RSS Feed
Twitter
4 Comments
Griffin's statement, Huntsville Times
"Today we have in orbit a $75 billion International Space Station, a product of the treasure and effort of 15 nations, and the president is recommending that we hold its future utility and, indeed, its very existence hostage to fortune, hostage to the hope that presently nonexistent commercial spaceflight capability can be brought into being in a timely way, following the retirement of the Space Shuttle."
Mike Griffin Reveals His Commercialization Vision for NASA: Part 1 (2005)
"So it is a real dilemma - it is a real dichotomy: how do we engage competition and position ourselves to take advantage of the successes and accept the failures which inevitable occur in that environment while, at the same time, meeting the goals and objectives that we have as managers? What I've come to, after considerable thinking (with some discussion and modifications to come) - for NASA: the best way to do that is to utilize the market that is offered by the International Space Station and its requirements to supply crew and cargo as the years unfold."
The situations are clearly not the same. As stated in the paragraphs after the 2005 one cited above...
"So, there will - and there must - be a government-derived capability to service the space station even after the shuttle is retired. But because there must be such a capability does not imply to us that that is the way we would most prefer - to have cargo and crew logistics requirements for the station satisfied. What I would like to do is be able to buy those services from industry - and in fact I'd like to be able to buy those services from the industry represented in this group: the Space Transportation Association."
Clearing stating a dual capability, a government capability AND an industry one. In other words, if this was your retirement nest egg, the 2005 situation had you investing the bulk of your funds in a medium risk mutual fund while seeding some funds in higher risk investments. A typical strategy balancing cost, risk, and pay out.
In today's situation, there is now just a private industry direction. All the funds are being targeted for a small number of vague high risk endeavors. (In fact their may be only two viable contenders.) This is a very high risk scenario, hence the "hostage to fortune" comment. As we know well enough, so much can go wrong in space flight, even the best technologies are subject to unforeseeable problems. Delays are inevitable. Payout is less likely.
For example, in 1996 the X-Prize was founded and it took eight years for it to be won in 2004. There were 27 contestants. In the six years since 2004, and fourteen years after the challenge was first made, none of those contestants, including the winning team, have repeated the feat. Those are not encouraging odds. And it will be a long time until I save up enough to buy my ticket.