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2005-06-12 Home Front: Tech

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Posted by Seafarious 2005-06-12 02:07|| || Front Page|| [4 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 The WaPo had a longer article yesterday.

New NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin has decided to replace about 20 senior space agency officials by mid-August in the first stage of a broad agency shake-up. The departures include the two leaders of the human spaceflight program, which is making final preparations to fly the space shuttle for the first time in more than two years.

Senior NASA officials and congressional and aerospace industry sources said yesterday that Griffin wants to clear away entrenched bureaucracy, and build a less political and more scientifically oriented team to implement President Bush's plan to return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars.

The moon-Mars initiative has put severe pressure on NASA's budget, forcing Griffin into a difficult balancing act -- trying to build quickly a next generation spaceship without crippling programs ranging from Earth observation satellites and aeronautics research to maintaining the Hubble telescope.

At the same time, the sources said, Griffin wants to restore NASA's glamour, reasserting the engineering and science leadership that has been eroding since the Apollo era. To this end, the sources said, he is willing to oust as many as 50 senior managers in a housecleaning rivaling the purge after the 1986 Challenger explosion. ....

Griffin, a former NASA chief engineer and associate administrator for exploration, settled into his new job. ....

"He's wanted to be NASA administrator for a long time and has given a lot of thought to what has been done well or badly," one congressional source said. "Because of that, he is not going to take a year or two to get to know the organization."

Instead, the sources said, he expressed dismay that NASA over the past several years had put a lot of people in top management positions because of what one source described as "political connections or bureaucratic gamesmanship -- not merit."

Several sources spoke of a corps of younger scientists and engineers, including Griffin, who had been groomed in the 1970s and 1980s as NASA's next generation of leaders only to be shoved aside during the past 15 years. They said Griffin hopes to bring them back.

"The people around him will be quite outstanding," one source said. "The philosophy is that good people attract outstanding people. This is going to be a very high-intensity environment, and NASA needs experienced, outstanding people."

Posted by rkb 2005-06-12 09:12|| 2005-06-12 09:12|| Front Page Top

#2 Thanks RK. NASA is one of our greatest accomplishments. There is no doubt it is full of politically placed bureaucrats. Lets hope the polticians that put them there stay silent or this will be a mess.

Posted by 49 pan 2005-06-12 09:41|| 2005-06-12 09:41|| Front Page Top

#3 At this point, he should focus on NASA's "core business", the completion of "one shot" existing unmanned projects, maintenance, and human space flight--his directed priority. However, he should set up a major "subcontracting" agency within NASA, to farm out future unmanned projects to free enterprise. This would accomplish three things: mission accomplishment at significantly less cost and time; greatly expanding the commercial space industry; retention of overall control of space authority by NASA. This last insures that "lessons learned" by the subcontractors remain proprietary United States property, and that space "management" be centralized much like the FAA manages airspace, for much the same reasons. Hopefully the end result would be not just "scientifically interesting" unmanned technology development, but practical commercial development, too. Boffins are far too prone to want to only use tweezers when a sledge hammer is needed, technologically speaking. That is, never go inside a house *both* designed *and* built by an engineer. People focused on money are far more practical than people focused on science.

Posted by Anonymoose 2005-06-12 11:07|| 2005-06-12 11:07|| Front Page Top

#4 Boffins are far too prone to want to only use tweezers when a sledge hammer is needed, technologically speaking. That is, never go inside a house *both* designed *and* built by an engineer. People focused on money are far more practical than people focused on science

what a load of crap. Proof I was right in my first take on you, "moose"

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2005-06-12 11:13|| 2005-06-12 11:13|| Front Page Top

#5 People focused on money are far more practical than people focused on science.

People focused on money rather than science were at the heart of the Challenger O-ring cluster foo.

Posted by SteveS 2005-06-12 11:24|| 2005-06-12 11:24|| Front Page Top

#6 The issue here is the degree to which we want or need to regard the moon and Mars in geopolitical as well as economic terms.

As Griffin put it a few weeks ago:

The new administrator said he foresees no reason why Johnson Space Center's mission would be significantly altered and hopes to maintain the balance that has been reached between robotic and human space missions.

"If you ask anyone in this country, 'Do you believe that the United States should cede the moon to say the Chinese, Europeans, Russians, whoever?' I bet you the answer would be, 'No,'" he said.

Griffin said he believes a majority of people "want to make sure that as humankind expands into space the United States is there in the forefront."

"That is why this is important," he said. "It's about where human beings go and what they do when they get there and what that means to the future of the human race."

The subtext is human presence there with regard to economic, political ... and possibly military uses, although the latter would be a major shift in national policy.

Posted by rkb 2005-06-12 13:04|| 2005-06-12 13:04|| Front Page Top

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