Thus sayeth the esteemed Dr Griffin:
Engineers do not deal with “perfect”. Your viewgraphs will always be better than my hardware.
A fictional space program will always be faster, better, and cheaper than a real space program.
Now…someone remind me who’s been flying their existing rocket for seven years now, and who will be amazingly lucky if there’s is flying seven years from now? Who’s viewgraph rocket that is being designed by a rookie launch team, and who hasn’t even passed a legitimate PDR is claiming to be 8x better than all those stinky rockets that are already flying?
I wouldn’t be talking about viewgraph rockets and how much better theory always is than reality in your shoes Mike.
[Update: Here’s another gem:
We’re “investing”, if that is the word, hundreds of billions of dollars in entities whose claim to the money rests on the premise that they have failed to manage their enterprises properly, but are too important to be allowed to founder.
*cough* Columbia *cough*
Seriously. How can you make arguments that NASA is always going to be around and getting a certain amount of money because nobody wants to cancel our manned space program, and claim that Shuttle was a massive decades-long multi-billion dollar mistake…and then say something like this? I wouldn’t whine about failure being rewarded because entities are too big to fail when you’re placing your bets on “shuttle workforce issues” and “political realities” to keep your preferred launcher from getting canceled.]
Dr Griffin: you did some really decent work advocating for COTS, propellant depots, and suborbital RLVs. I will be always apreciative of that. But you need to let Ares-I go. You and your pals blew it. The sooner you admit that you’re mortal and that you screwed up, the more likely it is that you’ll be remembered for the good you’ve done, rather than being the man who lost NASA the moon. For your sake, please–let it go.
Jonathan Goff
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That is an excellent observation. The big media needs to write about this.
I don’t know if any people in the right places read this, but there could be an interesting story to be written on how did Griffin actually end up as NASA administrator? I think (and have heard rumors) it is likely that he himself can’t be behind all these ideas and actions, there must have been other people in some places supporting the Areses (or whatever the plural is, Arii?)… And I don’t mean ATK or Horowitz.
20 billion to “man-rate” the EELV:s… all certainly shown in the secret appendages of ESAS…
Man rating requirements getting easier at every junction…
NSF has some juicy stuff on L2 about NASA ESMD attitude about this.
I suspect that the Senators for life from MSFC and KSC helped to show Mr. Griffin’s predecessor the door, and usher Mr. Griffin in.
Beyond that, I have no ideas.
MG,
Not sure about that. The former admin (O’Keefe) was a close friend of Bush’s. I think his reason for leaving (to take a job that he honestly wanted, and leaving behind a thankless job trying to fix a broken bureaucracy) was likely legit. Not that I doubt Shelby and Nelson wanted to see him go, and not that I’m sure they wanted someone biased towards keeping things in the family…but I don’t think that those two “forced out” O’keefe.
~Jon