From The Orlando Sentinel :
CAPE CANAVERAL – NASA administrator Mike Griffin is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is “not qualified” to judge his rocket program, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.
In a heated 40-minute conversation last week with Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator who heads the space transition team, a red-faced Griffin demanded to speak directly to Obama, according to witnesses.
In addition, Griffin is scripting NASA employees and civilian contractors on what they can tell the transition team and has warned aerospace executives not to criticize the agency’s moon program, sources said.
Griffin’s resistance is part of a no-holds-barred effort to preserve the Constellation program, the delayed and over-budget moon rocket that is his signature project.
From Nature :
When one member of the team, who are meant to smooth the transition from Bush-rule to Obama-rule, told Griffin they were “just trying to look under the hood” Griffin replied:
If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar. Because it means you don’t trust what I say is under the hood.
We don't want to look under the hood, Mike. We want your head on a pike as a warning to future pork-happy ego-ejaculating administrators that pride is only acceptable when your project works.
At a glance, the best thing that could happen is that Obama fires Griffin, cancels Constellation, and replaces it with DIRECT - an on-paper system that reuses a large amount of the STS technologies without the need to develop a second booster.
We need to get off this rock, in a meaningful way - and Mike Griffin has proven he's not the man for the job.
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