At 50, NASA is embarking on a bold new effort to send humans back to the Moon and on to Mars, dropping the space shuttle for an "Apollo-on-steroids" approach that applies the latest technology to a modular architecture reminiscent of the agency's first lunar expeditions. But in an election year, with a war on and the economy in turmoil, all bets are off for now. Regardless of who is elected to the White House and Congress, Administrator Michael Griffin believes NASA has gone too far down the path outlined in President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration to turn back. He gave his take on the agency he has headed since April 2005 in an Aug. 8 interview at his office with Frank Morring, Jr., Aviation Week's deputy managing editor for space.

AW&ST: After 50 years how do you see NASA's health as an organization? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

Administrator Michael Griffin watches the space shuttle Atlantis lift off on STS-122 on Feb. 7. He believes NASA is too far into its next phase to reverse course easily.Credit: NASA/BILL INGALLS

Griffin: I think we're strong and trending upward. We're better off as an agency, with a couple of exceptions, than really, any time since the early shuttle era. That was a time when we lost a lot of the Apollo veterans with a tremendous amount of human spaceflight experience. I think we're doing well.

[On the positive front] we're now in a place where if you look across the agency, the center directors, the mission directors, the program managers, have a pretty uniformly high degree of technical talent and experience in what they do. To be very honest, that wasn't always so in the past couple of decades. There were a lot of people for whom high-level positions at NASA were their first jobs in the space business. And with all due respect to their prior experience, credentials and qualifications, which in most cases were quite significant, still, your first job in the space business can't be at the top.

Hugely to the good is that NASA now is working to execute a coherent, rational forward-looking civil space policy. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board made the key point that for 30 years the space program has moved forward without a guiding vision. I think they were dead right. I think both the White House and the Congress listened. In fact, a couple of successive Congresses have now listened. We have a civil space policy. It's affordable, it's doable, it's logical, it's executable and we're executing it. I cannot overestimate the value of having an organization with a clear understanding of what it's trying to do, and why.

To the negative side, we are losing a lot of very experienced people over the next five years just because of the demographics, and they will be replaced by people who, because of the period in which they've grown up, have not had a chance to have their hands on as many missions, as much hardware, as much real-world experience. So it's both a challenge and an opportunity. [We're gaining] lots of fresh new faces, but losing lots of solid experience.

Another huge detriment is that we're facing this five-year gap between the retirement of shuttle and the deployment of Ares and Orion. It's like the gap between Apollo and shuttle . . . [but ultimately] worse because we have a space station to sustain while we go through that gap, and that's very tough.

Related is the fact that our budget, starting with the first year of the Clinton administration, began trending downward, and over the course of the '90s we lost - and I'm giving you exact data to two significant digits - 20% of our buying power in real dollars, from where it was where the first President Bush left it in Fiscal '93. Now to the second President Bush's credit, he arrested that decline. So the downward trend was halted, but the loss of buying power was not restored, so we basically took a permanent 20% cut from where we had been. Some people will ask why that's a problem. You took a cut. Just do less.' And that brings me to my key point.

If somebody said: Well I just want a smaller space program,' we could handle that. But nobody took anything off the table. NASA is really still fundamentally trying to execute the same portfolio of missions on the same scale - build a space station, fly the shuttle, do all of this interesting science - as when I was last here in the agency, and we had 20% more real dollars. And so the issue is not can the agency do 20% less work to accommodate 20% less budget. Of course, we can. We're not allowed to do 20% less work or have 20% fewer field centers, and that's a real problem.

I would like to see that resolved for the future by getting the budget back up to where it needs to be, and certainly the Congress has been very vocal about saying that NASA should be funded for considerably more money. But I would take the higher road. I would say NASA can function at any fiscal level the nation's policymaking leadership chooses to set, but NASA can't do everything that necessarily is expected of it at any arbitrary policymaking budget level. So personally I'd like to see the budget come back up. The next best thing would be to be allowed to remove things from our plate that we can't do, and I'm not allowed to do that. So that's frustrating.