Word: spaces
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...outgoing Bush Administration. In 2004, the President announced a new push to return astronauts to the moon and eventually get them to Mars. Many skeptics saw the hand of political whiz Karl Rove in that, suspecting that the whole idea was just a bag of election year goodies for space-happy states like Florida and Texas, as well as for voters nostalgic for the glory days of Apollo. But Bush, NASA and Congress did mean business, and eventually came up with a plan under which the space station would be completed and the shuttle would be retired by 2010. That...
...machines in the hope of having crews in Earth orbit by 2015 and on the moon by 2020. Schedules have slipped some - the original plan was to launch the orbital missions in 2014 - and costs have swollen, though so far not dramatically. (See the Top 50 space moments since Sputnik...
...Obama team picked Garver to run the NASA transition, in part because of her deep pedigree and long history at the space agency, which saw her climb to the rank of associate administrator. But Garver started as a PAO - NASA-speak for a public affairs officer - and never got involved in the nuts and bolts of building rockets. She is best known by most people as the person who in 2002 competed with boy-band singer Lance Bass for the chance to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket. Neither of them ever left the ground...
NASA is right to be uneasy about just what Obama has planned for the agency since his position on space travel shifted - a lot - during the campaign. A year before the election he touted an $18 billion education program and explicitly targeted the new moon program as one he'd cut to pay for it. In January of 2008, he lined up much closer to the Bush moon plan - perhaps because Republicans were already on board and earning swing-state support as a result. Three months before the election, Obama fully endorsed the 2020 target for putting people...
...think that's bulls---," he says. "I believe that anything he was asked he was very honest in answering because he's a systems engineer. And Lori Garver is not equipped to make technical judgments on the architecture of a space exploration system." The unnamed NASA source concedes that Griffin can be brutally honest and occasionally tactless, but insists that his shouting is simply improbable. The Obama transition office did not return an e-mail seeking comment from Garver...