Finally! NASA has been spiraling out of control over the last twenty years or so. They are a government agency and have suffered from severe scope creep -- expanding until the bureaucracy was standing in the way of science. President Bush has appointed a new chief and heads are starting to roll:
NASA Chief to Oust 20
Shake-Up Linked to Mars Initiative
New NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin has decided to replace about 20 senior space agency officials by mid-August in the first stage of a broad agency shake-up. The departures include the two leaders of the human spaceflight program, which is making final preparations to fly the space shuttle for the first time in more than two years.
Senior NASA officials and congressional and aerospace industry sources said yesterday that Griffin wants to clear away entrenched bureaucracy, and build a less political and more scientifically oriented team to implement President Bush's plan to return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars.
The moon-Mars initiative has put severe pressure on NASA's budget, forcing Griffin into a difficult balancing act -- trying to build quickly a next generation spaceship without crippling programs ranging from Earth observation satellites and aeronautics research to maintaining the Hubble telescope.
At the same time, the sources said, Griffin wants to restore NASA's glamour, reasserting the engineering and science leadership that has been eroding since the Apollo era. To this end, the sources said, he is willing to oust as many as 50 senior managers in a housecleaning rivaling the purge after the 1986 Challenger explosion.
"Some people make a lot of changes; some people make a few," said Ed Weiler, director of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "He's going to want people that are on his wavelength, and his wavelength is that he's an engineer and a scientist."
Emphasis mine. Cool -- finally, a Geek in charge rather than a Washington career-administrator. We had Americans walking on the surface of the Moon and got them back safely. Apollo 14 Astronaut Alan B. Shepard hit a golf ball up there! No other nation has done this. We need to keep going -- launching one fragile shuttle every two years doesn't cut it...
