Optimism as NASA Chief Charts New Course
"We've gone from what I would say is the worst morale we've had in the 23 years I've been here, to some of the best," the NASA engineer told Michael Griffin, "and the trajectory is still up."
Griffin was presumably gratified, if a little mystified, at this effusive vote of confidence from an employee during his visit to NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View a few weeks ago. After all, he had held the position of NASA administrator for just over a month -- not long enough to do much more than talk about his policies, rather than actually implement them.
The enthusiasm that greeted Griffin reflected the strain Ames felt under his predecessor, Sean O'Keefe, a budget-minded bureaucrat who was viewed as having little understanding of the role NASA's four major research centers (including the Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert) played as the agency's intellectual core.
O'Keefe proposed to cut the Ames budget from $820 million in the current fiscal year to $630 million next year and as little as $465 million by 2009. Hundreds of government engineers and scientists were to be laid off or replaced by outside contractors; research that was years in the making was to be canceled and facilities shuttered. An outflow of talent had begun to punch holes in projects that might be impossible to fill. (The center's professional staff, which peaked at about 2,200 during the Apollo missions, is down to about 1,350 now.) Instead of long-term science, the center was moving toward short-term projects that fit within its straitened budget but were sure to yield sparser results.
"There was a sense of a place that wasn't what it once was," says Roger Remington, an expert in human cognition who left Ames this year for Johns Hopkins University. "There was a sense that your work was, at best, tolerated reluctantly."
When Griffin, a physicist and engineer, took over, he placed many O'Keefe initiatives on hold, including plans to outsource much of NASA's research to industry. Griffin hasn't promised that there won't be layoffs ahead. But as recently as last week he reassured the staff by e-mail that he values the centers as the repositories of the agency's "core intellectual capability." Many staffers take this as a sign that he doesn't share O'Keefe's enthusiasm for outsourcing. That impression was presumably enhanced by news reports over the weekend that Griffin is planning a major housecleaning at NASA headquarters, aimed at reorienting the agency from a politically-minded bureaucracy to a scientific research establishment.
