Griffin: NASA Is No Longer a Technology Agency

Is NASA Glenn in this fight?, Cleveland plain Dealer

“Year in and year out, whenever the NASA budget comes up for review, Ohio’s congressional delegation puts up a heroic struggle to keep the NASA Glenn Research Center from getting shoved farther into the background. But it gets harder every year to believe that NASA’s top brass see Glenn as anything more than an expensive little sideshow. An e-mail written by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and obtained recently by The Plain Dealer comes right out and says that research centers, like Glenn, just don’t fit the overall mission anymore: “We are not, any longer, a technology agency to any significant extent. Wishing otherwise is nice, but irrelevant.”

Editor’s note: Gee Mike, Maybe you could do something about reversing that situation? Instead, you are making things worse by cutting basic research and technology programs at NASA. I find it rather odd that you think that NASA has the capability to implement the VSE – yet seem to feel that NASA no longer has the technological smarts to do so.

Of course, the Cleveland Plain Dealer did not publish your email. Perhaps if PAO released the full email message we’d know exactly what you said – and the context within which you said it.