Former NASA Administrator Griffin: Gateway Is A "Stupid Architecture"
NASA’s Moon Plan Panned by Space Council Advisers
“Stressing that these are his private views, [Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin] said 2028 “is so late to need as to not be worthy to be on the table.” From a systems engineering standpoint, building the Gateway before humans are on the surface is a “stupid architecture” because it will be needed only as a depot for propellant once it is being manufactured on the surface.”
Former NASA administrator says Lunar Gateway is “a stupid architecture”, Ars Technica
“Prefacing his comments by saying that these were his personal beliefs, Griffin said, “I think 2028 is so late-to-need that it doesn’t even need to be on the table. Such a date does not demonstrate that the United States is a leader in anything. This is 2018. It took us eight years to get to the Moon the first time, and you’re going to tell me it takes 10 to 12 to 14 to do it again when we know how? I just want to drop a flag on the play.”
There was a hackathon at JSC two months ago and for the challenge of accelerating a return to the moon neither team saw any useful reason for a gateway station/spacecraft as part of the architecture. they both went to the lunar surface without needing an out of the way rest stop.
Gee, the same thing that NASA figured out in the early 1960’s with Project Apollo when Dr. John Houbolt showed them. And the same solution NASA had when it was considering a return to the Moon (First Lunar Outpost) using the spacelift capabilities of the Space Shuttle instead of building the ISS.
http://lunarnetworks.blogsp…
BTW it appears all the old NSS web pages on this are now missing… I wonder who order the house cleaning of those old studies.
http://space.nss.org/lunar-…
If only a previous NASA administrator had not been so unwise as to commit NASA to the purchase of an extremely expensive booster and capsule that used up all of NASA’s budget…who was that again?
Charles Bolden? Or do you mean the one who so unwisely committed NASA to developing TWO extremely expensive rockets and a capsule that wasted huge parts of NASA’s budget with nothing to show for it and after 4 years of the program the initial launch date for ONLY the smaller of the two had slipped between 6 and 9 years?
Yes, the one who said that it was too difficult to human-rate the Atlas V for the OSP program, except that NASA now has human-rated the Atlas V for a version of Boeing’s entry in the OSP program, the CST-100. If not for that Administrator it could have been operational before the Shuttle retired.
He had a lot of prodding from Congress.
That makes Dr. Mike 1 for 2, I suppose.
Ok. Snarky. I always appreciated Dr. Griffin’s plain-spoken approach, at the very least. To be fair Dr. Griffin is simply pointing out that there’s a man behind the curtain. Or the Emperor is naked. Or something.
It’s inevitable really that at some point there would be a tidal wave of Heavy Voices aimed at these policies. Let’s hope others will join up.
Considering Mike Griffin is the one that shoved Ares/CEV down NASA’s throat this is laughable. When Constellation was cancelled his Ares/CEV was brought back by Congress as SLS/Orion.
The Lunar Gateway was conceived by NASA as a mission for SLS/Orion since they can’t afford to develop an actual crewed lander. This mess is directly traceable back to Mike Griffin’s choice of transportation architecture for Constellation!
Flexible path using existing launch vehicles would have been a much better approach. Developing in orbit cryogenic refueling depots would have been a much better use of NASA’s limited resources than Ares/SLS development.
Yep, if the person who sent NASA down a dead end with Project Constellation thinks it’s a bad idea, it must be a really really bad idea. But unfortunately NASA will be deaf to it since they must have the Gateway to Nowhere for the rocket no one needs.
I would tend to think in the opposite terms .. anything HE thinks is a bad idea is worth taking a look at.
I wonder if he hates Gateway because it’s the part of the moon “plan” that will use commercial launches.
Turning NASA back to Apollo-redux denies commercial-space this very visible display of capability and affordability.
I’m inclined to be more charitable. Sometimes, the right thing to do is make a choice, even if it isn’t the best one, and get to work. That’s better than simply studying things forever, which is guaranteed to get you nowhere. What’s better? Making a wrong turn or spending hours puzzling over a map to find the quickest route to your destination?
I don’t think the problem is setting NASA off along the wrong path. It’s a seemingly intractable insistence on staying on that path. Puzzling over the map at every intersection is bad. But when the road starts to become a dirt path into the middle of nowhere, you need to be able to say, “oops, we made a wrong turn, let’s go back to the last intersection.” Many people and organizations, NASA included, just don’t like to admit mistakes and rethink decisions.
Good analogy. But in the GPS generation folks have been know to follow the directions they receive into the wilderness to die. They let the GPS do the thinking for them.
https://www.npr.org/2011/07…
The GPS: A Fatally Misleading Travel Companion
And this is the basic problem I see with NASA now versus NASA during the Apollo era. The managers then recognized dead ends and bad decisions and were willing to pull the plug. Even in the case of the Space Shuttle they knew when they were compromising the design and hoped to be able to eventually fix it. For example replacing the solid fuel boosters with new liquid fuel boosters and finding a replacement for the thermal tiles as a heat shield. But latter managers excepted those compromises as necessary and stopped the search for replacements.
