From the Washington Post story -

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/10/A

R2005061001911.html

 "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."


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"He's going to want people that are on his wavelength, and his wavelength is that he's an engineer and a scientist."
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OK. Not much here excepting that Griffin is going to replace people that have made a career dedicated to "human spaceflight" for a project "to return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars." Yeah, that makes sense. (NOT! If you don't get the sarcasm.)

So, being an average net junkie without Lexis-Nexis, or even a Lexus, I did a quick Google search on Griffin.  Nothing much. Glowing reviews. Geez there's even a 'pray for him little Christian Republican children' page.

http://pptkids.org/index-20050325.php

Let's all pray for the engineer and scientist.

Then I saw this comment on Griffin -

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http://www.shadowsofmedusa.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=21&

In terms of policy, he has always favored minimizing investment into the space station and evolving the space shuttle stack into a heavy-lift vehicle (capable of sending serious payloads to the Moon or Mars).
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Now I've never believed in this "to the moon Alice!" Bush project for 5 bil when papa Bush had a Mars project 15 years before that was supposed to cost 500 bil in those dollars.  My take has always been that NASA wasn't in full stride with the military industrial complex and the Mars mission at some vague decades away date was just a "bring democracy to Mars" sort of cover for shifting NASA into a pork project.

With that preface on my attitude, 'note in the quote' (sounds like a sportscaster type home run phrase) "heavy-lift vehicle."  My memory is fuzzy on the subject but I think the shuttle was originally designed to be smaller and have less load capability. I think it was the military that wanted the heavier load spec.  

Now all this is just vague speculation but I'm not that concerned about a NASA purge as a singleton. Purges have become almost as commonplace with the Bush regime as with communist regimes.  Everything has been politicized and politicized to a radical degree. Every fking thing.  The courts are the most obvious in long term importance, but there's the intelligence community with Cheney and Bolton, et. al. The FBI with the porter doing the sweeping. Look at the generals that say they have enough troops in Iraq.  Those are the people whose job it is to protect and defend America. Another significant Republican purging has been with lobbyists, where if you lean Dem you lean over the cliff and get a quick shove.

If Democrats or any alternative group ever get into power, these entrenched in the woodwork people will require even more extensive purging in order to get government back on the tack of working for America and Americans rather than military-industrialists and multi-nationalists.

Think of all this and remember the uproar over some government travel agency.

Pray for us little children, we need it.