I am shocked — SHOCKED to see Obama political appointees blaming their predecessors.
“We have a program. We have a budget. We have bipartisan support. We have a destination,” NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said. “We are just putting finer points on the rocket design.”
But Garver and other administration officials are getting heat from some of the most famous astronauts on the planet, not to mention members of Congress and aerospace industry executives. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and someone never known to be a rabble-rouser, recently co-wrote with fellow Apollo astronauts Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan an op-ed in USA Today declaring that the space policy of the Obama administration is in “substantial disarray.” The astronauts protested the decision to kill the Constellation program, the George W. Bush-era plan for a new lunar mission with new rockets and spacecraft.
Here’s Bob Crippen, the pilot of the first shuttle mission, STS-1, back in 1981: “I’ve never seen NASA so screwed up as it is right now. . . . They don’t know where they’re going.”
Even one of NASA’s senior people here at the Kennedy Space Center, Mike Leinbach, the launch director who will supervise the final countdown and launch of Atlantis, has blasted his agency for the lack of direction.
“We’re all victims of poor policy out of Washington, D.C. — both at the NASA level and the executive branch of the government,” Leinbach said recently at a news conference here. He said he was “embarrassed” about the lack of guidance.
NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. said that he respects Crippen and Leinbach but “could not disagree more” with their comments: “Our future is bright, and the U.S. will continue to be a world leader in space exploration for many years to come.”
Garver suggested that the agency’s critics fail to recognize the dire condition of the human spaceflight program when Obama took office.
Even if Bolden, the ambassador from NASA to the Muslim world’s ego, and his minions are correct about it all being Bush’s fault, that card is played out.
