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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.
... but if I were Obama, Michael Griffin would be so fricken canned.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Sounds like a lot of backbiting rumors spread by someone with a bone to pick.
It's pretty easy to tell how much money would be saved by cancelling Aries and Orion outright. Just look at how much money they have outlined in budget projections.
The harder question is whether there is some cheaper alternative, and how much it would cost. But that's not something that can be answered accurately in response to a snap question. And saying so is not stonewalling.
It's hard to believe that NASA would be against their program being cut. While I like the space program,if it's going to be cut spending on nothing or cut spending on the space program I would pick the former. While I'd prefer to cut other things, NASA spending is probably one of the easier things to cut, from a political standpoint.
What is with the entitlement mentality within government? I am sure the article blows what actually happened way out of proportion, but if there *was* any sort of conversation asking industry partners to stonewall, resist, camoflage or otherwise derail the effort to understand the risk/reward of future space efforts, everyone involved within the government should be canned. If I did anything of the sort at my place of work, I'd be out on my ass so quickly!
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That means we need to axe a lot of programs, or (a) face potential bankruptcy of the whole country or (b) face the reality that we have to cut Medicare and SS benefits to a needs-based program rather than an entitlement. We have a huge amount of Baby Boomers about to retire, and don't have the money to support them all unless we start saving immediately.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
For some reason the submission goes to a site that mentions the original articles appeared at the Orlando sentinel, but doesn't link to the articles. So here they are:
December 11: NASA chief Griffin bucks Obama's transition team
and
December 12: NASA chief insists he's cooperating with Obama's team
Obama has nothing against NASA. He has EVERYTHING against Mike (global warming is a myth) Griffin, a known Bush lackey and a incompetent manager. Ask anyone in the know about Orion and Ares and they will tell you while it WILL work, it is horribly designed and way over budget for what it is and its DIRECTLY contributed to Griffin, unlike other unmanned programs that where running before he took over and lost funding due to him and Bush's "lets get a American on Mars without spending any more money" ploy.
Griffins job is canned, he's just drawing out the hanging right now and trying to wrap it in a Obama hates NASA spin, not a Obama hates incompetent Bush republican flunkies spin.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
It is unfortunate that we've come to this point in American history, but the truth is probably that we can't afford a grandiose space program right now.
NASA will still exist, but the bureaucrats running it need to go. NASA will have a chance at manned space flight, but they need to figure out a way to do it cheaper. The rest of the nation has tightened its belt, the rest of the nation is concerned about the ballooning debt, NASA isn't exempt from the changes.
If I had my choice, I'd much rather see the billions spent on a shuttle launch go toward turning children into future aerospace engineers.
If we can put a black man with a funny name in the White House then surely we can put a man on the moon again!
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
Sorry, but I have taught kids and the best way to turn children into future aerospace engineers is to launch some new rockets. I have shown 3rd graders poorly drawn CGI of a Ares 1 launch and it was enough to garner "oohs," "aahs," and "I want to do thats,"
We can't just "un-retire the shuttle," mainly because it is a bloated, out-of-date, foam-shedding death trap. Besides, with everyone talking about creating jobs, how does it make sense to cut NASA hard and put tons of people who are working on Ares out of work?
This was an easy article to find, that's following up this story... Being on Space.com, it was on Slashdot's side bar... ;)
http://www.space.com/news/081211-nasa-obama-transition.html
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
And the problem is that NASA/etc. focuses so much on inspiring the 3rd graders, yet don't seem to care so much once those kids get to high school and can actually develop that interest into something useful towards their future.
I also taught high school, and you are right that high school kids get left out. But I think it's less the fault of NASA and more the fault of high schools. High school is so rigid and change-adverse that any attempts by an outside agency to come in is usually shot down. This is even more evident with the focus on high stakes testing.
