In early 2002 he met entrepreneur
Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to
Russia where they attempted to purchase
ICBMs. The unsuccessful trip is credited as directly leading to the formation of
SpaceX.
[7] Musk offered Griffin the title of Chief Engineer at the company,
[8] but Griffin instead became president and COO of
In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests.
[9]
In 2005, he was appointed NASA Administrator where he pushed for commercial cargo and crew transportation services.
[10]After NASA lost a GAO protest from SpaceX on a sole-source contract to RocketPlane Kistler, Griffin led a reorganization of the contract into a competition called the
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. Twenty aerospace companies applied to the COTS program, of which two companies, RocketPlane Kistler and
SpaceX were selected by NASA.
[11] In December 2008,
NASA awarded SpaceX and Orbital Sciences contracts with a combined value of $3.5 billion as part of the
Commercial Resupply Services program.
[12]
In February 2018, Griffin was appointed as Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering by Donald Trump. One of his first actions was to create the Space Development Agency.[13][14] The organization was tasked with procuring a proliferated constellation of
low Earth orbit satellites to detect Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons. Commercial contracts for the constellation were given to
L3Harris and
SpaceX to build
Starlink military satellites.
[15] CIA Director
Mike Pompeo called the project a “Strategic Defense Initiative for our time, the SDI II".
[16]