NASA Administor

From an email Mike Griffin sent to all of NASA:

"A successful Shuttle flight will represent a major step toward our
nation's
ambitious Vision for Space Exploration. The flight of Discovery to the
International Space Station will demonstrate the frontier spirit that
drives
us all -- the desire to explore, discover, and understand the universe
we
live in, and to settle new territory when it becomes possible to do so."

Note the last line. I think we've got a space colonist at heart
running NASA.

The International Space Station's (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr.
Tito going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was a terrific space
station, but by the time of Tito's trip it was also old, smelly,
crowded and probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shiny,
much more roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts
of how great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

Al Globus
Evolvable Systems Group (http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg)
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.