Fire Michael Griffin

Seriously, the current NASA administrator's activities with regard to the transition are insubordination.

We now have reports that he is now pimping out his wife to support his continued tenure at NASA by having her send out an email begging people to sign an online petition supporting him.

It gets even better, as it appears that Griffin spent $57,000 to print and bind copies of his speeches, and then sending copies to Obama.

Note that this is in addition to his refusing to cooperate with the Obama transition team.

Of course, even if Michael Griffin weren't nuts, the fact is that he is doing a lousy job of managing the next generation of NASA missions and vehicles, particularly his beloved Ares I and Ares V launchers, which show every indications of escalating costs and technical problems (like shaking the astronauts to death during launch, which was resolved with a performance hit because of the additional weight).

There are increasing calls for NASA to use the Orion Capsule on an existing launcher, though, in all fairness a study just reported that the early analysis indicates that man-rating a Atlas V or Delta IV would be more expensive than the Ares.

Personally, I'm inclined to doubt this, because the costs of man-rating these systems is a known quantity, while the Ares is still being developed, and costs are likely to escalate.

Also, Griffin's refusal to provide data on Ares to the transition team (see the refusing to cooperate link) raises concerns that the study was based on data that was cherry picked by Griffin and NASA.