Does Obama Have a Problem At NASA?
MarkWhittington writes "Has NASA become a problem for the Obama transition? If one believes a recent story in the Orlando Sentinel, the transition team at NASA, led by former NASA Associate Administrator Lori Garver, is running into some bureaucratic obstruction." Specifically, according to this article NASA Administrator Michael Griffin made calls to aerospace industry executives asking them to stonewall if asked about benefits to be gained by canceling the current US efforts to revisit the moon; we mentioned last month that cutting Aries and Orion is apparently an idea under strong consideration by the Obama transition team.
Don't be such a Drama Queen... The Shuttle program is a screwed up kludge, but, like many screwed up kludges (say, for example, the Internet), you can move forward instead of constantly reinventing the V2. The Shuttle (and it's attendant support programs and staff) work pretty well. Some spectacular failures - both of them directly attributable to managerial decisions gone wrong. But the damn thing actually works.
NASA should work on a next gen system that doesn't use recycled Shuttle components. But that's a long ways away. Orion / Constellation is (are) a reasonable interim solution.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!