Is NASA dying?? If so, whose fault is it?

In article ,
Phil Fraering pgf@AUTO wrote:
Goldin survived much more because of the difficulty of finding vaguely
qualified candidates who actually wanted the job. It wasn't that Clinton
wasn't *interested* in replacing him...

Out of curiosity... did they ask you at the time?

Nope. I was disappointed. :-)

Not that I actually *expected* them to, for two main reasons. First,
while I'm not sure that it's legally impossible for a foreigner to fill
such a position, it certainly would create many difficulties, and I expect
it would be a complete political non-starter for both the White House
(nomination) and the Senate (confirmation). Second, the Administrator is
primarily a manager, not an engineer, and should have big-organization
management experience (preferably in government), which I lack.

Nor do I consider myself qualified for it, for that second reason.

Nor would I particularly *want* the job. I would be interested in it only
on a platform :-) of drastic reform, and the first question to ask someone
offering you such a job is "I'll have to slash and burn first -- the queue
of powerful people demanding my dismissal will overflow your outer office
and stretch down the hall -- so is this important enough to you that
you'll back me up all the way, even when I make mistakes?", and there is
just no way I'd get a (believable) "yes" to that. NASA, as a space agency
rather than a jobs program, just is not important enough to the White House
to invest that much political capital in reforming it.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

Phil Fraering pgf@AUTO writes:

(Henry Spencer) writes:

In article ,
Rand Simberg wrote:
Golding survived because he was a Democrat...

Goldin survived much more because of the difficulty of finding vaguely
qualified candidates who actually wanted the job. It wasn't that Clinton
wasn't *interested* in replacing him...

Out of curiosity... did they ask you at the time?

Henry Spencer is a Canadian citizen. That pretty much rules him out for
any position in the US Civil Service; Congress theoretically *could* make
an exception - or just make him a US citizen - but realistically, no.

Plus, I'm not sure he has the management experience he'd need to ride
herd on the rest of the institution.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-718-0955 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

"Explorer8939" wrote in message
om...
The obvious choice is Mr. O'Keefe, arguably the worst NASA
Administrator ever.
---clip---

Oh, come on! O'Keefe may be underqualified for an aerospace leadership
position, but worse than Goldin, the "George McClellan" of Space?!

JJ Robinson II
Houston, TX
****************
* JOKE *
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* SERIOUS *
****************
* SARCASTIC *
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* OTHER? *
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"Explorer8939" wrote in message
om...
The obvious choice is Mr. O'Keefe, arguably the worst NASA
Administrator ever. If you have any doubts, check out his performance
in regards to the 3 of NASA's major programs: Shuttle, ISS and Hubble.

Since O'Keefe will likely exit NASA after the election, the bigger
question is the future of NASA. The most likely long term scenario
for NASA is that Shuttle retires itself, ISS continues to depend on
the Russians (in minimal mode), and the Moon Mars thing quietly fades
away as the other crises overwhelm the NASA bureaucracy. All the
while, private astronauts fly ever higher suborbital missions.

One could argue that there is indeed a space race - if private
astronauts get into orbit using totally private systems BEFORE NASA
can send astronauts beyond orbit, then it would obvious that we don't
NASA's version of human spaceflight - why spend billions of taxpayer
dollars to fly NASA astronauts when any idiot can simply buy a ticket
into space?


A suborbital ride just doesn't measure up compare to an orbital ride, I'm
afraid. OTOH the first U.S. astronaut also made an orbital flight (15
minutes) back in the fifties, after years of government spending. I believe
private enterprise may be able to get an astronaut into orbit for about $50
million, one shot pop, about $15 million every flight after that.

On 2004-05-17, Uddo Graaf wrote:


A suborbital ride just doesn't measure up compare to an orbital ride, I'm
afraid. OTOH the first U.S. astronaut also made an orbital flight (15
minutes) back in the fifties, after years of government spending. I believe
private enterprise may be able to get an astronaut into orbit for about $50
million, one shot pop, about $15 million every flight after that.

Um. The first US astronaut made a *sub*orbital ride back in the sixties,
for about fifteen minutes...

(He later made an orbital one, and indeed a landing one, for about a
week and a bit, but that was in a different part of the sixties...)

If you can get an astronaut doing a fifteen-minute orbit, more power to
you, but you'd need a fairly nifty tunnel :-)

--
-Andrew Gray

John Schilling wrote:

Phil Fraering pgf@AUTO writes:

(Henry Spencer) writes:

In article ,
Rand Simberg wrote:
Golding survived because he was a Democrat...

Goldin survived much more because of the difficulty of finding vaguely
qualified candidates who actually wanted the job. It wasn't that Clinton
wasn't *interested* in replacing him...

Out of curiosity... did they ask you at the time?

Henry Spencer is a Canadian citizen. That pretty much rules him out for
any position in the US Civil Service; Congress theoretically *could* make
an exception - or just make him a US citizen - but realistically, no.

Plus, I'm not sure he has the management experience he'd need to ride
herd on the rest of the institution.