If you spend billions on a shuttle launch you ensure jobs for people who want to go into aerospace. Take the money away from that so you do not have any shuttle launchings and you have pretty much removed it from most people's minds. I remember growing up in the 80's and the shuttle launches were a big thing. Now it hardly receives any coverage. It would be great to have a president with a mind for the future like JFK. Granted he wasn't perfect but it is better than a rehash of FDR ideas that have put us in the place we are in. That's my $.02. Go ahead and mod me down now.
I eat Karma for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's why I don't have any.
...sadly, I think many slashdotters are going to be disappointed as NASA funding under Obama takes a backseat to a number of other programs that are targeted at much larger domestic constituencies.
-Styopa
You're doing a heck of a job, Griffie!
Obama's transition team isn't asking NASA programmes only about cutting their budgets to zero. The review is also asking them about accelerating those programmes, increasing their budgets so their benefits are delivered sooner.
Griffin, the Star Wars scientist / CIA "entrepreneur", is stonewalling any change by the new Chief Executive (Obama). Which is of course threatening those projects even worse, because there's going to be less time to evaluate and save the worthwhile ones, as the economic meltdown accelerates and Obama's busy leading the nation fulltime. And of course the stonewalling shows an agency that will need an even more radical makeover by the new administration.
But why should NASA be any different from the rest of the government Bush built? Hey, over in Congress, a minority of the minority Republicans in the Senate (next month their numbers shrink to a nearly insignificant count) are stonewalling even a bridge loan from money already allocated to Detroit. They destroyed New Orleans and New York. Maybe if a Christmas Earthquake hits California they can have laid waste on every coast except Alaska's - which they maybe managed with drilling in ANWR.
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make install -not war
Griffin's comment on Global Warming was excellent and probably the only thing about him to like. He simply expressed the biggest issue standing, we don't know what the optimal climate is. If anything the comments of the those who didn't like his remark were more akin to the right wing religious nuts. It is a religion now and will always be one because anything which is brought up to disprove it is immediately derided regardless of merit. If anything the whole GW document is nothing more than a new age Bible
Oh, as to his remark in 2007
"I have no doubt that global -- that a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change.
First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown, and second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."
If i was an American i would be much more concerned with military spending than with NASA. The various spy organizations and domestic surveillance programs alone makes the NASA budget look like weekly allowence. Add the military spending and NASAs budget is just silly in comparison.
If there is one area where money is spent for nothing its in the military.
HTTP/1.1 400
Here's the thing. The economy ain't so hot (I gno, rite!) so how does it make sense to employ a relatively small number of people at a relatively high salary when that money (one BILLION dollars!) could go to some other project that could influence thousands more workers?
Easy, pull troops out of Iraq. Amazing, I just increased NASA's budget by well, well over 100 fold per year.
In other news where is the rival Jupiter delivery system that scientist and engineers were working on after-hours?
Griffin is dead-set on Ares because it is his pet project. He brought it with him from the university think tank that Bush pulled him from. It is not a good architecture, and even now NASA engineers are fighting basic laws of physics to get the thing to fly.
The ESAS committee rubber-stamped Ares because that's what Griffin wanted. It is not the best approach. Especially when they decided to drop the Space Shuttle Main Engine in favor of the RS68 engine due to cost. The RS68 is cheaper, but much less efficient than the SSME. Once they dropped the SSME, they should have convened another committee to re-evaluate all options using the RS68 numbers.
The DIRECT project is where we need to be. Check it out, check the numbers. NASA has been sitting on this for almost three years now. It's ridiculous.
www.directlauncher.com
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
Government, by nature, can't be "trusted" - at least in the sense that individuals allow it to decide what's "best" for them.
I view it as more of a "necessary evil" than anything else. A total lack of government is much like a vacuum on a planet with an atmosphere. It's not going to exist permanently or naturally.
(I've always thought "anarchists" often have the wrong idea about things. Anarchy is a "government changing device", not a sustainable way of life.)
