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Policy

Reinventing Past Facts

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
January 22, 2005

Editor’s note: John Logsdon has a well written Op Ed titled “The Road Ahead for NASA” in the 17 January 2005 edition of Space News. The article makes some good observations and is well worth reading. Logsdon’s affiliation with George Washington University and his service on the CAIB are mentioned at the bottom of the article. Curiously, even as he mentions a variety of recent political influences within his piece, he neglects to mention that he spent most of 2004 as a space advisor to the Kerry campaign.

I find it fascinating that someone as well known and oft quoted as Logsdon can write nice things about Sean OKeefe and his management of NASA with a straight face when, a scant few months earlier, he was telling senior NASA officials, reporters, and aerospace company representatives that he thought O’Keefe had “overly politicized” NASA, that the vision was not a serious effort, that the people he was bringing into the agency were not up to the task, and that when (if) Kerry won there would have to be a “house cleaning” at NASA.

In the same issue of Space News, a reader takes issue with another Kerry campaign space advisor – Lori Garver – and her contention that she has always supported the President’s Vision for Space Exploration, when in fact, she has not – as the letter writer and I have pointed out.

People should certainly be allowed to be wrong or change their minds – even people who are regularly interviewed by the press. There is nothing wrong with that – so long as they are honest about being wrong or changing their minds. Alas, Logsdon and Garver seem incapable of doing so.

C’mon John and Lori, fess up.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.