NASA's new administrator, Michael D. Griffin, faced the media Monday for the first time since being confirmed by the Senate last week and vigorously defended the Bush administration's ambitious plan to send astronauts to the moon and Mars.
"We could probably go to Mars for what we spent on Apollo" in today's dollars, he said.
"It is a journey, not a race," Griffin said. If the country put aside "a few billion a year," the Mars plan would be "very affordable."
President Bush announced his space exploration vision last year. Critics complained that Mars is so much farther away than the moon that it would pose daunting financial and technological barriers.
The Apollo moon program of the 1960s and 1970s cost about $150 billion in current dollars, but some estimates of the cost of going to Mars surpass $500 billion. At the same time, NASA's share of the federal budget has shrunk from a high of 4% during the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to about 1% in recent years. That funding trend would have to be reversed if Mars is to become a realistic goal.
In wide-ranging remarks before reporters in Washington, Griffin also expressed frustrations with plans to replace the aging space shuttle with a new "crew exploration vehicle."
Over the life of the shuttle program, two orbiters and their crews have been lost in accidents. Plans call for decommissioning the shuttle in 2010, after it finishes assembling the International Space Station. But NASA's schedule doesn't bring a new vehicle into service until 2014.
Griffin, a former NASA engineer who was most recently head of the space department at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, said he was concerned about "a five-year gap in the ability of the U.S. to access space with human crews."
He also reiterated recent statements that he would take another look at his predecessor's refusal to use the shuttle to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, which could fail as early as 2007. Former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said a repair mission to Hubble would be too dangerous because there would be no escape for the astronauts if something went wrong. Trips to the space station are considered less risky because the crew could abandon the shuttle for the station if the orbiter was damaged on liftoff.
