And why the first step of of the Obama administration should be to fire NASA administrator Michael Griffin.

He’s still lobbying aggressively for his pet project the Ares launcher, claiming that keeping the shuttle flying will cost $3 billion per year and have a one in 8 risk of another fatal accident, so we need to accelerate the Ares.

The fact is that there is a man-rated system that can meet the needs of space station servicing, the Russian Soyuz, in the interim, and not withstanding his arguments that the atmospherics of relying on a foreign system somehow or other diminish US prestige, this has been the sort of self destructive behavior that has characterized NASA since the shuttle, where they decimated existing capabilities in order to insure that there was no viable alternative.

Obama should be announcing a replacement for Griffin sooner, not later.