This guy needs to line up behind FEMA's Mike Brown. "O'yah, it was all those other prior administrations that did it."
Don't agree with you at all Kurt. The shuttle is certainly too old now, but it was misguided from the start. It was the height of foolishness to put all of our heavy lift options into one basket. It meant that people had to risk their lives simply to launch large satellites. It also meant we had a craft that was a compromise in every way: Its size and shape forced unnecessary restrictions on large payload. It was a disaster for human space flight, never able to go more than a few hundred miles up, lugging around a lot of empty space. Many of us felt that way from the beginning, and I wouldn't be surprised if Mike Griffin had been among them. He's first and foremost an engineer and only secondarily a bureaucrat.