to build, expensive to keep up. And we don't change them rapidly. So the designs you see for crew and cargo heavy lift are going to be the designs that will take us to Mars. Oops, pardon me.

One of our requirements is that the CEV must be capable of servicing the space station, which was one of the things that fell out of our mixed lunar orbit rendezvous and Earth orbit rendezvous scheme. With that scheme, of course, the first step in any mission to the Moon-- the first step is the launch of the heavy cargo. Provided that goes well, we then launch the crew.

But the crucial thing is we stage through low Earth orbit. Well, if we're staging through low Earth orbit, the crew exploration vehicle can go to the space station. Or it can dock with the heavy lifter in the lunar cargo.

How does it know the difference? Like the old joke about the thermos bottle, right-- it keeps hot stuff hot, cold stuff cold. How does it know the difference?

The CEV is basically a vehicle designed to fly from the surface of the Earth into low Earth orbit or into cis-lunar space. That's what it does. And whether it goes to the station or goes to the Moon is a matter of-- largely indifferent matter to the design. So we can meet our obligations in that vein at no real additional-- in fact, we were not able to find any significant requirements to serve the space station that were not there in terms of going to the Moon, much like Apollo. Apollo serviced three Skylab missions, because a vehicle which could fly to the Moon could also fly to the Skylab.

The launch systems, of course, are the real key to the transportation. They are of two stripes, 125-metric-ton heavy lifter and a 25-metric-ton crew lifter. By the way, the heavy lifter is man rated. And if one only wanted to go to an equatorial region for a particular reason, then the heavy lifter alone with the CEV on top could get you there. But if you want to go to the polar regions, you need more lifting capacity.

It will not be lost upon you that these vehicles are derived from shuttle systems. The use of the shuttle solid rocket booster and external tanks is clear. So there are two new elements in our architecture, an upper stage for the crew launch vehicle and a CEV.

We will be doing things like extending the length of the external tank, and quite possibly extending the length of the solid rocket boosters. But fundamentally, they are systems we've already paid almost all of the non-recurring engineering development costs in order to create. And we're trying to make use of them as we go forward.

I've basically said most of the points on these charts. The third bullet down says that we're building a new LOX-hydrogen upper stage. And it says that we are going to use a space shuttle main engine. And that's up in the air. We might use the space shuttle main engine. We might use the Apollo-era J-2 LOX-hydrogen engine, because the shuttle main engine requires development to do an air start and is a little big for the burn out thrust, so we're considering a couple of possibilities there. But the payload capacities are in the range that are indicated.

For the heavy lift cargo vehicle, we'll add a segment onto the solid rocket boosters. By the way, the five-segment solid rocket booster has, in fact, already been tested. The heavy lifter as such can put 106 metric tons to low Earth orbit by itself. And if you add the Earth departure stage for the lunar capability, then you can put 125 metric tons in low Earth orbit, of which 55 metric tons can go to the Moon. And of course, it's built out of the same man-rated components as we're using today, so it can be used for crew if you want.

Earth departure stage is the moral equivalent of the Saturn S-IVB upper stage, third stage used in the Apollo era, a little bigger. The Apollo-era model could carry right around 50 metric tons to the Moon, which was-- that was the trans-lunar injection mass on Apollo 17. This will do about 55 metric tons. So we pick up a little bit. The extra is very nice to have. I think I've already said everything on this chart.

Lunar lander will deliver, in their initial sizing, four crew to the surface. I have no doubt that more could be packed in if one wished. It does offer global access. We are sizing the whole thing to be able to land 21 metric tons dry weight, net of fuel, to get down.

And that's-- as I commented earlier, don't fall in love with the configuration. The real thing you want to know is that the architecture will let you land 20 plus metric tons. We want to figure out the lander design that utilizes that in the maximally efficient way.

Early on, we're planning on for an ascent and a decent stage. And so we want the ascent stage to be as small as possible, because it truly must be thrown away, whereas the descent stage will be left behind and should be designed or designable in such a way as to offer a lot of leave behind in terms of building up a lunar base, because we're never going to find any resources on the Moon more valuable than the tanks, and the metal, and the electronics that we take down with us in the descent stage. So we are thinking about those things. In the slightly longer run, we want the lunar lander ascent and descent stage to be one stage, and to be reusable, because we want to park it either on the surface or in low lunar orbit, and refuel it either from in situ resources developed on the Moon or from a fuel that is shipped out from Earth.

