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."

Comments

Good appointment for 3 reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is a Very Good idea for three reasons:

(1) the nominee is Not a Beancounter;
(2) the nominee is not an astronaut married to the Space Shuttle/Space Station welfare system;
(3) the nominee knws some science and engineering.

-- Jonathan Vos Post

Re:Good appointment for 3 reasons

[demachina]

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

Re:Heavy lift

[Chairboy]

Russia's biggest operational booster is the Proton, which has equivalent delivered cargo capacity to the US shuttle.

Before you yell ah-ha! and trot out the Energia, note that I said 'operational'. In all likelihood, no Energia stack will launch again. You might as well count the Saturn V if you're optimistic enough to think the DE will fly again.

Re:Time?

[Quantum Fizz]

As a hiring manager, I would be automatically suspicious of anyone who spent that much time in school. Sounds like he's trying to avoid real work.

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.