First, that whatever NASA does beyond the Shuttle must stay close to the current budget.

Second, that results must be obtained soon; whatever replaces the Shuttle cannot be an open-ended technology playpen (NASP, et al) or a constantly redesigned political football (the Space Station).

Of course, both of these lessons were forgotton the instant O’Keefe left office, and we went back to the failed policy of putting indecision and perceived technical requirements ahead of the political and economic requirements.

Dr. Griffin’s plan takes longer and costs more than O’Keefe’s — even before it hits the pavement. It requires the United States to develop and maintain multiple government launch vehicles over the long haul — like the Shuttle, this is a huge tax on the space budget that makes it hard to do anything else. Whatever it’s technical merits, it ignores the political and economic environments and is probably doomed to failure.

I suspect that the only way to save the day is to go back to something like Mr. O’Keefe’s minimum lunar infrastructure using tiny capsules and EELVs.

— Donald

There’s no reason to believe that the original 2014 timeline was realistic. The previous 2014 CEV timeline was based upon the assumption that the shuttle budget would decrease in later years (2007-2010) and that money would go to CEV. As Griffin discovered, that was a false assumption, and he needed to find an extra $3 billion for shuttle. So the 2014 CEV timeline contained a fictional component, and if O’Keefe was still there, he would have had to slip the CEV schedule due to lack of money.

“Griffin may be a rocket scientist, but O’Keefe had deep experience dealing with megabudgets and megabureaucracies.”

O’Keefe had that experience, but one wonders how much it mattered. After all, NASA’s financial management system is still not fixed (it was one reason why O’Keefe was sent to NASA in the first place), and the missing $3 billion was discovered soon _after_ O’Keefe left. The reality of that latter case is that O’Keefe and everyone else involved with NASA’s budgeting knew that the expected savings before shuttle retirement were illusory and they simply kicked the can down the road and decided to let somebody else address it.

So much for the budgetary and programming gyrations Griffin has put NASA through during his administration, all in an effort to accelerate CEV deployment. So it finally turns out that O’Keefe, the previous administrator, had the right CEV development timeline after all. Griffin may be a rocket scientist, but O’Keefe had deep experience dealing with megabudgets and megabureaucracies.