NASA chief pays visit NASA chief pays visit (May 27, 2005)

By Kathy Schrenk

NASA has a new head honcho whose top priority is manned space flight, including the safe return of the Space Shuttle after its mission this summer and the replacement of the Shuttle with the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV.

Michael Griffin, NASA administrator since April 14, talked to reporters at the NASA-Ames Research Center on Monday about the Shuttle, the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope.

He sees the Shuttle, CEV and Space Station as NASA's most important projects in the next five years. NASA wants the Space Station completed and the Shuttle retired by 2010.

The CEV is expected to more closely resemble the Apollo spacecraft than the Shuttles, and will be designed to ferry astronauts to and from the Space Station and, ultimately, the moon and Mars.

The next Shuttle launch -- the first since Columbia blew up two and a half years ago -- is scheduled to take place between July 13 and July 31. It's been a long time since the last shuttle launch, Griffin conceded, but he's seen longer waits, including the six years between the last Apollo mission and the first Shuttle mission, flown by Columbia in 1981.

"It is my goal to have the shortest gap possible between the retirement of the Shuttle and the launch of the CEV," he said.

"It is not appropriate for the U.S. to not be the world's prime space-faring nation," he said.

Still, NASA isn't interested in rushing things. The Discovery launch, originally scheduled for this month, was pushed back because of concerns about debris and ice hazards. The delay was the result of a "fairly rigorous evaluation" of the debris situation, including some "unresolved issues" around ice problems, Griffin said.

The Columbia disaster was attributed to debris flying off the shuttle and striking the left wing on launch. "There were too many things we wanted to look at by the May window," he said. "This (Shuttle) will be the safest we know how to launch."

Another one of Griffin's goals is to find new funding to maintain NASA's focus on manned space flight while not sacrificing the administration's science and aeronautics programs, he said. While science isn't a priority for President George W. Bush, Griffin said, he expects NASA to continue doing "true frontier research" in science and aeronautics.

Griffin previously served at NASA as chief engineer and associate administrator for exploration. He also worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He was working as the Space Department head at John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore when Bush nominated him for the administrator position in March.

E-mail Kathy Schrenk at kschrenk@mv-voice.com

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