This morning, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin addressed all of his employees in an open forum, and took nearly an hour’s worth of questions from employees in Washington and from some of the far-flung NASA centers.

He talked a little bit about his worries as Hurricane Ike rolls towards Houston and the Johnson Space Center, which has been closed (Ike pictured here, from the International Space Station): “Complete flooding of the center to the depth of several feet is not out of the realm of possibility,” he said.

But Griffin spent most of his time talking about the ongoing Space Shuttle saga. The key question: Plow ahead on the next set of moon rockets, called Constellation, with money saved by retiring the expensive shuttle in 2010? Or, in the wake of icy US-Russia relations, extend the Space Shuttle program so that NASA doesn’t need Russian help in getting to the space station?

Last week, the Orlando Sentinal disclosed the contents of a leaked email, in which Griffin candidly vented his spleen on the situation. At the briefing today, he said that while he was embarrassed about the email leak, his position on the situation hasn’t budged. “It’s about the money,” he said. “I absolutely deplore the gap in human spaceflight between the end of shuttle and the beginning of Constellation operations … But because of funding limitations and pressure on the overall national budget, NASA has not been provided with a bump in funding.”

A funding bump might have allowed the development of Constellation even as the shuttle continued to fly. Instead, during the “gap”, the US will have contracts with Russia for rides to the ISS in far cheaper Soyuz capsules. Griffin spent this week rallying support in Congress for a waiver to a law that forbids contracts with Russia because of their past nuclear deals with Iran. He needs the waiver so can extend the contract for more rides on the Soyuz vehicles, through 2015, when Constellation is due to take astronauts up.

And it is this contract that is going to allow NASA to have its next generation of rockets, he said. “It’s a feature, not a bug,” he said. If Congress decides, suddenly, to continue shuttle operations, Griffin says, “there will be no replacement” to the shuttle. “There’s not enough money to do both,” he said.

Image: Nasa