Here is an excerpt from page 68 of the Sept. 29, 2008 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology. This is from an article titled Interview With NASA Adminstrator Michael Griffin by Frank Morring, Jr:



A-W&ST:- Are you satisfied with the progress on Orion and Ares at this point?


Griffin- Yeah, I am. Ares and Orion seem to take a lot of flak in the blogosphere, and I’m really having trouble figuring out why. One of the conclusions I reach is that the people who are doing the writing must not have any actual developmental flight program experience, because if they think the problems we’re experiencing on Ares and Orion are in any way unusual or even particularly severe, they just don’t have a good experience base. I’ve been through much worse. I think Ares and Orion are doing well, and I think Ares is doing particularly well.



People whine about thrust oscillation. Well, OK, rockets have a lot of vibration, and solid rockets are prone to a particular form of vibration that we see on some—not by any means all—not even very many, flights of the shuttle solid rocket booster. And we don’t have a lot of data on it. Our fault. We should have been gathering data earlier in the shuttle program. So we are gathering data. We are designing remedies for it. We’ll deal with it. It’s so far away from being a showstopper that I do get a little amused.



People complain that Orion is overweight. Well, I just want to heave a big sigh. I can’t remember working on any space program, robotic or human, that didn’t have problems containing weight unless they had problems containing volume. You’re always going to run out of one of those two quantities. So for the space station mission, I hope it’s obvious to readers of Aviation Week & Space Technology from work we’ve published before, there’s not a weight issue at all for the space station mission on Orion. That’s just not a problem. For the lunar mission, with our reserves, even at this early date we are closed to within 300 kg. for the lunar mission even using what we regard as the Block One version. And everyone understands, I hope, that we won’t be flying the Block One to the Moon.


It remains true that NASA hasn’t done this kind of thing, design a really new system, for nearly 40 years. There’s a lot of relearning to do. And I’m certainly not signing us up to do this without any mistakes or any hiccups, because there will be mistakes and there will be hiccups. But I think the progress is excellent; I’m proud of the team. (end of excerpt)




The original article can be found at :



http://www.aviationweek.com/search/A...chael+griffin+