for much longer than that [some would say ever since the present shuttle was approved circa 1972]. Was interested to see the NASA administrator most associated with the transition from Shuttle to [...?...] offering his thoughts recently. While critical of the new administration, I was struck by how he answered these two simple questions:

Ars: NASA previously explored extending the service life of the shuttle fleet. If Orion is out of the running, how would you interpret recent proposals to continue shuttle operations past 2010?

Griffin: Unless extra money is provided, those proposals are not helpful. The problem with the shuttle has always been that it costs around three billion dollars a year to continue to have the shuttle program, and so that's fine, but unless extra money is provided, you cannot both retire the shuttle and develop something new. And so, we were in a position, and still are, where it's necessary to retire the shuttle in order to have the money to develop anything new. Now, in a perfect world, I would rather continue flying shuttle while developing a new system, so that we don't have a gap, but the money was not available in the Bush Administration, and is not available in the Obama administration.

Ars: Could you elaborate a little bit on what you think is lost once human space flight is outsourced to the commercial sector?

Griffin: It's hard to say, because I don't know what that future holds, but there is an enormous government capability which will be dissipated to the four winds, and can't be recaptured. In addition, you put the US government in a position where only those things which are of financial interest for contractors to do will be done. I don't think that a proper US space policy restricts its activities to those things which are in commercial interest. There are things which are important to do that don't make a profit.

I would also ask the question: If the government is the only customer in a so-called commercial service, then how is it commercial? 85 percent of NASA's budget today is spent in industry, with NASA supervising what is done. It seems to me, when I closely analyze the comments being made by the so-called commercial firms, all they really want to do is continue to get NASA money—they just don't want NASA to supervise the job. As a taxpayer, I would ask: in what sense is it appropriate for tax payer funds to be provided to commercial industry without government oversight? That's the crux of the issue here. The crux of the issue is not whether American industry will do work for government money, the question is whether there should be appropriate supervision of how that money is spent.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/goodnight-moon-michael-griff...

One of the best accounts I know of how we got to this impasse is Chapter 5

http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net/anon.nasa-global/CAIB/CAIB_lowres_c...

of the Columbia accident report:

http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/CAIB_Vol1.html

the end result but the architects thought it would be fun to emulate Thunderbirds :-)