Thursday, September 24, 2009

First Post

Well, now that I'm no longer the NASA Administrator and am now here in beautiful Huntsville, Alabama, I have both time to spare and some thoughts to write. It is as good a time as any for some honesty about where America's space program is, where the space advocacy community would like to take it, and how NASA's new-age management (not Charlie--he's a good pilot, an astronaut, and smart like me) will run it. Of those matters I will post in the coming months. In the mean time, I wanted to make a few personal points.


I love being an engineer. If there's anything such as a religious calling, being an engineer is that for me. I also enjoy learning. That would likely account for the 7 degrees, 6 of which are of a graduate level, I have. I also very much like being smarter than all of those who criticized my leadership at NASA. Here's a quick question: who has more degrees of a technical background, me or my critics? This is not a trick question.


Imagine you are smart, like me. Now imagine that you have to tolerate the endless, miasmatic, pejorative droning of critics of the Constellation program who collectively know as much about designing, building, and launching real rockets as a they do about quantum mechanics. Yes, I even co-authored a book on systems engineering, "Space Vehicle Design", a 617 page text that is the standard in its field. The extent of the authorship of my detractors exceeds no further than one of the very worst reads ever, "New Moon Rising", a poster child for bad writing, if there ever was one. Think of it this way, my very technical book has an Amazon sales ranking of 336,639 while their book has one of 1,207,177; and no, higher is not better. These are the same detractors who spend NASA money every year to hang-out at their geeky version of a tree house called Haughton-Mars Project on Devon Island, a small Canadian nothing, playing astronaut and believing all-the-while that they are actually helping human space exploration. Hey guys, if you want to help, stop wasting money on this campground and making the rest of us look like we are reality challenged...I mean, this is almost as bad as the old L-5 types who used to wear Spock ears when they went to testify before Congress about supporting the space program. Yes, that was a big help in maintaining NASA's budget in the tens-of-billions, which is why we landed on Mars in the 80's and have O'Neill space stations orbiting above. Very useful.


But I'm tired of writing now and am going to go fly my Tiger.


Fake Mike

1 comment:

  1. Fake Mike,

    Glad to see you making your presence known on the cybersphere.

    Keep telling it like it is brother.

    eff.equals.ma

    ReplyDelete