前NASA長官 Michael Griffin氏：シャトル引退に寄せて
We have been designing, building and flying the shuttle for more than four decades, four-fifths of NASA’s existence. This is typical. Aerospace systems normally have very long life cycles; it was Apollo that was an aberration, not the shuttle. We must remember this as we design the new systems that will, one day, be commanded by the grandchildren of the astronauts who fly their first test flights. We must resist making compromises now just because budgets are tight.
Budgets are always tight; that is the normal condition. We need to stop using the normal condition as an excuse for aberrant behavior. When a system is intended to be used for decades, it is more sensible to slip initial deployment dates to accommodate budget cuts than to compromise technical performance or operational utility. “Late” is ugly until you launch; “wrong” is ugly forever.
After the cancellation of Apollo by President Nixon, the NASA managers of the time were confronted with a cruel choice: try to achieve the goals that had been set for the shuttle, with far less money than was believed necessary, or cease U.S. manned spaceflight. They chose the former, and we have been dealing with the consequences ever since. That they were forced to such a choice was a failure of national leadership, hardly the only one stemming from the Nixon era.
Thus, today’s problem is not that we are retiring the shuttle. The tragedy in front of us is that we are retiring the shuttle, but looking forward to nothing newer or better―indeed, we are looking forward to replacing it with nothing at all. That is a tragedy worthy of more than a little angst.
