George Abbey, who ran NASA's manned spaceflight program in the Goldin years, seems to be attempting to position himself to replace Mike Griffin with the advent of a Democrat administration. There are some grammar problems with this report of a recent speech by him (it reads sort of like a live blog of the speech). I know that you will all be shocked to hear this, but he doesn't want to replace the Shuttle--he wants to keep operating it:

The space program needs realism, Abbey said. Putting an end point on the shuttle forces NASA to focus all of its remaining missions on the space station, giving little leeway for other missions.

What other missions? Other than Hubble, what does he have in mind? Surely he doesn't think that we can afford to do deep space exploration with it as a launch vehicle?

If we don't retire it, how long does he expect to be able to keep operating it? What happens when (not if) we lose another orbiter?

The major difference between the two craft, Abbey said, is versatility a handy attribute when working in space [sic--I assume that there is supposed to be some kind of punctuation after the word "versatility"]. (Orion) is not as capable as the shuttle it cant [sic] do any of the things the shuttle can do.

Well, it certainly can't do all the things that the Shuttle can do, but it can certainly (at least in theory) deliver crew to space and back, which is one of the things that the Shuttle can do. Whether or not it even should be able to do all of the things that the Shuttle can do is barely even debatable any more, given the consensus of most observers of the program that a primary problem with Shuttle is that it had too many conflicting requirements. This is thinking right out of the early seventies, and it's also thinking born of a career at NASA, in which it is automatically assumed that we can only afford one vehicle type, so it must do everything (ISS was severely crippled by this attitude as well). And of course any system that has to have so much capability, if it's possible at all, will be very expensive to develop and operate, so the notion that we can only afford one becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I find his concern about other space nations misplaced. Certainly China isn't going to make any great strides at their current place. And his spinoff argument is typical NASA fluff. The only thing he says that I agree with, in fact, is about ITAR (at least I assume that's what he's talking about when he says):

First, Abbey said too much government red tape is making it very difficult for wanting nations to purchase satellites from the U.S. The red tape is forcing nations to other competitors those competitors are surpassing us.

Of course, it's hard to know exactly what he said, or meant, given the quality of the reportage.

Grammar nazis are more of a turn off than those who want to keep the shuttle alive.

"Grammar nazis"?

Pardon my indifference to your foolish turn ons and turn offs, Miss May Not.

Right or wrong, NASA badly needs to move forward.

As has been mentioned (many times by some commentators) before NASA is not supposed to be builing its own fleet of spacecraft under VES or ESAS. I know, 'congressional pork'...

Again, so much talk and waste with not enough action. I am aware that building a spacecraft can be no easy matter and I have no solution to that problem. Its your tax dollars being wasted by constatnt redesigns because someone has FUBAR'd or 'greased the wrong palms'.

I hope and pray that the next administration - the representatives, senators, president, his (or her) appointees along with all the kiss-butt civil servants - share the vision and we're not left scrambling again.

Some have critisized China. At least China is doing something, even if they are lagging way behind.

To get back to the original post,
let me just tell everyone a story
from my staffer days.

Back in 1997-98 Dan Goldin and JSC
Director Abbey were desperately
trying to convince the Clinton WH
to support limited Mars exploration
research, to no avail.

In order to justify investments that
would have relevance to Mars, they
made up some whoppper stories.

For example, in 98 Abbey's front men
at NASA HQ proposed "commercializing
the shuttle payload bay", which would
drive the flight rate up to 15/year.
Mind you, they didn't want to turn the
orbiters over to USA, they just wanted
NASA to be allowed to sell commercial
Shuttle launches.

Why this preposterous notion? Because,
you see, the SRB production could only
be scaled up to 11 pairs per year,
whereas LIQUID FLYBACK BOOSTERS could
enable 15+ missions per year.

And, it turned out, LFBs were a key
architectural element of a Boeing
(nee Rockwell) concept called Magnumlifter.
Which, if course, was all about sending
humans to Mars.

So they wanted to destroy the commercial
geosat launcher marketplace in order to
"justify" funding part of a Mars rocket.

That's the logic of George Abbey.

I agree with George that I think the hard cutover is foolish, but then so is burning money (which is cheaper than flying the shuttle). That said, I rather continue flying the shuttle to keep the STS engineers employed, rather than bastardizing the CLV to keep the STS engineers employed. In short, keep flying the Shuttle and build the CEV/CLV correctly for the long term.

Or just go commercial and get out of the way.

I think Abbey will actually do more to make Constellation look more like STS than less.

Whatever George Abbey does for manned spaceflight, I doubt the centers outside of JSC/KSC will be happy to see him as Administrator.

George Abbey will become Administrator of NASA over several people's (including my) dead body.

You know, the first step in a recovery program is to admit you have a problem. Abbey has not even gotten to step 1 yet: he still thinks Shuttle is the solution, not the problem. As if Shuttle was still the PowerPoint queen it was in 1980, instead of the failed mess it is in 2006.

George Abbey will become Administrator of NASA over several people's (including my) dead body.

I'm sure that he'd be happy to arrange that, Jim.

A nomination of George Abbey as NASA Administrator would certainly be entertaining, albeit on a very low order of probability. It would likely mean that any President that does such a thing would have as a secret agenda the destruction of NASA from within, and would thus be welcome in certain quarters.

I seriously doubt President McCain will feel inclined to nominate Gorge Abbey.

If half of what I've read about Abbey in books like Mullane's "Riding Rockets" is true, then he would be a bigger disaster for NASA than a whole cartload of exploding rockets.