Free Republic

NASA's new space exploration program may be skewed toward sending astronauts to an asteroid and onto Mars, but a return to Earth's moon is not completely lost, NASA's deputy chief told reporters today (Sept. 30). NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, the space agency's second-in-command, said the moon has a role to play in the new space exploration plan set by President Obama and approved by Congress this week. NASA, she added, won't turn its back on Earth's nearest neighbor.

Recently NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver made a speech to the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics on what she termed "the next fifty years in space." The address was primarily a defense of the controversial Obama space policy. Beyond some of the soaring rhetoric and some good, but vague wordage about the roles of commercial space and NASA, one could not help but notice how tinny and small the Garver, which is to say the Obama, vision of the next fifty years in space really is.

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama's transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is "not qualified" to judge his rocket program, the Orlando Sentinel has learned. In a heated 40-minute conversation last week with Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator who heads the space transition team, a red-faced Griffin demanded to speak directly to Obama, according to four witnesses. In addition, Griffin is scripting NASA employees and civilian contractors on what they can tell the transition team and has warned aerospace executives not to criticize...