Many nations put together "Constitutions" specifically to outline the duties of their governments (and to ensure they govern in a fair and limited way). Even the USSR had a Constitution (that echos quite a few similar "values" to the U.S. Constitution). Look it up online sometime! The problem is, the lazy and the power-hungry, and sometimes just the misguided, work to ever expand government's "sphere of influence". Given enough time, most "good and just" governments wind up only paying lip-service to their Constitutions, and violate much of it in practice.
Griffin may be, as you say, 100% correct here but telling contractors and others to "support Constellation and not discuss alternatives" as well as demanding "mid-level executives from not meeting with the transition team" is INTOLERABLE (from TFA). Considering this comes from an accredited journalist from a reputable news organization (at least I've heard of them previously), their claims of having witnesses, documents and e-mails to back them up should be taken seriously.
Perhaps Griffin is one of the few Bush appointees who isn't corrupt, incompetent or so politically/religiously biased as to commit criminal acts (justice department I'm looking at you). On the other hand considering the absolute disasters this administration has led us into regarding war, international relations, energy policies, the economy, the environment, civil/human rights, politicization of science, corruption of the judiciary, (oh and did I remember the war on terror?) I think anyone with half a brain would look upon anyone Bush would pick with extreme skepticism.
The shuttle HAS been a disaster for the last 25 years. If his plan has decent merit hopefully it will be allowed to continue. Hopefully Obama's team will consider not just the plan itself but the costs of any delay/change to a new one and will make the best choice accordingly. Of course there is a risk that they may not but we did not elect the president of NASA, we elected the PRESIDENT OF THE USA to make these decisions for us. Even as an avid space buff I have to respect that there ARE things more important than NASA. Considering Obama's top level appointments so far I have confidence that they'll do a good job.
If Griffin's plan is good, he will always be known as the one who got the ball rolling and pushed it through difficult and uncertain times. (Maybe he feels so entitled at NASA because under Bush everyone around him WAS an idiot). IF THE ALLEGATIONS from the newspaper ARE TRUE though, he, with his resorting to tactics reminiscent of his other Bushies, has proven that he does not have the character to lead NASA. Let Ares go without him.
For a simple example, NASA came up with the first prototype of creating Velcro.
According to Wikipedia:
No, they do not. They were originally supposed to be run like airliners, with a cost much lower than expendable rockets. They utterly and completely failed at that goal.
Such stories as Post-its demonstrate that though something may, at the outset, have an intended goal, it's actual best use may be far off that mark.
I hear this argument a lot; "x sucks because it was supposed to be y and it's not". The question is really; is there any utility to x? For what it did, the shuttle program was successful. What it did didn't happen to be what it set out to do, but only a very narrowly defined vision will see that as a failure.
The real tragedy here is how much of the taxpayers' money has been wasted on this lobbyist-driven boondoggle over the decades, and what we could have achieved in space, had we spent that money wisely.
This is also a common refrain, "Think of what we could have done if we spent the money wisely!" What is never included is what else is needed. Money may be a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient - unless you spend orders of magnitude more. Does that seem like a familiar pattern?
NASA has a $17B 2008 budget. Ten times that was dropped by Congress in a tax rebate early this year. More than forty times that was given to the Administration as discretionary bailout spending. Neither of these expenditures is guaranteed to achieve the goal they set out to do, and even if they succeed have no direct permanent benefit to society; forestalling economic collapse is all well and good, but only if you also go in and fix underlying issues.
On the other hand, NASA provides tangible benefits to science, and science has always, in the long run, improved society both culturally and economically. Knowledge gleaned is not lost. As a tax payer, I will far more readily spend $17B a year, even if it's vastly inefficient, for small, tangible scientific advances, than spend ten times that much to cover up major problems in the economy. Nothing is gained by axing NASA, and even less is gained by claiming that NASA is totally and irrevocably useless and has always been.
Long story short: our resource investment in NASA is low, and the claims of it's inefficiency are entirely out of proportion to it's actual inefficiency, meaning that such claims are inherently deceptive.
[Ego]out