She raised a lot of eyebrows in the audience a week and a half ago when she called some on the Hill “porkers” in public. It occurs to me this morning that now we know why. She was FIGMO.
[Update a few minutes later]
Over at Space Politics, DBN points out the real failure of the administration on space policy:
I’m no fan of the NASA workforce, but if you’re right and Tip O’Neill’s maxim that “all politics is local” is what’s driving the repeated failures of the Administration’s civil space initiatives, then the Administration is to blame for never making the local argument about how their initiatives would maintain NASA employment by shifting workers from Program A to Programs X, Y, and Z. We never saw that kind of argument, commitment, or the workforce numbers to back it up when the Administration rolled out its Constellation replacement programs, and we never saw it earlier this year when ARM was proposed.
I don’t lay this failure at Garver’s doorstep because we don’t know who did what in the Administration and White House before these initiatives were rolled out. That decision process is embargoed, and for all we know, Garver was pounding her fists for a sane workforce transition plan instead of the vacuum that ensued. And maybe the hyperpartisan environment on the Hill would have rendered even Tip O’Neill’s maxim useless. But the fact that the Administration never got to square one on the politics 101 topic of workforce redistribution is not Congress’s fault. As venal and stupid as Congress is, at some level their rejection of the Administration’s civil space initiatives is just them doing their job under the Constitution and protecting their constituents’ local interests. In the absence of any workforce argument, commitment, or plan from the Administration, it’s hard to see how the key members in Congress could have reacted differently. Even a workforce commitment and detailed plan might not have been enough to get the Administration’s civil space initiatives off the ground, but the Administration also didn’t even bother to try.
That’s because space policy wasn’t important to them. That was good, in terms of their willingness to leave it more to the commercial sector, but bad in that they made no effort to implement their good policy on the Hill. Of course, they’ve been pretty incompetent at dealing with Congress in general.
Considering some of the policies of this administration, that was pretty rich. I think she did the nation a service by burning bridges.
Occassionally I tell this story about a JSC Innovation Fair. Outside building 17, there were 3 mock-ups of the CEV/Orion module and the first Dragon orbiter (already flown). Besides the obvious attempt for NASA to show progress towards what SpaceX had already accomplished; there was one sign that explained it all to me. Over a graphic of the US with dots all over the country, a title read: “Orion is built near me!”. It was the clearest example of spreading around the pork and the harm it causes to progress that I have ever seen. I snapped a picture of the overall display and show it to people, who ask me my opinion of the state of the US space program and NASA.
Ah, the infamous “Congressional Kiss of Death” slide, wherein a map shows that there is a subcontractor in every congressional district in the entire friggin’ country. But at least everybody gets a piece of the pork. Sigh.
Yes. And the lady doing PR for SpaceX in front of Dragon… A former NASA contractor. She’s just one example, but it too illustrated that NASA had the intellectual capital to be where SpaceX is.
I think it was Alan Turing who said that the Americans built the first digital computer because they wanted a computer, whereas the British government wanted a computer project.
With the projected SLS flight rate (and thus NASA’s) already mind-bogglingly low and dropping, it’s obvious that we’re not trying to get into space, we letting a construction project tangentially related to space swell to the available budget.
Whereas Kruschev was determined to churn expendable rockets out like sausages, and Elon Musk wants to churn them out like DC-3’s, with the SLS we’re going to churn them out like Sistine Chapels.
SLS isn’t that pretty.
But each one could be, and probably without much effect on the schedule or budget. The Sistine Chapel ceiling only took about four or five years for Michelangelo to paint 5,000 square feet. So each NASA contracted artist could cover about 1,000 square feet per year.
The SLS core stage is 86 feet in circumference and is roughly 200 feet long, so it’s about 17,000 square feet. Given a flight ever two to three years, painting each one to that level of detail should only add about five to eight people to the workforce.
“is just [congress] doing their job under the Constitution and protecting their constituents’ local interests.”
He’s being too kind to congress. Is it really just their job to bring home the bacon in a zero-sum political spoils contest?
Bob,
That is how the majority of the voters and donors see it so that is why Congress Critters behave the way they do 🙂