Michael Griffin
Michael Douglas Griffin (born November 1, 1949 in Aberdeen, Maryland) is an American physicist and aerospace engineer. From April 13, 2005 to January 20, 2009 he served as Administrator of NASA, the space agency of the United States. As NASA Administrator Griffin oversaw such areas as the future of human spaceflight, the fate of the Hubble telescope and NASA\'s role in understanding climate change. In April 2009 Dr. Griffin, who has an academic background, was named eminent scholar and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. On September 28, 2007, Michael Griffin said that NASA aims to put a man on Mars by 2037. In an interview with The Guardian in July 2008 Griffin stated that an opportunity to push on to Mars by extending the Apollo program was squandered by a change in focus to Shuttle and space station programs that only reached orbit: \"I spent some time analysing what we could have done had we used the budgets we received to explore the capabilities inherent in the Apollo hardware after it was built. The short answer is we would have been on Mars 15 or 20 years ago, instead of circling endlessly in low Earth orbit.\"
