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 wanted 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…
At the same time, the sources said, Griffin wants to restore NASA’s glamour, reasserting the engineering and science leadership that has been eroding since the Apollo era. To this end, the sources said, he is willing to oust up to 50 senior managers in a housecleaning rivaling the purge after the 1986 Challenger explosion. “Some people make a lot of changes, some people make a few,” said Ed Weiler, director of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “He’s going to want people that are on his wavelength, and his wavelength is that he’s an engineer and a scientist.”
The Prince, Chapter V: And he who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, for in rebellion it has always the watch-word of liberty and its ancient privileges as a rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will ever cause it to forget. And what ever you may do or provide against, they never forget that name or their privileges unless they are disunited or dispersed but at every chance they immediately rally to them…But when cities or countries are accustomed to live under a prince, and his family is exterminated, they, being on the one hand accustomed to obey and on the other hand not having the old prince, cannot agree in making one from amongst themselves, and they do not know how to govern themselves. For this reason they are very slow to take up arms, and a prince can gain them to himself and secure them much more easily.