But we don't need to bring a lander every time. We should think about bringing fuel, if we have to bring anything. So we're not ready to commit yet to the design of the lander, but this is one concept.

Earlier on in the bottom bullet, we were thinking about LOX-methane for the ascent stage propulsion, because there is good transferability of that to the Mars ascent stage because Bob Zubrin and others have investigated the utility of extracting methane propellant from the Martian atmosphere in a catalytic reaction that uses only a little bit of hydrogen. And that's a neat thing. And we may well do it.

There are also other in situ resource extraction possibilities for Mars. So I don't think we're ready to commit to LOX-methane, but in any case, we were planning on using it for the ascent stage of the lunar vehicle, and removed it from consideration, because early on, the development cost was going to be quite high. And when we looked at it, it didn't offer any payload advantage for the Moon. And doing something now for Mars that doesn't offer a payload advantage for the Moon didn't seem to be a fiscally appropriate thing to do, so we will drop back to another propellant combination, maybe LOX-ethanol, possibly hypergolics for lunar ascent.

There are a number of commercial opportunities. And we want to avail ourselves everywhere we can of the option of purchasing services and goods on a commercial arm's-length transaction basis. It is in that fashion that we might have some opportunity to help create a true space economy rather than having everything we do be the result of a government prime contract.

We intend to purchase launch services and communication services as soon as they're available. And in fact, I think all of you know that we have allocated-- I hope the Congress sustains. We have allocated a half billion dollars over the next five years to help serve as seed money for entrepreneurial or even larger firms who choose to invest in creating a truly commercial cargo and crew carrying capability to be able to service the space station.

The space station logistics market is a market that we are willing to, and in fact, eager to turn over to industry because we believe that it is incontrovertibly true that, if something can be done by industry at all, it can be done cheaper than having the government do it, most estimates would say at least a factor of five or six times cheaper. And we'd like to be able to take advantage of that, so we're trying to help bring it about. But as we move forward to the Moon, there are rovers to be built, power supplies to be emplaced, communications systems to be orbited around the Moon, navigation systems to be put in place. There are a lot of services and goods that we believe we can contract with industry to supply on an arm's-length basis and where they might be able to sell residual services to other enterprises. We hope that can come about.

Similarly, there are many opportunities, some of the same opportunities for international cooperation, where other nations can elect to participate with us in going to the Moon so that, in exchange for a seat in the lunar lander, maybe they help to build and emplace a habitat. Maybe they help to provide communications, or a rover, or power supplies, or an automated cargo lander, or, or, or, or.

We have tried within NASA to offer an architecture that does a couple of things. First of all, it does the minimum necessary to meet the presidentially stated and congressionally approved objectives. It does not do more. I think we do not want to return to the day where NASA was going to just do everything.

We designed an architecture which does what we were told to do, does not do more, but leaves an awful lot of places, a lot of interfaces, a lot of hooks and scars where either other nations or commercial enterprises can join in to make it grow from a slender reed to a branching tree. The architecture, however, that we've advanced does the crucial thing that only, in this era, only the government can do, and only the United States government can do. And that is provide robust, we believe, safe and reliable transportation for a significant number of people to low Earth orbit and then take them on to the Moon.

That is the crucial step with which we believe an international program can be forged, and without which nothing can happen. And we believe that, in this era, only the United States can do it. And so that's the path that NASA will do. This is a chart for budget geeks that says our plan fits within, at least in the near term, fits within the budget profile we've been told to expect.

This is the chart that is sort of my semi get off the stage chart, but captures what I started out by saying. And this is a couple of quotes from me that, again, [INAUDIBLE] people abstracted from speeches I gave and put into the presentation. So I will let you read them later.

And this is a quote from Gene Cernan, which I think is hard to read without a certain sense of humility. I believe that great nations do indeed do great and ambitious things, and that this is something that the United States must do to be a great nation and a Great Society in the 21st century and beyond. And that's why I took the job.

Thank you for your time and attention. I'm yours for questions and for 50 minutes, according to Jeff's schedule.

[APPLAUSE]

HOFFMAN: We have a microphone here which we can pass around so everybody will be able to hear the questions. So start raising your hand. And we'll try to get things going.

GRIFFIN: Yes?

