Mike Griffin on VSE Woes: "I did not put us into this position"

Editor’s note: At one point in the hearing Mike Griffin lamented “I’m doing the best that I can to chart our course out of it. I did not put us into this position, I’m doing the best I can to get out of it but if you think I like it, you would be wrong.”

I beg to differ, Mike. You most certainly did get the agency into the predicament that it is in today. Instead of going off and reinventing the wheel (Ares 1) you could have bought EELVs off the shelf from a ULA catalog and focused only on CEV development. You forced a rigid and recycled architecture upon the agency – one that requires large monolithic launchers – when in fact you could have come up with one that used existing launchers or straightforward derivations thereof.

This happened on your watch, Mike. It is about time that you started to accept the responsibility for it.