Emails from NASA head show discontent

ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 7 (UPI) -- Emails from the head of the U.S. space agency NASA suggest he is frustrated with efforts to return to the moon by 2020.

National Air and Space Agency Administrator Mike Griffin has written critically of a lack of funding for a new rocket and White House interference in America's space flight program, the Orlando Sentinel reported Sunday.

"My own view is about as pessimistic as it is possible to be," he wrote Aug. 18 in predicting continuation of the space shuttle program, which he opposes as unsafe and a waste of resources.

"Extending the shuttle creates no damage that they (the next administration) will care about other than to delay the lunar program. They will not count that as a cost," he wrote. "They will not see what that does for U.S. leadership in space in the long term. And even if they do, they have a problem in the short term that must be solved."

Griffin's preference was for cutting the shuttle and spending resources on an Ares moon rocket and Orion crew capsule as soon as possible, relieving NASA from having to depend on Russian help to shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station.