AUDIENCE: Is it on-- yeah. So thank you very much. This was very good. I'm with the MathWorks in the Natick, Massachusetts. And of course, I have a question about the design process. I read somewhere that you are taking a different approach to design than the traditional spiral-based approach. You want to have a much more direct approach to designing the systems that will eventually take us back to the Moon.

Could you elaborate on that a little bit, how you think to achieve that, in particular just to contrast it? If you look at the Joint Strike Fighter program, they took a deliberately spiral-based approach. And you chose another. Is there a particular reason for that? So I guess there is two questions.

GRIFFIN: Well, other than the fact that the GAO published a report saying that the Joint Strike Fighter was overweight, underpowered, short-legged, and couldn't carry much weaponry-- that's just the kind of program I want to emulate. Spiral development is a term that to my knowledge-- and I might well be wrong-- originated in the software world, where one does a continual iteration between capabilities and requirements to grow them ever greater and has been used in the acquisition world. And the buzz word may have gone in the other direction for all I really know-- and has been used in the DOD acquisition world. You know, I think that's a fine approach when you're talking about production systems or systems that you're designing to go into production, where you'll have a lot of units, a lot of users, and expect to have a long-term evolution of requirements.

I would like to get to a point in the space business where we have enough demand, and are producing enough units with enough different and growing requirements, to be able to say that I thought a spiral development acquisition approach would be useful. It was my judgment that the space business for the next couple of decades will not be that type of business. And it was, frankly, my judgment that we would be lucky to get one spiral, that what we should do is build a system that will meet the stated objectives in the simplest and most direct manner possible, using as much as possible the heritage from components which had already been developed and paid for. And if we absolutely had no other choice, develop some new thing.

There is a Japanese phrase, the nail that sticks out is hammered down, that I learned from my roommate in college a million years ago. And there are times when you want to take a bold new step, and times when maybe you don't want to attract quite so much attention to yourself. We are trying to re-vector the human spaceflight program of the United States from one which has been focused on low Earth orbit for the last 30 years to going to the Moon and beyond. And I chose not to put any developmental-- I've got enough political hurdles and enough mental hurdles in changing the paradigm of what we do with civil spaceflight in this nation. I did not want to have developmental hurdles.

Now, I've spent years doing one new thing after another. I would love nothing more than new developmental challenges. I can't resist, at heart, being a system engineer. It's what I was born to do. But I restrained myself, because we have other problems right now. So that's why it looks the way it looks. Miss in the front row, the red whatever?

[LAUGHTER]

I don't know if it was a sweater, or a skirt, or a blouse. I can't see that well from back here.

AUDIENCE: Has NASA been considering low level development of the Atlas or Delta, not as a primary CEV carrier, but as a backup to the shuttle drive to assure human access to space?

GRIFFIN: Well, the five-meter diameter of the CEV allows it to fit nicely on an EELV, an Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, the Atlas or the Delta, just from a fit point of view. The EELVs would have to grow a bit to accommodate a fully fueled CEV. Their capability to the orbits that we need to go to is in the neighborhood of 20 metric tons or less.

I don't know that we can get a CEV down that low. Let me let me just remind everybody who-- that the Apollo system, carrying only three people to the Moon, was a 30-metric-ton vehicle, right on the nose. Technology has moved on. Structures have gotten lighter. Electronics doesn't weigh so much, da, da, da, da, da.

But getting a fully fueled and loaded CEV down to a weight that the EELV can carry, probably something we can't do. So the EELV is going to maybe have to add another E in front of it for Evolved Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle before it could be really useful for us. They may very well do that.

And some of the hardest things to change are things like-- that would be conceptually the simplest, like the base diameter. So our vehicle envelope is compatible with theirs, but at present, there is not a direct utility of the EELV family for a crew launch backup, not to say that there could not be. And we're open to that possibility later on.

There are some other issues there. The EELVs don't offer a very robust abort strategy. The trajectories that they fly are rather lofted for efficiency. If I were-- and I used to do-- designing trajectories, I would want a more lofted trajectory also, but then that makes a very high G load in getting off the vehicle at certain points in flight. And we really would rather not kill crew if we could avoid it.

And sometimes launch vehicles will fail. In fact, 1 in 50 times or so, launch vehicles will fail. So you have to assume that they will fail. And you have to have a robust abort. The EELV in its present form would not provide that.

EELVs today are not man-rated. I mean, the Air Force would be the first to tell you that. Why should they man rate them? We would have to spend a good amount of money to man rate the vehicles. And the Air Force is not going to do that for free.

