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New NASA Administrator Named
CheshireCatCO writes "The Bush Administration has nominated Mike Griffin as the new chief administrator of NASA. Griffin currently heads the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University and holds degrees in physics, civil, electrical, and aerospace engineering and aerospace science, as well as an MBA. (How did he ever have time to do anything else?) He was also part of the Strategic Defense Initiative in the 80s."
Press Release: http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/20
Real work? Like heading the Space Department, a group with more than 600 people, which is the 2nd-largest group at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory?
As for your doubts that he actually built stuff, according to that first link above he helped design the Delta 180 missile components of the SDI program. He was also SDI's deputy of technology, associate administrator for exploration at NASA, and COO of In-Q-Tel (a private CIA-funded group to invest in relevent technology companies). He also had leadership positions at Orbital Sciences Corporation, and tech jobs at NASA JPL and Computer Science Corporation.
Regardless of whether you agree w/ SDI and the other jobs, you cannot doubt the fact that he has had both engineering and management positions, and apparently been rather successful and has a buttload of experience.
So back to your quote above, I'd say you'd make a pretty lousy hiring manager if you just judged their time in school without putting their work experience into context.
Prior to being at JHU's APL for the second time, Dr. Griffin was also the "president and chief operating officer of In-Q-Tel, a private, non-profit enterprise funded by the Central Intelligence Agency to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests."
Some may be familiar with In-Q-Tel as the CIA's private venture firm.
He had just rejoined APL last April. He was with APL in the 1980s, and left to become the technology chief for the Strategic Defense Initiative.
To expand a bit on what the summary said, "in addition to a doctorate in aerospace engineering, he holds master's degrees in aerospace science, electrical engineering, applied physics, civil engineering and business administration, and a bachelor's degree in physics." He is also the president-elect of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
There's no question he is not only a skilled academic with a clear appreciation for space sciences, but a competent administrator and manager as well, and experienced with Washington politics to boot. Let's hope he does well for NASA.
I am so glad they nominated Mike Griffin, and I was rooting for him well before. Not only is he a scientist, he has an MBA and common sense.
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Common sense is something missing from NASA and NASA's hiring practices, contracting rules, and even grant administration.
Failure plagues NASA ever since NASA embarked on an astounding gender and race based hiring and advancement program a few years ago. Many of the female led programs has had resounding failures, and the waste and delays from SBIR (ethnic third party procurement rules) and other racist programs have destroyed NASA in many ways.
There reason the MAJORITY of recent mars missions failed is gender and race bias in hiring and promotion against whites and asians.
Vital FACT! Nasa switched to forced female hiring in most of the recent Mars failures.
For the first time ever ONLY WOMEN called the shots on the largest mars mission that failed. read
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/ 04 1899nasa-women.html
(remove spaces if needed, Slashcode ads them)
for the first time ever all three KEY positions of the failed mars missions were female
Sarah A. Gavit = the mars project manager
Suzanne E. Smrekar, 37, the lead mars scientist
Kari A. Lewis= the mars project's chief engineer
Current hiring rules from the new top level NASA female administration dictate this new female forced hiring policy.
NASA has hiring policies that try to hire women DESPITE IQ or experience. In fact they now PREVENT job related award honors and bonuses based on how many females you hire and how many females and black contractors you hire!!! This is a fact!
NASA publicly has stated this from the woman in charge. I can't tell you about my own memos.
NASA is proud to boast 2% female active engineers minimum and that is WAY out of wack with societies norms.
The mars missions are even more than 2% female.
The average IQ of a Caucasian US Male holding a medical degree is IQ 124, but as the front page of the San Jose Mercury proclaimed in huge block letter headlines, and millions of IQ scores show (see the Bell Curve book data), the chance of a FEMALE obtaining a test score of 124 is EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY than an equivalent male. EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY. Conversely very low IQ people are almost always males. The average IQ is the same for both genders 100, but the IQ distribution bell curves are dramatically different shapes.
