It's Mike Griffin for NASA Administrator

[BrainGlutton]

@Hyperelastic

There have always been Bob Parks around, but until recently, nobody took them seriously. Good thing, too, otherwise there would be a severe overpopulation crisis in East Africa by now.

What does skepticism about manned spaceflight have to do with the population of East Africa?

[Grey]

The Rift Valley would’ve become really tight for space if we had waited for the right time to walk over the next hill.

[jshore]

@Hyperelastic

Park has built a career out of naysaying human spaceflight.

Well, I think most physicists would say that Park had a very successful career before he shifted toward science policy. But granted, Park is indeed a big…perhaps the big…naysayer of human spaceflight, and I think for some pretty compelling reasons.

[manhattan]

@jshore

And, outside of the happy world that Sam Stone talks about where Bush gives NASA big increases and fights then Congress that tries to cut NASA, there is the real world where the redirection at NASA is cutting some programs badly, like aeronautics (and here) and
other things and Congress is questioning these cuts:

I’m OK with that. I have complete and unwavering confidence that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and others (including foreign competitors such as Airbus) can do their own research on terresterial aeronautics at this point in history. If not, DOD can pay them to or pick up the slack themselves. Let the “S” in NASA now supercede the “A.” If we’re going to have a manned spaceflight program – and the public seems to want us to – let the spaceflight guys put their best talent to work on going to space.

[Hyperelastic]

@manhattan

I’m OK with that. I have complete and unwavering confidence that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and others (including foreign competitors such as Airbus) can do their own research on terresterial aeronautics at this point in history. If not, DOD can pay them to or pick up the slack themselves. Let the “S” in NASA now supercede the “A.” If we’re going to have a manned spaceflight program – and the public seems to want us to – let the spaceflight guys put their best talent to work on going to space.

Except that NASA has lost the technical ability to control the designs the way it did during Apollo. Said differently, the spaceflight guys work in the private sector now, and there’s no plan to lure them back to NASA. I predict that what you will see with Moon-Mars is a colossal firm, fixed-price contract to either Boeing or Lockheed for “general systems engineering and integration,” in military parlance. That means the designs will be controlled by private companies, with NASA only checking that top-level requirements, like mass-to-orbit, are met. This scenario is my biggest concern with Moon-Mars. The Air Force tried “managing by requirements” in the Nineties but gave it up after contractors dropped several billion dollars worth of payloads in the drink. One would hope that NASA would avoid repeating the Air Force’s mistakes, but history tends to show that NASA has to learn things the hard way.