NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has admitted that the Space Shuttle program, which has taken up the better part of the last 30 years of American manned space flight, was a mistake:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 8 ? NASA?s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, says the current period of space exploration will come to be seen as a mistake.
?Viewed from the point of history several decades out,? he said in an interview, ?the period where the United States retreated from the Moon and quite deliberately focused only on low Earth orbit will be seen, to me, a mistake.?
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?The space shuttle is a response to a policy mistake ? it isn?t the mistake. The mistake was tearing up all the infrastructure that we built for Apollo and saying, ?let?s just focus on low Earth orbit.? ?
I’ve said much the same thing myself before here and here
, but it’s good to see that Griffin isn’t afraid to say it, especially after he got himself in hot water when he made his initial comments back in July. The Space Program has a new direction now, but it’s one that we should have been on from the day that Apollo 17 left the lunar surface.
