Reflections on NASA at 50: Michael Griffin

One of the things we've learned and really internalized in the agency that maybe wasn't there in say, 1978 -- 30 years ago -- is that we can fail.

Up until Challenger, NASA -- folks older than me -- had done the impossible. We had done stuff that was used as an expression for the impossible. We'd flown to the moon and then we had built the shuttle, which remains the most amazing vehicle humans have ever built. It didn't and won't and hasn't met its cost and schedule goals, but even so, it's the most amazing vehicle that anybody has ever built.

So you look at the things that NASA did and the people who did them and there may have been certain hubris there about how good we were.

Losing Challenger and recovering from it and then 17 years later, losing Columbia and recovering from it ... I've been involved in the space business for a long time and my honest impression is that people now know that we can fail in big and important and in very, very difficult ways.

Another of the lessons that I hope we have learned -- I'm not sure we've learned it, and this would include both NASA and the nation -- is that 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's important. Shutting off possibilities at that time for voyages to Mars, confining the agency to low-Earth orbit was a mistake.

I believe that government agencies like NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation belong on the frontier, their individual frontiers. NASA belongs on the space exploration frontier. We shouldn't be doing that which can best be left to commercial practice, to industry.

NASA's job is to create the new frontier, to move out with it and as much as possible transfer the technologies and the skills needed for more routine things to industry, where it can be done more efficiently.

Now, especially early on, industry may be doing things that the government wants done. That's fine. There may not initially be a market other than the government market. But we should conduct ourselves to try and provide opportunities for industries to step in and do what industry can do. Almost by definition you don't find successful corporations operating on the frontier. If you're a corporation, operating on the frontier is a recipe for going bankrupt.

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. But they didn't. It's a matter of spending the right amount of time as leaders in government thinking about what it is that the purpose of the U.S. government, as a steward of the people's goals, ambitions and futures, what it is that the U.S. government should be doing. It's a matter of thinking.

Michael Griffin is the NASA administrator. The views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent the official position of NASA or the Discovery Channel.

For more reflections on NASA's 50th anniversary, visit Discovery Space's NASA at 50 page and the When We Left Earth site's official NASA at 50 blog.

Got something to say? E-mail your questions, comments or concerns to discoveryspace@discovery.com. Your words may appear on Discovery Space.

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