In a Washington Post profile article, NASA deputy administrator (and current acting administrator) Fred Gregory is asked if he’d like to be Sean O’Keefe’s permanent replacement:
“I would hope not,” he said quickly. But then came the qualifiers: “I’ll tell you, though, it’s a blast; the agency is the most challenging entity that I can imagine. A person who comes in here has to be passionate about it.”
“I would hope not,” he said quickly…..A person who comes in here has to be passionate about it.”
I would think that a reply of “I hope not” means that Gregory himself isn’t all that passionate about the job, thus by his own measure of what it takes to be the admin he rules himself out as a qualified candidate.
It sounds like he was surprised by the question and gave an instinctive response.
I’m sure he’s passionate about space, and he appears to be saying that whoever gets the admin job needs to be passionate about space too. That sounds like useful guidance for choosing a candidate to me.
Especially as the lack of detailed planning is now endangering the entire initiative.
NASA should have the important details in place by now but they still doesn’t have a clue of how to get from point A to point B in this program, or what the justifications for all the different programmatic elements would be. So far they’ve figured out that they won’t be using the space shuttle and need something else. That’s it.
Without the right leadership they are incapable of thought it seems, and these details can only come from an administrator with vision, passion, and who gets the big picture. They’re not going to come from an accountant, a lawyer, or even an engineer who hasn’t thought deep and philosophical thoughts about the uses and justifications for the different elements of the space exploration puzzle before.
I’m certain Gregory is passionate about space; he just may not be passionate about the admin job. I thought he would be a good choice for admin, still do but only if he really wants it. Maybe he’ll change his mind; who knows.
But I think you short change NASA with the admonition that they don’t know where they’re going, other than not going in the shuttle. For a course change as big as this is for NASA, and only a little more than a year old, I think they’ve come along very well. It’s fairly obvious that there is at least a rough understanding of what “Moon, Mars and Beyond” is all about by reading the CEV Solicitation released March 1.
I disagree.
The CEV is one element of something that is supposed to be a “system of systems”. The vision as initally laid out was a well thought out framework, but it relied on NASA to define the details. That’s where the senior NASA leadership has failed to deliver, and frankly I have my doubts that they ever had the expertise. In the real world, this initiative will only work if we figure out:
1) Exactly what we are going to build on the Moon, why we are doing it, and how.
2) Exactly how we will resupply our Moon/Mars efforts in an economically feasibile way. At the present time our only data point is the space station in LEO. NASA has demonstrated that with its current budget it can logistically support a two person crew with a great deal of help from Russia. How could we afford Moon/Mars resupply?
3) What will we initially do with Mars? Mars sample return is so difficult and expensive technologically that it’s almost science fiction. If we return the samples to Earth it puts our population in a very precarious position, especially if both forms of life share a common heritage.
I propose that before a mega-expensive and long-winded sample return mission is undertaken, we send a robotic biochemical analysis mission that uses microfluidic chips perform thousands of chemical tests in parallel and ascertain the chemical makeup of any microorganisms, and if they have DNA, to sequence it.
The genome of an organism that evolved for billions of years on another world would be invaluable to science and medicine, and I think its a necessary safety step for us and Mars before we send any human near Mars or bring any part of Mars near a human.
4) What are we doing here on Earth to prepare for our return to the moon? Don’t we need to design facilities and mock-ups, then test out hardware in them? I don’t see astronauts or robots working out the practicalities of lunar construction techniques.
So, what I think we’ve seen so far is NASA weave whatever it was doing before into the exploration initiative. What someone needs to do now is to work out what the exploration initiative will be and how to make it succeed in the real world, and to instigate new programs and prioritize funding accordingly.
Without these and other details, I don’t see dow the exploration initiative can forward in anything other than viewgraphs. People will study possible solutions rather than solve problems, and then congress will kill it all as the budget situation worsens and nonperforming programs become too much of a policital liability, even for their supporters.
I agree with you to some degree that the details you list 1 thru 4 are required, I disagree with your premise that those things should have been detailed at this point in the process. After all in all likelyhood there won’t be any NASA astronauts setting foot on the Moon until 2020 anyway, if those details were decided now they would most likely change 2-3 times between now and 2020.
I think they need a baseline plan; something they can point at and say this is what we’re going to do. If it evolves later then great.
I think our disagreement is primarily in how much detail and in what areas a baseline plan for a 14 month old plan should contain.