While it’s been mentioned in the comments in the earlier post on the subject, it’s worth a post itself. Space News scored the first interview with Ed Weiler, the director of the Goddard Space Flight Center and the interim replacement for Alan Stern as head of the Science Mission Directorate. The interview makes it clear that Weiler, who previously served in a similar position at NASA headquarters, is still getting up to speed on the issues. He also declined to comment on the circumstances of Stern’s resignation.
The interview does raise the question of the future of some of the programs that Stern promoted while on the job, including planning for a Mars sample return mission near the end of the next decade and a reinvigorated suborbital program. On the last point, Weiler was asked about the request for information that NASA issued recently for suborbital flight services; Weiler responded, “I know nothing about this,” although he was supportive in general of the efforts Stern made on suborbital programs. (That last comment, though, may be causing some concern among companies in the entrepreneurial suborbital industry, based on some conversations I had with people at the Space Access ’08 conference going on now in Phoenix.)
Scientific American, meanwhile, has an article with comments from the space science community about Stern’s resignation, as they speculate why he resigned, and what impact it will have on the agency’s science programs. “It means potentially a black day for science at NASA,” said Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. “It’s clear that [Stern] was pushing very hard on the system,” James Bell, a Mars scientist at Cornell, said. “He may have thought he had more latitude with Mike Griffin than he did.”
In his email to SMD, stern closed by writing, “[Mike Griffin] remains in my eyes the best Administrator NASA has ever had.” I do not think that Stern would write such an endorsement had his reigns been yanked by Griffin. I rather think that he is tired of working a zero-sum game while JPL seems to be doing its darnedest not contain costs, thereby jeopardizing the Mars programs.
“In his email to SMD, stern closed by writing, ‘[Mike Griffin] remains in my eyes the best Administrator NASA has ever had.’ I do not think that Stern would write such an endorsement had his reigns been yanked by Griffin.”
I don’t think it was so much that Griffin yanked Stern’s chain as Griffin didn’t back Stern up in this (and probably earlier) battles. If Stern couldn’t be effective because Griffin wasn’t behind him, Stern probably didn’t want the job anymore.
(Although it’s still possible, but probably unlikely, that Griffin asked for Stern’s badge because Stern didn’t give Griffin a proper “heads up” on this and other sensitive issues Stern was fighting.)
Stern might still admire Griffin for other reasons, even if he felt Griffin didn’t give him the support he needed to do his job.
FWIW…