NASA boasts a female-minority web site documenting how not only are contractors hired by whether or not they are female or black but what state their small companies reside in! NASA apparently requires all 50 states to have minority participation in parts design and supply for the mars missions! REGARDLESS of competence! Sex and race are the prime criteria in current years. Check out NASA own detailed list of female and minority small contractors at : http://sbir.nasa.gov. SBIR is a euphemistic acronym for small business innovation research, but as you can easily see it is actually a gender and race quota based system spearheaded by the new women helping to run NASA now.
from the female mars leader
"Women have really added to the workplace because we do come at things from a different angle," she said.
"For the same reason that cultural diversity works, gender diversity is wonderful, too, especially when you're trying to do something creative."
Also from the female mars leader Gavit:
"The fact that we're women hasn't made a difference," she said. "It's not an issue here. But it's good that young girls see that engineering and technical fields are wide open to women. That's the good thing about saying it's a woman-led team."
The report in The Guardian (British) December 7th a couple years ago included the following comment: "The total launch and development costs of NASA's lost Mars spacecraft is put at $320 million.
The one concern I would have is I think he was spearheaded Bush Senior's Space Exploration Initiative(SEI) which was Bush Seniors version of going back to the Moon and Mars, and he presided over a program that dead ended. You have to wonder if Bush Junior is hoping for a different outcome the second time around, or if he doing a bad rerun of SEI meaning the current initiative is doomed.
A few noteworthy Google hits on Mike Griffin below, a hard name to Google because its so common.
I gather he invented Faster, Better, Cheaper while at SDIO, a concept that has some merit if properly done, it has a lot in common with Kelly Johnson and the old Lockheed Skunkworkds that built the U-2 and SR-71, but became much maligned when Dan Goldin tried to implement it at NASA, because NASA is institutionally and structurally incapable of doing faster, better, cheaper and have it end up being actually faster, better and cheaper.
theForce.net
Mike Griffin, a former senior NASA manager and aerospace industry executive, presented the most charitable assessment of NASA's human space flight efforts, ranking it second in priority only to building a new, more reliable heavy lift launcher.Griffin advised following through with space station, which means returning the shuttle to flight, while setting a new course that includes Mars. To accomplish this, Griffin recommends increasing NASA's budget from $15 billion a year to $20 billion.
"NASA costs each American 14 cents a day. A really robust program could be had for about 20 cents a day," Griffin said. "Americans spend more on pizza then they do on space."
Free Republic
The final nail in the coffin of Goldin's "legacy" came when NASA published its damning critique of his vaunted "better, faster, cheaper" approach.
A couple of points on this greatly misunderstood concept..
First, FBC is not Dan Goldin's invention. It came out of the old SDIO ("Star Wars") organization back in the late '80s. At the time, the dominant paradigm in both military and civil space was big, complex, very capable spacecraft, on which any and all instruments and experiments could be accommodated.
This development model led to decade-long, multi-billion dollar missions (e.g., Galileo, Milstar). When these kind of missions screw-up (e.g., Hubble Telescope, Galileo antenna), the public and Congressional ramifications can be devastating.
"FBC" was devised as a way to deal with this problem. I believe it was mostly developed by Mike Griffin, then Director of Technology at SDIO. The concept was simple: cut costs by having a small, compact, "Skunk Works"-type development team. Fly small satellites, each with one or two instruments, more often. As you are launching smaller sats more often, you have more flight opportunities, so if there IS a failure, you can recover from it quickly. In short, the objective is the knowledge gained from space flight, not to design and fly the most capable vehicle.
It's "faster" because you don't have decadal development times as the satellites as smaller and less complex. It's "cheaper" because you're not paying a marching army of highly paid technical staff (where the true costs of space flight really are). It's "better" because for a given amount of expenditure, you get more data, more often.
You can criticize this all you want to, but the simple fact is that FBC "worked" on a lot of the SDI flight projects of the early 90s (e.g., Delta Star, MSTI), culminating with the successful space test of the Brilliant Pebble spacecraft, the Clementine mission in 1994.
Goldin and NASA (specifically, JPL) never really understood this concept. They understood "cheaper" in the sense of reducing engineering development costs, but kept the glacial JPL pace, which ran the manpower costs right back up again. The Mars Pathfinder mission, NASA's FBC "success" story, was successful o
@de_machina
Of the ten NASA administrators (actually nine since Fletcher served twice) -- from Glennan (1958-1961) to O'Keefe (2001-2005) -- seven have come from the private sector. Two (O'Keefe and Frosch) came from academia and one (Truly) came up through the NASA ranks.
