NASA's Griffin on Shuttle and ISS

There's been a great deal of consternation about NASA Administrator Mike Griffin's remarks to USA Today that the space shuttle and the International Space Station were "mistakes."

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-09-27-nasa-griffin-interview_x.htm

When you read what he actually said, though, it's not as radical as the headlines make it seem.

On whether the Shuttle was a mistake: "My opinion is that it was. ... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible."
On whether the ISS was a mistake: "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in."

Look at his words here. He was not saying it was a mistake to build a Shuttle. He was saying we built the wrong design. There are plenty of dedicated NASA engineers, then and now, who say the same thing. The politically-driven need to minimize R&D funding resulted in the adoption of the compromise partly-reusable design with the external tank (ET) and solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Granted, the all-resuable idea NASA preferred was even more aggressive in some ways, but it's hard to argue that we built the best of all possible Shuttle designs, in the light of two accidents related to the use of the foam-covered ET and the SRBs.

On the ISS, Griffin's words are also carefully chosen. He did not say we shouldn't have built a station. He said we should not have chosen this design in this orbit. The ISS program was changed fundamentally by the political decision to bring the Russians into the effort and move the station from a low inclination to its current 56-degree orbit, a track which is practical to reach from Russia but means the Shuttles launched from Kennedy Space Center must give up a signficant fraction of their payload capability due to the energy needed for the orbit change. Combine that with the continuing difficulties in obtaining and paying for Russian hadware, and it's hard to argue that the original Space Station Freedom concept would not currently be giving us more science at less cost.