X-NASA Admin Tells Congress to Put Him Back With an Apollo Sized Budget

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X-NASA administrator Mike Griffin now has his own management consulting company and testified to congress that NASA should spend hundreds of billions of dollars for cost-plus contracts from United Launch Alliance for the Moon and Mars program.

He testified to the House and told them to fire everyone at NASA and cancel all of the current Moon contracts. Put competent people in charge (implication would be him) again and run the moon program with an Apollo sized budget.

It would be cost-plus contracts for all of his old friends and possible clients.

Current NASA leaders did not approve of his call to fire everyone at NASA.

SpaceX and Blue Origin did not approve of his call to cancel their contracts.

Griffin Says SpaceX and Blue Origin Will Fail So the Contracts Should Be Cancelled

The agency has awarded fixed-price contracts to SpaceX and Blue Origin to carry out lunar landings for, respectively, $2.9 and $3.4 billion dollars. The cost of the Apollo Program over the 14-year period from 1960-73 is estimated to have been $257 B in 2020 U.S. dollars. It is reasonable to believe that with the flight experience and space industrial infrastructure that exist today, human lunar missions could and should be executed for considerably less than Apollo. It is grossly unrealistic to suggest that they could be done for 1.5% of Apollo’s cost. The award of these unrealistically low fixed-price contracts makes it clear that cost reasonableness was not a factor in ranking these contract awards.

Just Stop and Get No Money Back

He does not want SpaceX and Blue Origin to try to continue, since they might succeed.

The existing contracts should be terminated for the convenience of the government and a new program initiated along the lines described above. Those who object will observe that termination for convenience will not allow significant funding to be recaptured from the existing fixed-price contracts, and this is correct.

Fire Everyone at NASA, Hire Griffin Back and Spend Money on SLS Like His Cancelled Constellation Program

A new program, architected and managed by people who are clearly qualified for the job, should be initiated and executed with funding adequate to carry out this urgent and important national mission.

He wants to go back to the $200B-300B Apollo, Space Shuttle days.

Obama Cancelled the Delayed and Over-budget Constellation Program Under Griffin

The Committee judged the nine-year-old Constellation program to be so behind schedule, underfunded and over budget that meeting any of its goals would not be possible. President Obama’s 2011 budget request for NASA cut the agency’s Constellation program completely, effectively canceling a five-year, $9 billion effort to build new Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets. The new space vehicles were slated to replace NASA’s three aging space shuttles (due to retire this year) and launch astronauts into orbit and on to the moon.

The same contractors on Constellation reformed under the Space Launch System program and continued the Orion capsule.

From its inception in 2011 through the year of its first flight, the Space Launch System rocket program has cost $23.8 billion. The Orion deep space capsule has cost $20.4 billion since the program began in 2006. Related ground infrastructure upgrades cost an additional $5.7 billion since 2012. In total, NASA spent $49.9 billion on these programs between 2006 and their first test launch in 2022. There was another $9-10 billion spent and being spent in 2023 and 2024. The SLS/Orion program will have cost nearly $60 billion by the end of 2024.

There is no lunar lander with the SLS/Orion program. The return to Constellation/Apollo would require tens of billions to develop a lunar lander.

First Test Flight of SLS/Orion in 2022

The Orion spacecraft for Artemis 1 was stacked on October 20, 2021, and on August 17, 2022, the fully stacked vehicle was rolled out for launch after a series of delays caused by difficulties in pre-flight testing. The first two launch attempts were canceled due to a faulty engine temperature reading on August 29, 2022, and a hydrogen leak during fueling on September 3, 2022. Artemis 1 was launched on November 16, 2022.

A NASA safety panel, while congratulating the agency on a successful Artemis 1 mission, said it was worried about the agency’s safety culture and workforce as it prepares for the first crewed Artemis flight.

NASA officials said at the time an inadvertent overpressurization of a liquid hydrogen line damaged a seal, causing a large leak of liquid hydrogen that scrubbed the launch. They speculated that human error caused the overpressurization.

In its report, ASAP said a “manual command error” from the launch control center caused the leak.

14 thoughts on “X-NASA Admin Tells Congress to Put Him Back With an Apollo Sized Budget”

  1. Griffen wants a flag and footprints setup as a way to relive his perception of the glory days of NASA. Nothing even remotely sustainable or transitionable to commercial ops.

  2. NASA’s only bet is to go with the SpaceX monster rocket.

    Perhaps, put on a third stage (ULA Centaur) to boost the lander and service module to the moon (trans lunar injection), with the astronauts, just like was done with Apollo. A simplified SpaceX derived second stage that is non reusable would be the ticket to get the Centaur/Lander/ServiceModule to orbit…..

    Vastly cheaper than SLS or Apollo-2 and ready to go now, with off the shelf flight tested components!

    Given some time, a SpaceX third stage could also be developed, they have the proven design, hardware, engines, engineering talent, and manufacturing capability down pat.

    NASA can then re-direct funding to saving other projects that the over budget and obsolete SLS will drain……

    This is all “low hanging fruit” stuff that can be rapidly implemented at acceptable costs.

  3. A two launch scenario would probably be the simplest way to return to the moon: one launch places the Orion in lunar orbit and the other launch places the lunar lander in lunar orbit.

    You could put landing legs on the ICPS and equip it with a cryostat to keep the LOX and LH2 from boiling off. A simple 5 tonne crew habitat module could be placed on top with a davit system to deploy astronauts to the ground once the vehicle is on the Moon.

    Hover, the fact that NASA has invested so little effort in developing orbiting propellant depots that can produce LOX/LH2 from water is a technological tragedy.

  4. Mike Griffin has long had this very narrow understanding of how government money should be spent. If it is a government project then NASA should be in complete control of how the money is spent. If the market already offers a good or service then government can buy that. But if the market doesn’t already have it available then the government has no business giving money and calling it “commercial”. Rather, the government should spend the money with complete control. Cost-plus is an example of that. Even with the highly successful COTS program, he said that it never occurred to him that it would end up being in place of the government rocket (Ares-1) but only as a back-up.

    My perspective is that the SpaceX Starship fleet is going to dominate the future of spaceflight especially beyond LEO. NASA can take great credit for helping make that capability available and they should transition away from SLS-Orion-Gateway to take full advantage of the Starship fleet ASAP. Doing so would result in an outcome conservatively 100X better that Griffin’s proposed approach or NASA’s program of record.

  6. Quick summary of his remarks:

    “We’ll have none of this free market stuff and go back to the good ol days of the Soviet market”.

    • Well I for one am genuinely glad he testified. Sometimes it is convenient when people come out and tell you who they really are.

  8. Old Space Strikes Back. If Griffin got his way, it might have the side effect of putting people on Mars sooner since SpaceX/Elon would likely skip the moon altogether and work instead on their Mars settlement goals.

  9. I guess he knows how to make rocket fuel from pork. It makes sense why NASA did nothing in human space flight through my life.

  10. I can’t see why Congress would even think of doing as he’s suggesting, unless the unstated subtext is, “And I’ll make sure half that budget finds its way into your pockets.”

    Come to think of it, that probably IS the unstated (Or privately stated?) subtext.

    • This seems to be the context. Half the budget is probably an understatement. The entire budget would be devoted the good old days of pure pork distribution with no risk of disruptive technology effects or distractions by people with SciFi ambitions.

  11. NASA has yet to produce a reusable rocket like SpaceX and a drone entrepreneur. Griffin is a do nothing know nothing. NASA should be defunded by 90% and all missions outsourced to the private sector.

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