SirNitram wrote:Oh, I was wrong about his position in it. It was Michael Griffin.
So no wonder I couldn't fucking find anything -- I was looking for the Ares project manager, NOT the fucking administrator of NASA.
Your grasp of departmental organization and the division of responsibilities in a large industrial program leaves me fucking in awe of your brilliance.
A dangerous concept for anyone involved in spaceflight.
If you would shut the fuck up for a moment, instead of simply parrotting soundbites and spewing jizz onto the board without checking your own sources -- you would have noticed that this was Griffin chewing the head off of the lead member of the Obama Transition team, which was looking at Constellation during the transition period with only one purpose in mind -- to find flaws, so that they could recommend its cancellation.
Additionally, as a bonus, it was a soft degree person going up against someone who knows their Shit (TM) and has been there, and done that. I'm sure that engineers love having some PolSci degree holder issue judgement in their degrees of expertise.
Link
The Obama team picked Garver to run the NASA transition, in part because of her deep pedigree and long history at the space agency, which saw her climb to the rank of associate administrator. But Garver started as a PAO — NASA-speak for a public affairs officer — and never got involved in the nuts and bolts of building rockets. She is best known by most people as the person who in 2002 competed with boy-band singer Lance Bass for the chance to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket. Neither of them ever left the ground.
Garver's lack of engineering cred is especially surprising in light of the eggheads with whom Obama has been surrounding himself — most recently, Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Chu, who has reportedly been tapped to be Secretary of Energy. Garver is also not thought to be much of a fan of Griffin — who is an engineer — nor to be sold on the plans for the new moon program. What she and others are said to be considering is to scrap the plans for the Ares 1 — which is designed exclusively to carry humans — and replace it with Atlas V and Delta IV boosters, which are currently used to launch satellites but could be redesigned, or "requalified," for humans. Griffin hates that idea, and firmly believes the Atlas and Delta are unsafe for people. One well-placed NASA source who asked not to be named reports that as much as Griffin wants to keep his job, he'll walk away from it if he's made to put his astronauts on top of those rockets.
NASA is right to be uneasy about just what Obama has planned for the agency since his position on space travel shifted — a lot — during the campaign. A year before the election he touted an $18 billion education program and explicitly targeted the new moon program as one he'd cut to pay for it. In January of 2008, he lined up much closer to the Bush moon plan — perhaps because Republicans were already on board and earning swing-state support as a result. Three months before the election, Obama fully endorsed the 2020 target for putting people on the moon. But that was a candidate talking and now he's president-elect, and his choice of Garver as his transition adviser may say more than his past campaign rhetoric.
The dust-up between Griffin and Garver is said to have occurred last week at a book launch party in Washington when, according to the Sentinel, a red-faced Griffin told Garver she was "not qualified" to make engineering decisions. Horowitz, who was not at the party but knows the NASA boss well, says he doubts that Griffin raised his voice.
"I think that's bulls---," he says. "I believe that anything he was asked he was very honest in answering because he's a systems engineer. And Lori Garver is not equipped to make technical judgments on the architecture of a space exploration system." The unnamed NASA source concedes that Griffin can be brutally honest and occasionally tactless, but insists that his shouting is simply improbable. The Obama transition office did not return an e-mail seeking comment from Garver.
Really, the fact that NASA has even gotten this far, is due to Griffin's drive -- he told the scientists in NASA to suck it and cancelled various science programs to pay for Constellation and the development of a new heavy lift capability to support manned exploration, beginning with the moon.
In fact, going to Mars is actually fucking part of Constellation -- the Orion Mars Mission, which would use Ares V and the methods developed during operation of the Lunar Base in the 2020s was slated tentatively for the 2030s -- Griffin even gave a rough year -- 2037.
I thought you were all for MARS MARS MARS.
Memory Problems. Right. Sure. 
