NASA's Star Is Fading, Its Chief Says

She declined to comment on Griffin's leaked e-mail.

The raw relations with the OMB come at a particularly difficult time for NASA and Griffin, who was brought in after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia to reinvigorate NASA and implement Bush's "Vision." Griffin, who is widely respected in the space community as a self-possessed and broadly knowledgeable administrator, has been passionate about the need to maintain U.S. space dominance and NASA's place as the preeminent space agency in the world.

Although the agency has generally had a stable budget in recent years, Griffin says that it receives about 20 percent less in current dollars than it did in the early 1990s but has been asked to do much more -- including designing and building a new generation of spacecraft. Citing budget limitations and safety concerns, NASA plans retire the shuttle fleet in 2010, even though its replacement will not be ready until at least 2015, forcing the agency to rely on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to transport astronauts to the space station.

In his e-mail, Griffin said White House officials told him not to bring up the need for a congressional waiver to allow NASA to purchase launch services from Russia. "I disobeyed their wishes in doing so, because we knew that we needed to get this on the table in '08," he wrote to several top NASA officials.

Griffin also wrote that White House officials "actively do not want the [international space station] to be sustained, and have done everything possible to ensure that it would not be."

The OMB's heavy editing of his China testimony took on new significance after the Orlando Sentinel reported last weekend on the leaked e-mail, in which Griffin complained of interference by the OMB and the OSTP and voiced frustration and anger over how White House officials have been directing NASA affairs.

Griffin distanced himself from the e-mail, but Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said that it is widely thought in the NASA and space community that the "OMB tells NASA what it can and cannot do." Of the edits of Griffin's testimony, Nelson said, "This is very typical of how OMB sets policy, in terms of what they let [NASA officials] say and what they let them ask for."

The senior NASA official said the deleted comments about China's space ambitions would have increased pressure on the administration to speed up and better fund construction of the new spacecraft.

Like the OMB, Griffin has been an advocate of retiring the space shuttles. He says that NASA needs the billions spent annually to maintain and fly the fleet to build its new spaceships and that the shuttles are too risky. But he has called the five-year gap during which the United States will have no independent way to fly to the space station "unseemly," and he said in an interview last month that spending the extra money to continue flying the space shuttle during some of the gap would be the best solution.

In the leaked e-mail, Griffin wrote that this "rational approach didn't happen, primarily because for the OSTP and OMB, retiring the shuttle is a jihad rather than an engineering and program management decision."