Some recent experience herding cats would be helpful.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-718-0955 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

On 2004-05-17, jacob navia wrote:

[Copied and redirected to ssh, since this possibly seems appropriate
there, being as it is a little historical diversion which might be
useful at an indefinite later point]

Trips to America were risky and extremely expensive
in 1492. The technology of that epoch required that
the Queen Isabel of Spain sold most of her jewel treasury
to finance it. It was a good investment of course, but trips

[Warning - rambling by someone with no grounding in economics bar
enthusiasm and knowing some words is to follow; please treat it as the
bored-evening digression it is g]

I've heard this a lot, pawning her jewels; how accurate is it, really? I
mean, we're talking three fairly common merchant ships and provisioning,
plus appropriate crews; not pocket change, but not exactly something you
would expect to tax the resources of even the monarch of a backwater
nation - especially when you consider that a year or so later, he sailed
with seventeen ships and fifteen hundred colonists, and funding doesn't
seem to have been a problem. 'Course, then he was talking gold g

(I wonder if an appropriate modern analogy would be asking somewhere
like .es or .nl to provide you some 747s... not unattainable, but not
something they'd do off the cuff)

[digs for a while]

Hmm. It seems that Isabella may have offer to pawn her jewels, but it
doesn't seem that she actually did; either or both parts of this may be
apocryphal - and probably no more than a demonstration of her intent to
carry through.

Two of the ships were provided by the town of Palos, which was
apparently owing the service of two caravels to the Crown (or Crowns?);
crew and tack quite likely included. Some cites seem to indicate that
the crown paid for the third (the Santa Maria), some that the town was
strongarmed into providing it, some that it came with Pinzon when he
joined the expedition. (the 1911 Britannica seems to suggest it just
appeared one night, which is probably unlikely g) Lot of variety in
the details between apparently authoritative accounts, which is only to
be expected (given the wide disparity on, eg, how much Apollo cost...)

All this aside...

http://worldebooklibrary.com/eBooks/...03/cc02v10.htm

(among others)

The cost to the crown appears to have been on the order of a million
maravedis, plus another couple of hundred thou from Columbus.

http://dinsdoc.com/sumner-1.htm

"The real was, therefore, 3.433 grams gross and 3.194 grams fine. It
consisted of 34 maravedis." [apparently talking of silver]

.... 93941.176470588235294117647058824 g.Ag to a million mar, sayeth my
calculator with delightfully spurious accuracy!

So, we're looking at a shade under 100kg of silver as the cost to the
crown. That's not astoundingly much, really, even by contemporary
standards...

"The excelente was rated at eleven reals and one maravedi, the intention
evidently being to rate the metals at 10 to 1"

So in gold a shade under 10kg, three hundred-odd troy ounces. I don't
seem to be able to find a contemporary context for that, but feel free
to play; there should be a contemportary European figure or two in
either gold or silver ounces.

But I think we can all agree they got a pretty good return on their
investment :-)

--
-Andrew Gray

In article ,
jjrobinson2 wrote:
Oh, come on! O'Keefe may be underqualified for an aerospace leadership
position, but worse than Goldin, the "George McClellan" of Space?!

That last is not a bad comparison, since although McClellan didn't get the
results desired in the end, he *did* considerably improve the Union Army,
and his successors benefitted substantially from that. (Unlike some other
Union generals, he wasn't grossly incompetent, just too timid for top
command.)

O'Keefe is quite well qualified for a government management position, and
that's what being Administrator is all about. The Administrator does not
make technical decisions; he is primarily a politician.

NASA's best Administrator, Jim Webb, knew zero about aerospace when he got
the job, but he was an experienced high-level government manager and he
knew where all the bodies were buried in Washington.

Whereas the most technically knowledgeable Administrator ever, Dick Truly,
was the Ambrose Burnside of Space -- "snatching defeat from the jaws of
victory".
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

In article ,
Dick Morris wrote:
Plus, I'm not sure he has the management experience he'd need to ride
herd on the rest of the institution.

Some recent experience herding cats would be helpful.

Come now, we're talking about NASA Centers here. Herding weasels would be
more like it. :-) :-)
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

(Henry Spencer) writes:

In article ,
Phil Fraering pgf@AUTO wrote:
Goldin survived much more because of the difficulty of finding vaguely
qualified candidates who actually wanted the job. It wasn't that Clinton
wasn't *interested* in replacing him...

Out of curiosity... did they ask you at the time?

Nope. I was disappointed. :-)

Did I need a smiley?

Not that I actually *expected* them to, for two main reasons. First,
while I'm not sure that it's legally impossible for a foreigner to fill
such a position, it certainly would create many difficulties, and I expect
it would be a complete political non-starter for both the White House
(nomination) and the Senate (confirmation). Second, the Administrator is
primarily a manager, not an engineer, and should have big-organization
management experience (preferably in government), which I lack.

I wasn't serious about it at first... but I'm now thinking of Gerhard
Neumann, who I think gained citizenship outside the usual channels,
but I can't remember the details.

I agree about the slash-and-burn, etc...

--
pgf