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Ready to cooperate with India: Griffin

Michael Griffin, Administrator, NASA

HYDERABAD: Michael Griffin, Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), reiterated here on Tuesday that the NASA “will be open to the idea of cooperating with India in human space flights for our efforts beyond the [International] Space Station, which could again be taking people back to the moon and establishing a research station there.”

NASA was also “open to discussions [with India] for Chandrayaan-II or other missions,” he said. The U.S. was already on Chandrayaan-I mission and exchanging scientific data.

(The Indian Space Research Organisation is preparing to launch its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle-XL in 2008 for orbiting a spacecraft called Chandrayaan-I above the moon. It will have two payloads from the U.S that will look for water and minerals on the lunar surface).

Mr. Griffin, who holds the topmost post in NASA, is here to attend the International Astronautical Congress, said the U.S.’ entire manned space flight programme was an international cooperative venture with 15 other countries. “The centrepiece of our programme right now is the [International] Space Station. We hope that when we return to the moon, it will be done with our space station partners and others, may be India.”

But Mr. Griffin made it clear that the Indian government had not made any specific proposal on these lines. “You have a capable organisation in ISRO and a capable chairman [G. Madhavan Nair] and I am pleased to have the opportunity to know him and may be the opportunity to work with ISRO. At this point, the discussions are in an exploratory stage,” the NASA Administrator said.

Asked to react on the Chinese launching a missile to kill one of their ageing satellites and whether the ISS would be a sitting duck for such a missile, Mr. Griffin said the NASA was a civil space organisation and that he did not have any comments on the Chinese A-Sat [anti-satellite test]. China’s test did not cause a problem for the ISS.

“We watched it very carefully to make sure that it was not a problem. If there had been a problem, we would have moved the Station. But as it turned out, there was not.”

He was confident that man would be back on the moon by the end of this decade or the next decade, which would lead to the development of a small research station or outpost there, just as a research station has been established in the Antarctica. By 2037, humans would land on Mars.

The missions to the moon and Mars would be on an internationally cooperative basis, which had been put in place by the U.S. and 15 of its partners.

“In the next couple of decades, as we look forward to the moon and Mars, it is reasonable to expect that that model will hold again,” he said.

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