I have to admit to feeling a bit flummoxed every now and then by a device intended to improve my quality of life -- like the television remote control. I’m looking at a blank screen because when I hit the power button, the TV blinks on, but the content supposedly streaming through the cable in my wall is nowhere to be found.
Being human -- i.e. occasionally stupid and irrational -- I try the on/off button a bunch more times, then punch in a couple of combinations using some colored tabs perched like crown jewels at the top of the remote before giving up. Not worth it, I decide, even if I am curious how NBC followed the devotion of its entire Friday night news broadcast to Tim Russert’s death with coverage Sunday morning on “Meet the Press,” which Russert hosted before his sudden demise on Friday.
Staying on the edge is something I find myself less inclined to be concerned with as I approach 50. (Wasn’t it easier and less stressful to just walk across the room and turn a dial, or am I just being nostalgic? Now when we can’t handle our electronics, we wonder if it’s time to get screened for Alzheimer’s) Yet for NASA, losing snap is the kiss of death.
“I think we made a fundamental mistake of national policy back in the ‘60s as we were doing the moon landings and in the early ‘70s in the Nixon administration when we took NASA out of the exploration business -- not that getting to and from low-Earth orbit isn’t important -- it is -- but it isn’t the only thing that was important," NASA's administrator Mike Griffin tells me.
We're talking about the agency turning 50 and how the experiences of its younger days might prepare it for the challenges ahead. Mike reached the milestone nine years ago this year. My number's coming in a bit more than two.
“I believe that government agencies like NASA, like the National Institute of Health, like the National Science Foundation, belong on the frontier -- their own individual frontier, " he continues. "NASA belongs on the space exploration frontier. Taking us out of lunar exploration, shutting off possibilities for voyages to Mars, confining the agency to low-Earth orbit was a mistake.”
Griffin became NASA’s head three years ago when the agency was just beginning a transition triggered by the 2003 loss of space shuttle Columbia and its crew. The investigation and subsequent report set off a national discussion about the purpose of the U.S. space program. The verdict was to retire the shuttle fleet after it completed construction of the International Space Station and move on to a new spaceship that could travel to the moon and other destinations, as well as operate in low-Earth orbit.
“The shuttle program has been the recipient of a lot of praise and a lot of criticism, both of them probably justified,” Griffin says. “It’s an enormously capable vehicle and yet, it has not lived up to its goals. But that is kind of irrelevant: if the shuttle were a perfect machine, we would still need to move on because the shuttle is inherently limited in terms of its ability to fly to and from low-Earth orbit and do only that.
“NASA’s and the nation’s future in space does not lie in being confined to low-Earth orbit,” he adds. “Given that a government program is not going to have multiple systems -- I mean if I could have a system optimized for low-Earth orbit and another optimized for exploration, that’d be great, but no one’s going to give us that money -- then in my view, it’s a strategic imperative to have a vehicle which can get us out beyond low-Earth orbit. But to have a vehicle like the shuttle, even it it’s a perfectly designed vehicle, even if it operates perfectly, if it cannot take us out beyond low-Earth orbit, then we need to move on.”
Though we like to compare things in terms of money, Griffin says finances are not the relevant factors when it comes to defining NASA’s mission.
“We didn’t save money by taking NASA out of the exploration business. We still spent money on NASA. We spent money on having NASA do the wrong things. Now, if policy-makers of that era had thought more carefully about what they were doing and about its long-term consequences, they probably would have reached different decisions.
“I think it is important for senior government policy makers, agency heads including myself, to remember that part of our role is to look outward to the future,” Griffin says. “Most everything that government is involved with deals with today’s problems and today’s issues and that’s as it should be, just as in your own private personal portfolio, most of the money you make is associated with just living. But you have to set aside some money and some time to look toward your future. And government has to set aside some money -- the amount of money NASA gets is almost trivial from a government perspective … half of one-percent (of the federal budget) -- so it’s not so much about the money. It’s about the focus of attention by policy-makers on looking toward the future.”
In its early years, the United States had a clear-cut vision of what it wanted to do in space: land people on the moon. It wasn’t easy and it had never been done before. It was on the edge, pushing the frontier of possibility. Now after decades of idling, NASA is eager to show that 50-year-olds still have snap.
Caption: Mike Griffin with his wife Rebecca, being sworn in as the 11th administrator of NASA by Vice President Dick Cheney on June 28, 2005. White House photo by David Bohrer.
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