Update on NASA drama!

I've got two things to briefly (I promise) discuss today and they are follow-ups on a post from back in December.

First of all, the supposed tension between the upcoming Obama administration and the current NASA administrator Michael Griffin has slipped out of the control of the many PR people involved. Mr. Griffin's wife has begun actively lobbying for her husband with the hope of avoiding his imminent ousting. I have mixed opinions about Mr. Griffin. I have to give him credit for overseeing NASA's crawl from the stagnation of the post-Nixon space program. At the same time, all of Mr. Griffin critics can't be wrong, right?

For the record on the big NASA issues of the day, I think extending the space shuttles' service is a bad idea. It's an old, unreliable and expensive spaceflight system. I also think that scrapping the Ares program would be a terrible decision and would likely doom, or at least drastically delay, the future of manned spaceflight. Merging some parts (manned spaceflight, earthbound satellite programs, orbital and exo-atmospheric object tracking, etc.) of the DoD space budget and NASA budget is probably a good idea as long as funding for "science for science's sake" programs (deep space probes, planetary probes, orbital science platforms) is not slashed.

On the subject of money, projections for next year's budget deficit are in! Ouch...

Politically, Mr. Obama will be able to avoid most of the "tax-n-spend liberal" charges with his proposed tax cuts and breaks. However, I fear something worse - a continuation of Pres. Bush's "cut taxes and spend obscenely" policy which garnered rave reviews during the election season. With all of this proposed spending, remind me why everyone is so concerned about NASA's relatively small budget?