So, seven of nine (heh) of the men who headed up NASA also had either engineering or administrative roles at companies such as Sperry Gyroscope, General Electric, General Dynamics, Hughes, Aerojet, Westinghouse, and TRW. All have been major defense contrators and NASA vendors.
I'm not going to go so far as to imply a conflict of interest, but I would be hesitant to uphold defense contractors as shining examples of private sector management. TRW, in particular, has had its share of cost overrun problems with respect to NASA and DoD projects.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Daily Show viewers ought to get this one (3/10/05) but in case the joke flew right over your head, the about-to-be-appointed ambassador to the UN, John Bolton said once that the top 10 floors of the UN building in NYC ought to be chopped off. Brilliant, fprefect.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Just to be picky - he didn't say they out to be chopped off, he said something to the effect that if the top 10 stories were chopped off, the UN wouldn't be any different. He didn't advocate chopping them off, he was pointing out that the UN has a huge bureacracy, which is true afterall (Remember, this is the same organization that added Sudan to the select human rights commission *while* it was committing genocide in Darfur) On the other hand, appointing him was another in the Bush administration's long line of diplomatic fuck ups.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
It's a problem, sure, but an engineering/physics problem that will have solutions. One such solution is dramatized in Kim Stanley Robinson's well researched Red Mars.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Hm... I went through three rounds of rejected submission attempts earlier trying to submit this story, several hours before this version was posted. In any case, here's my version of the submission, which has many more links:
NASA Watch, New Scientist, and Space Ref report that Dr. Michael D. Griffin has been nominated as the next administrator of NASA, to replace Sean O'Keefe. As NASA head, Griffin will be tasked with implementing the Vision for Space Exploration. Griffin is currently head of the Space Department at the Applied Physics Laboratory at JHU, is president-elect of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and has a doctorate in aerospace engineering. He's noted for being passionate about space exploration and having strong management experience. His nomination has been praised by a number of groups, including the Planetary Society, the National Space Society, and House Science Committee Democrats and Republicans. In the past, Mike Griffin has testified to Congress on the future of human spaceflight, the vision for space exploration, and the danger of asteroid impacts. He was also rebuked in the early 90s for pointing out problems with the space station's review process.
As for my own thoughts, I think Griffin is an excellent pick. I'm amazed that they were able to find somebody with as much technical expertise as him who also has such a large amount of experience with managing large organizations. According to the space.com article, Griffin can be expected to make maximum use of the emerging commercial spaceflight industry.
In the past he's also said the following, which I approve of highly: "What is needed is to retire the Shuttle Orbiter, and its expensive support infrastructure," Griffin wrote. "It simply does not serve the needs of exploration and it is too expensive, to logistically fragile, and insufficiently safe for continued use as a low Earth orbit transport vehicle."
In the past he's been highly in favor of the government constructing a new heavy-lift launch vehicle, which I somewhat disagree with. Such an endeavor could easily end up being a bottomless money pit. Hopefully SpaceX's low-cost launches in the coming months will help raise awareness of frequently-launched smaller vehicles.
In synopsis, Griffin has been willing eschew political expediency and stand on principle.
Yeah, I thought this quote from NASA Watch was particularly telling:
Editor's personal note: In 1993, during the redesign of Space Station Freedom, many of us felt that the books had been cooked by NASA HQ such that the SS Freedom configuration (Option B) was deliberately handicapped and that the other two options A (MSFC) and C (JSC) were given an unfair advantage. Hardly an apples to apples review. Mike Griffin, who led the Option B effort (headquartered at LaRC) wrote a letter for the record at one point, standing squarely on principle and pointing out the discrepancies and inequities in that review process. That letter received wide circulation - and Mike's NASA career suffered as a result. He was promoted to some pointless job by Dan Goldin and eventually left the agency. I can say from personal experience, that Mike Griffin has demonstrated personal integrity - and did so in a public way that was rather career adverse. I expect he will bring that same integrity to the job of NASA Administrator. As such, yes, at this point, I am biased in this regard.