If we man rate the vehicles, we either have to have two production lines, which there isn't a sane production engineer in the world who wants to do, or everybody is going to have to buy a man-rated vehicle even for an unmanned launch, which of course addresses the DOD requirements. They will not be real fond of paying the extra bill required to buy copies of a man-rated launch vehicle because we needed it to be man rated.

So as a backup or emergency capability, sure, I'd like to reach a state where one day we could do that. I really would. But as a thing that you do routinely, there are considerably-- there are sound reasons of programatics and fiscal policy that would argue to keep those lines separate. And that was the argument that we made in crafting this architecture.

And it was, believe me, fully accepted, because people below the top line do kind of understand that there are these differences. And then after we got it all done and got approval for this architecture, some of the senior ranking Air Force guys to me and said, thanks, thanks a lot. We really don't want you messing around in our production line. You'd be stupid to use the EELV. And so we said, okay.

Now, we may very well use it for cargo deployment. In fact, I would hope to. But as a crew carrier, it's not-- I'm not saying it can't work. And if you spend money on it, you can make it work. I mean, you can make anything work. But as it is today, it's not that well-suited. Did I answer your question?

AUDIENCE: Yes, thank you.

GRIFFIN: Okay-- there is an awful lot of stuff that goes into these engineering trades. You know, it's just really annoying. In the back?

AUDIENCE: This whole exploration of Moon and Mars is wonderful, commendable, and expensive, as is the National Space Station, as is the space shuttle. And I'm happy to give you my $0.30 instead of $0.15 to pay for this, but most of the nation is not. And so you have been moving forward with this within somewhat of a static budget, meaning there are concomitant reductions in other of NASA's operations. And I'm wondering, what are the painful cuts that you need to approve in order to do this within a static budget, and in particular, the ones about the Earth monitoring over the next century?

GRIFFIN: Well Earth monitoring is a NOAA responsibility, not a NASA responsibility. We helped develop the technology, but we don't pay for the Earth monitoring systems, by and large, unless they're research activities. And the Earth Science program is something I'm happy to say where I have restored budget since returning to NASA rather than taking it away. And you can look at the record on that.

Your statement is obviously pejorative. But I will try not to address it in that manner. The money that we're spending on NASA probably will not go up and probably will not go substantially down, because there are political objectives and goals that go well above my head that would act to keep it from going up substantially or down substantially.

And the science program at NASA is valued for itself and will not go substantially up or substantially down. I would argue that the next-- that actually, the highest priority would be to restore some help to aeronautics, but the aeronautics budget is not currently as robust as I would like it to be, entirely apart from any considerations of space exploration, but having to do with other policy objectives. So the net of that statement is that we spend a certain amount of money on human spaceflight in the country, and probably will continue to do so, because the NASA top line in constant dollars isn't going to get altered a lot, and neither is the science portion.

So the vision for space exploration is largely about, what do we do with the money we spend on human spaceflight? I and many others believe it is strategic and that it is important to the United States to do it. Many disagree. I fully understand that. But the argument is that, if we are going to spend this money on human spaceflight, then exploring space beyond low Earth orbit is a more productive, more strategic, more important use of the money than is remaining in Earth orbit and being confined to the space station.

I must disagree with your assertion that seemed to me to say that most people did not support these objectives. I actually was a little bit surprised, but the Gallup folks ran a poll in December that I thought was unusually well-worded. They got beyond the usual rather coarse policy sampling that yields a rather ambiguous answer.

And they phrased the question in the following way. Given that the budget for four NASA remains less than 1% of the federal budget-- and currently we're at 0.7%. Given that it remains at less than 1%, do you strongly support, support, are indifferent about, are mildly against, or strongly against-- and then they listed the goals of the vision for exploration, return to the Moon, go to Mars, all that. 75% of the population either supported or strongly supported those goals given the precondition.

And actually, it was about 77%. I'm rounding down. And the spectrum of approval was gender-indifferent and political-party-indifferent to within the accuracy of the sampling.

So when people understand, most people-- I would offer from informal sampling, that when I just talked to casual observers, most people believe that the space program uses an amount of money somewhat comparable to DOD. It's amazing how, you talk to people, they'll say-- you know, what do you think we get at NASA? And they say, oh, what half of what DOD gets? And I tell them 4%. And they're stunned. I tell them that we spend less than 1% of the budget on NASA, and they think it's pocket change. It's not an issue for them.