Saturday, October 22, 2005

NASA shake-up part of strategy to revisit moon





"To do this, you do need to be a rocket scientist," Griffin said. "The managers we had in place were not in my judgment what we needed for the change of direction we wanted to take."


It's almost surreal to see NASA mutate -- and kind of exciting, even though I know damned well the Moon-Mars initiative is about space militarization.

3 comments:

W.M. Bear said...

I hate to say it, but at least a military base on the Moon is better than no base on the Moon. Presumably there would also be at least some scientific benefit, we would at least be "out there" for good, and at least there aren't any native "Loonies" up there to slaughter. Lot of "at leasts"!

Ken said...

True enough, Bear; can't argue. Myself, I'm just glad we are going back. We should have had a moon base of some sort decades ago. We could have done it easily enough. Another casualty of Vietnam, I should guess.

A lot of "at leasts", a lot of difficulties to overcome, but there is no doubt in my mind that we can and should do this.

Also, it really does appear that Griffin is actually overhauling NASA. I'd had my doubts, as bureaucracy becomes incredibly entrenched. But, he's got the right idea. Fire the deadwood or, I dunno, ship 'em to Alaska! We can always put 'em in a pot and use 'em for crab bait! Or, just take 'em fishing, and they might mysteriously fall overboard. THAT is known as a "Kodiak Divorce". Works quite well, I'm told. ;-)

The Odd Emperor said...

We’re in a space race again boys and girls, I for one am happy to see it. But, it’s going to be about militarizing space first and science second. The first country that can set up a manned station and a few million dollars in hardware will have a weapons platform more potent than a brace of peacekeeper missiles. The Chinese are probably less than twenty years from doing that.

Of course, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was one of my favorite novels growing up.