You have to be kidding. You actually think a multiple divorcee with a drug arrest and detention record, who makes false claims about Parkinson’s patients “faking it” and calls certain veterans “phony soldiers”, who thinks it’s funny to play tapes of simulated animal torture and songs that use the word “magic negro” in reference to the President on air, who is repeatedly disowned by the chair of his own party, and who reaches less than seven percent of the U.S. population is the right model for a spokesperson for the nation’s civil space flight program?

It’s Limbaugh’s right to say and play the things he does and conduct his personal life as he sees fit. But that doesn’t mean that he’s a good model for a spokesperson for the nation’s human space flight program (or anything else). There are much better models in the political commentary biz (conservative or otherwise) to choose from.

“and people in the White House clearly tremble at the mention of his name.”

Huh? Who?

FWIW…

And much to relief of most, what Griffin says these days doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Thankfully, the only individuals who have to listen to him since he left the NASA Administrator’s suite are a secretary and some students at a third-tier engineering school.

“And a good thing too.”

It’s not necessarily a good thing for the civil human space flight program that someone as embarrassing as Griffin has appointed himself its spokesman. This is the same former NASA Administrator who:

— After claiming that it is “arrogant” to view climate change as a threat, was disowned by White House Science Advisor Jack Marburger as not “attempting to represent the [Bush] Administration’s views or broader policy” .

— After finally releasing a research database of airline crew safety complaints under Congressional pressure, claimed that there was nothing in the database that the “traveling public would care about”.

— Sent a September 2008 email to top NASA officials, complaining that the Bush White House was on a “jihad” to shut down the Space Shuttle.

— Told the NASA lead for the Obama transition team that she was calling him “a liar” if she asked to “look under the hood” at his plans.

— Enlisted his wife’s rolodex, spam marketing, and an astronaut-authored online poll in a failed attempt to retain his position as NASA Administrator with the new White House.

— Since taking a $350K/yr. position at the University of Alabama at Huntsville in a time of faculty cutbacks, has told public audiences, “I think given my background and experience and my years in this business and the overall space community, that I’m easily worth what I cost.”

— Now whines that past Administrations should have provided an additional $3B/yr. for NASA’s human space flight program, even though he supported those budgets in testimony to Congress as NASA Administrator and even though his chosen architecture to replace the Shuttle and get NASA astronauts back to the Moon has seen its projected costs grow by $40-58 billion (i.e., double).

Even if Ares I and Orion, the gap, future ISS crew support, and future exploration plans were not in a such a sad state after Griffin’s tenure, Griffin puts his foot in his mouth so often that the civil human space flight program is much better off if he keeps quiet.

FWIW…

Having said that, the gap has been greatly exacerbated by the form the replacement has taken, for which Griffin is directly to blame. A capsule makes sense if you want to develop a maned space vehicle quickly so I don’t fault him for Orion. However, developing a whole new launch vehicle, essentially from scratch, has never made sense to me from a cost, risk, and schedule basis.

A capsule on an existing heavy ELV (Dleta IV Heavy, Atlas V Heavy, and possibly Flacon 9 Heavy) always made more sense to me. Save your precious development dollars for the capsule. Other people have built suitable launch vehicles. The Ares I money could pay for man rating more than one heavy ELV, which would allow for price competition. It would also allow the capsule to be swapped between launcher types if one type suffers a launch vehicle failure. Finally, reliability and safety comes with increased flight numbers and rates, which is more likely to happen with an ELV that is use for unmanned and commercial launches as well as maned launches. Ares I will never as often as one of the EELVs and, thus, will probably never be safer than the EELVs.

Funding COTS-D also seems like a good hedge for the relatively small amout of money involved. I wish Space-X well but it is still a novice in the space industry so I would not want to count on this as the primary route to space access. Boeing and Lockheed are expensive – partly because of the government procurement process – but they do have 50 year track records in space. If Space-X can deliver, then all the better. That would give us a second capsule design, another man rated launcher, and more price competition. Two capsule designs and two or three man rated launch vehicles would give us enough redundancy to avoid the multiple year groundings that followed the Challenger and Columbia accidents. This would be truly assured access to space.

Aliens also provides my current thought on how to deal with Ares 1: “The only way to be sure is to take off, and nuke it from orbit.”

Mike Griffin owns the gap, lock stock and barrel. Time to kill it dead.

Aliens also provides my current thought on how to deal with Ares 1: “The only way to be sure is to take off, and nuke it from orbit.”

Mike Griffin owns the gap, lock stock and barrel. Time to kill it dead.

Mike Griffin forced an architecture that has gotten us nowhere, and now leaves us with a substantial “gap” in human spaceflight capability. This sounds an awful lot like the current Republican leadership blaming everyone else for the economic woes of the nation. All they need to do is hold up a mirror to find the true cause of the problem.

See this from 2005 as Mike Griffin waxes over the “gap”
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2005/05/shuttle-to-cev-gap-a-threat-to-us-national-security-lawmaker/

Not a bad thing to be. Twenty million people listen to Rush and people in the White House clearly tremble at the mention of his name.

Actually Griffin may become more like the Dick Cheney of space flight, hated by all the right people, but speaking plainly about the policy he supported and getting a certain respect and attention for that.