Griffin: "I had no concern whatsoever about it"

I have no trouble believing he wasn't involved in any of the contracting / procurement stuff. He'd have to have some darn ignorant civil servants working for him if he needed to get involved in that stuff.

"The NASA Administrator rarely (if ever) is involved in the technical details of procurement and contracting.."

However, it's widely known that Administrator Griffin was intimately involved in the technical details of Constellation, and especially Ares 1. He IS the Nation's Premier rocket scientist (or so we are constantly reminded).

He had everything working like a Swiss watch.

At least until someone looked under the hood a bit.

Griffin had the contracting / Procurement stuff moved to a field site and the program was called Constellation. He ignored the activity with purpose not to be involved with any legal concerns. When asked about the decision to start the CxP program and movement of NASA budget lines without Congress approval in a public Congressional hearing on the NASA proposed budget Griffin asked for a closed hearing session to answer the question. He would not answer in public.

The termination liability issue has been ignored for decades!

He also had no concern about eliminating ISS and Shuttle and putting $150B into a program that would have produced nothing of practical value.

I don't know. My analyst brain is seeing a gap here. I deal with contracts all the time at work (primarily associated with banking and capital markets activities), and I'm having a hard time reconciling "I had no discussions in connection with and issued no instructions on this matter.", and then the comment at the end about "apportionment of termination liability".

That's a pretty specific legal phrase, not mentioned in the question or any of the reporting I've seen, and specific enough to trigger a yellow flag in the back of my brain. I've learned to trust those flags (except for that incident in Shanghai) It's the kind of phrase that I would expect to see in a contract or hear in discussions about a contract, because you're talking about the amount to be set aside (escrowed, I would call it, which we do force for things like environmental remediation of the collateral) from the funds received under the contract.

Is it likely that he would have seen that from the other side in his work in the private sector?

I'm just curious. At work this is the sort of thing that would make me wonder about a borrower and start digging a little deeper into the overall story I'm being told. I'm not ascribing any ill intent, my interest is just piqued because of the gap in rhetoric, as it were.

I remember when the First ESAS contract was let for the First Stage work at ATK and at that time it was noted that there were huge termination liabilities built into the contract. Some noted that this was a way for NASA (i.e. the Griffin administration) to make it very difficult for congress to kill due to the large liabilities involved.

Doesn't "I have no concern about it whatsoever" seem to be the signature comment of Mikes time at NASA?

Robert G. Oler

OK, so the relevant question would be: How many past NASA programs carried Terminaltion Liability set-asides? The answer is: zero. This is an arcane legal maneuver being used by the Administration to cut Congress out of the loop. Trying to blame Griffin for this is lame.

How many future program managers will carry Terminaltion Liability set-asides? The answer is: zero. Because everyone knosw this was a one-time only situation.

Dennis. Right on.
Griffin was always concerned about Cx being canceled by a future congress/administration. IMHO that is why he ditched the 'spiral development approach' (too easy to kill for lack of hardware being built due to it's snail pace of movement and need for really big bucks), why he killed everything except LRO out of the Robotic Pre cursor missions Program Office (to focus solely on getting LRO up before Bush left office, making Cx real), and why he picked ESAS architecture (held the promise of getting hardware built faster)

In short, he was operating out of fear. How paradoxical for someone who 'doesn't do feelings'.

Unfortunately he didnt take that same "hands off" approach during the initial selection of Constellation's architecture....

I suppose everyone is so into the food fight that
suggesting that Bolden/NASA have turned an
accounting corner is out of the question. Even
though it would be consistent with the recommendation
of physical straight shooting by the Augustine
Commission and urged routinely by Senator Rockefeller?
Maybe this is the way it should have been done all along.
Asking government contractors to reserve funds to cover
the costs of possible cancelation of programs and having
a government agency not spend any more than it is
authorized sounds good to me. Saying that Griffin used
termination provisions of contracts as a political
weapon doesn’t sound like a recommendation for policy in
the public interest. Lets not forget who's money this is.