Griffin dour; the Stanford Space meeting will occur regardless
The "Griffin dour" bit is my inability to pass up potential puns, in this case on Gryffindor, the House that Harry Potter belonged to at Hogwarts. I guess past tense is appropriate now. I'm book-oriented....
"Experts to discuss the space plan", NYT 2/12/08. Merv, sorry, Peter, oops, Michael Griffin is annoyed that there's talk of coming up with new plans for how space exploration will proceed. He even has a perfectly plausible sounding explanation for some of the dissatisfaction. He said:
Partially true. Inadequately true.
Not all the people there are the conceded greedy contractors shut out of a lucrative deal with the profligate government. But then, I'm bothered by that anyway. We often commit ourselves to plans - go to the Moon, reconstruct Iraq, save a city imperilled by a hurricane - and not in each of those cases do we
- pay attention to how much will need to be done
- accurately assess the magnitude of the costs
- consider the available tools at hand, including the contractors, Congress, and bureaucrats who are to perform, oversee, and interfere with the task.
If a contractor is half a billion dollars into a project, say a satellite that's to go up three years hence, in a shuttle (wups, it'll be decommissioned by 2010), how easy is it to discipline it for cost overruns, quality failures, or simple malfeasance? Think sunk cost. Think inertia. My goodness, think about the political cost, not in votes but in campaign contributions, to any politician from the home area of the company that fails to defend its right to be incompetent or worse!
There's a very limited pool of contractors - there almost has to be, based on how Big Science has been done through NASA lo these many years. Faster Cheaper Better is an interesting motto (I always add: pick two), but despite some recent successes it hasn't been NASA's strong suit.
So, Griffin thinks changing policies that he's been involved with deciding, over the last several years, would be changing horses in midstream, or whatever.
Well, clearly he has screwed up. He may have had the best process imaginable, with the most important minds at NASA and maybe outside it. They may have the best plan. But NASA doesn't operate in a vaccuum (ha hahahah I crack me up), NASA has constituencies.
There are the critical public, the hecklers and opponents of space spending. The kind of people who honestly ask why that money isn't being spent here, and it's difficult to show them a pie chart and explain that NASA's budget is less than 10% of the cost of the Iraq war, less than 1% of the total budget. 16.25 billion for 2007, was NASA's budget. We're spending approximately 10 billion a MONTH in Iraq. All sources wikipedia, e.g. here and there.
And what about everyone else? Those who are not anti-space, but weren't consulted? Why wasn't there broader buy-in for NASA's current direction? Heck, why isn't there much buy-in for the idea of NASA? The plan has always been to not market the NASA brand, to cater to the public as dryly and as uninterestingly as possible. Contests? Reality shows? Why get people excited about exploration, risk, adventure, explosions, human drama, voyages, separation, possible death, vast distances and possible enormous treasure troves? None of that is romantic or saleable in the least.
The very first thing that the X Prize and similar things have going for them is that they're not hamstrung by stupid thinking. The whole point is excitement and selling people what they want, selling what will make its own market.
So, to go back and try to make my point: if you come up with a plan, even the best plan, and people who are crucial to your success in implementing it don't think it's a good plan, you don't have a working plan. Because they will resent you for not meeting their concerns, and they will remove you and unmake your plan and leave you behind, your time and effort wasted.
So, include crucial parties in your planning. Or you'll end up like Griffin, grumpy as the intellectual barbarians meet outside the gates to criticize what has been so painstakingly worked out by professionals....
"Experts to discuss the space plan", NYT 2/12/08. Merv, sorry, Peter, oops, Michael Griffin is annoyed that there's talk of coming up with new plans for how space exploration will proceed. He even has a perfectly plausible sounding explanation for some of the dissatisfaction. He said:
issued a response last month arguing that “the questions to be raised at this conference have been asked and answered.” Many voices, he said, were heard in the planning of the program, which Congress finalized in 2005.Now, I particularly buy his "sour grapes" comment. That's quite likely to be true, in my book.
In an interview last week, Dr. Griffin said: “We spent three years reassessing the policy and codifying it. Changing it now? I think that’s just stupid.” He has suggested that some of the opposition is a sour-grapes effort by aerospace contractors who wanted a second shot at rich contracts. But, he said last week, “We don’t change space policy in the United States very often — if so, you can’t get anything done.”
Partially true. Inadequately true.
Not all the people there are the conceded greedy contractors shut out of a lucrative deal with the profligate government. But then, I'm bothered by that anyway. We often commit ourselves to plans - go to the Moon, reconstruct Iraq, save a city imperilled by a hurricane - and not in each of those cases do we
- pay attention to how much will need to be done
- accurately assess the magnitude of the costs
- consider the available tools at hand, including the contractors, Congress, and bureaucrats who are to perform, oversee, and interfere with the task.
If a contractor is half a billion dollars into a project, say a satellite that's to go up three years hence, in a shuttle (wups, it'll be decommissioned by 2010), how easy is it to discipline it for cost overruns, quality failures, or simple malfeasance? Think sunk cost. Think inertia. My goodness, think about the political cost, not in votes but in campaign contributions, to any politician from the home area of the company that fails to defend its right to be incompetent or worse!
There's a very limited pool of contractors - there almost has to be, based on how Big Science has been done through NASA lo these many years. Faster Cheaper Better is an interesting motto (I always add: pick two), but despite some recent successes it hasn't been NASA's strong suit.
So, Griffin thinks changing policies that he's been involved with deciding, over the last several years, would be changing horses in midstream, or whatever.
Well, clearly he has screwed up. He may have had the best process imaginable, with the most important minds at NASA and maybe outside it. They may have the best plan. But NASA doesn't operate in a vaccuum (ha hahahah I crack me up), NASA has constituencies.
There are the critical public, the hecklers and opponents of space spending. The kind of people who honestly ask why that money isn't being spent here, and it's difficult to show them a pie chart and explain that NASA's budget is less than 10% of the cost of the Iraq war, less than 1% of the total budget. 16.25 billion for 2007, was NASA's budget. We're spending approximately 10 billion a MONTH in Iraq. All sources wikipedia, e.g. here and there.
And what about everyone else? Those who are not anti-space, but weren't consulted? Why wasn't there broader buy-in for NASA's current direction? Heck, why isn't there much buy-in for the idea of NASA? The plan has always been to not market the NASA brand, to cater to the public as dryly and as uninterestingly as possible. Contests? Reality shows? Why get people excited about exploration, risk, adventure, explosions, human drama, voyages, separation, possible death, vast distances and possible enormous treasure troves? None of that is romantic or saleable in the least.
The very first thing that the X Prize and similar things have going for them is that they're not hamstrung by stupid thinking. The whole point is excitement and selling people what they want, selling what will make its own market.
So, to go back and try to make my point: if you come up with a plan, even the best plan, and people who are crucial to your success in implementing it don't think it's a good plan, you don't have a working plan. Because they will resent you for not meeting their concerns, and they will remove you and unmake your plan and leave you behind, your time and effort wasted.
So, include crucial parties in your planning. Or you'll end up like Griffin, grumpy as the intellectual barbarians meet outside the gates to criticize what has been so painstakingly worked out by professionals....