Griffin simply can’t stop thinking in terms of Apollo, where you build a big rocket, launch, land on the Moon…then do some space station thing later. He also HATES modular space stations because of STS/Freedom/Alpha/ISS.
He doesn’t understand the need for stations, propellant depots and most of all, he has no idea how Apollo worked and why that approach isn’t sustainable.
The difficulty, however, is that LOP-G is not a propellant depot.
We can come up with roles for lunar orbit infrastructure. But the Gateway as presented doesn’t really serve any of them. In this respect, Bob Zubrin is right: the LOP-G is a toolbooth, not a gateway.
I think people are giving Griffin too much credit. He seems to think the Gateway is “stupid” because he’s never understood the modular space station concept (and doesn’t like it) nor does he seem to understand the need for a station prior to landing back on the Moon.
He thinks in terms of Apollo, where everything is launched from KSC for every sortie to the Moon.
“nor does he seem to understand the need for a station prior to landing back on the Moon”
I confess that I don’t understand why the Lunar Gateway ism on the critical path. Waiting for elucidation.
Do we wanna talk about a Lunar Station for the “Gateway”? Because there will be a need for a Lunar Station(s), though the “Gateway” is likely the wrong station in the wrong orbit.
***TELEGRAM***
DR MICHAEL GRIFFIN
WASH DC
DR GRIFFIN = SEND NEW IRONY METER POSTHASTE = OLD ONE EXPLODED THURSDAY =
***END***
Well when it comes to “Stupid Architecture” he is a king .. he proposed a stupid boondoggle we are still paying for and still flushing billiions down that rat hole.
Griffin is right but Orion was dumb too, and Apollo on steroids-that was Griffin’s idea.
Apollo on steroids was a plan to redo Apollo, starting up where Apollo left off. Apollo and its throwaway rockets and capsules was not affordable in the 1960s and it is definitely not affordable today. The architecture that is needed is a transportation system that throws the minimal hardware away and which takes people from Earth to the Moon. Unless lunar resources are processed for use, and unless that makes more sense in orbit or in some other cislunar region than on the lunar surface, then there is nothing of value about the Gateway. It is just a diversion; a delayng tactic. It gets us no closer to the Moon and is of no value for Mars. If we are interested in long term space habitation that is much easier to work on in LEO and we have a platform for that; it is called ISS. Use it!.
NASA is confused. they think their role with humans in space is “exploration”. They have not “explored” in 45 years and honestly there is little reason to be exploring with humans. Robots do it far better and are far less costly. Apollo was not about exploration and there is no reason for us to be pursuing human exploration today with computers and robots which can mach human capabilities. NASA ought to focus on what they used to do, which is systems development. Gateway is not exploration. Gateway is NOT systems development. Orion is not systems development. NASA is trying to establish a program for operating beyond LEO. That is NOT exploration. Take the operations people out of NASA leadership and put some people in who can contribute something about systems development. ,
For years I and others have said that NASAs problems stem from lack of NASA leadership and we’ve repeatedly been told, it was all Congress fault for directing NASA to do dumb things. Not this time. Gateway is a stupid home-grown NASA idea.
Hear, hear. Congress must encourage and allow NASA to focus on what it does best: exploring space. Transportation infrastructure has now been properly handed off to the private sector.
We can’t come up with a better plan when I see defeatism has left too many thinking that planning isn’t worth the effort. That a good plan can’t be pulled off anyway for whatever reasons (entrenched interests, politics, not enough funding, etc. the usual rants).
To make matters worse, even when some people believe there’s a plan that has a good chance of success there’s the belief they have only to suffer immediately on a personal level if they should advocate, push or try to bring about that plan. Well buck up. Thick skin is a job requirement.
There are many intelligent, driven people with a diversity of views about what NASA should be about. Toss in that assortment of visions about what success means and here we are.
None of this -the defeatism, the corruption in incentives, and the valid differences – will get resolved so long as the iron grip from the top continues to choke off open discussion. That’s the first order of business, unleash the community again that been muzzled and leashed -every day more so especially since after Griffin and Constellation.
Thought counter productive, it’s really the only thing that will move us forward -openness about long term problems. Too much of NASA has become like a dysfunctional family that no longer talks about what’s really troubling anyone. It all just lingers.
which is why it is time to let the private sector take over and just support them by buying seats and rides for instruments to the Moon. But don’t let the managers who corrupted CCP get involved with their micro-management through certification process that has derailed CCP so long.
Not enough diversity of opinion? Perhaps that’s the view from inside NASA, and maybe, even, it’s true.
But from my comfortable armchair it looks like there’s so much opinion diversity and kingdom-building that the direction of the Agency shifts, first, here, and then there, never really going forward.
Case in point: the ability of the NASA “managers” to coddle the laughable SLS program is overwhelmingly shameless. Only in an environment of shifting priorities can such a program fail to appear as Job One.