NASA Cojones award

It's kind of pathetic if you have your wife plead for your job in public. This goes double, if you're Mike Griffin, NASA chief administrator. It would help, of course, if Mike Griffin wasn't uncooperative with the incoming administration.

It seems to me, though, that there's one thing that Mike Griffin doesn't understand, which is that President-elect Obama is truly serious about supporting NASA's big picture mission, and fully promoting their scientific missions and activities, unlike the Bush administration, which seemed to me to have a truly sectarian agenda. What this means, in practice, is an overall increase in actual activity, possibly at the expense of big ticket/flashy programs, such as Ares I.

What is guaranteed, with the incoming administration, is that intelligent questions will be asked, and that consequently NASA will need a good man at the top. It's unlikely he'll change his attitude, and cultivate a little humility, which is a shame because Griffin is clearly qualified at the technical level. With a truly cooperative disposition, such a person could clearly help define a coherent and meaningful strategy for NASA over the next 8 years, in association with the new administration, which would commit fully to the new direction.

And that's important, because a strong civilian NASA is critical to the economic well being, and technical leadership of this country, and would provide a true and meaningful alternative to defense spending. To me, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were inspirational to a generation of engineers, and directly responsible in large part, to the US developing and gaining an overall technological superiority that wasn't ceded to the Japanese until Wall St invaded Silicon Valley in the 1990's. And as much as I support it, the private space industry, imho, is just not in a position to do anything over the next ten years, except put a small number of people/small payload in low orbit. As much as we marvel as what Burt Rutan has been able to do, with his limited resources, it's laughable to suggest that his technology can even begin to compete with what NASA does on a bad day. It's Little League vs Major League.