New NASA Chief to Oust 20

New NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin has decided to replace about 20 senior space agency officials by mid-August in the first stage of a broad agency shake-up. The departures include the two leaders of the human spaceflight program, which is making final preparations to fly the space shuttle for the first time in more than two years.

Griffin wants to clear away "entrenched bureaucracy" and build a less political and more scientifically oriented team to implement President George W Bush’s plan to return humans to the moon by 2020 and send them to mars, senior NASA officials and congressional and aerospace industry sources were quoted as saying by us daily ’The Washington Post’.

The moon-mars initiative has put severe pressure on NASA’s budget, forcing griffin into a difficult balancing act. At the same time, the sources said, griffin wants to restore NASA’s glamour, reasserting the engineering and science leadership that has been eroding since the Apollo era (when the firsts American was sent to the moon). To this end, the sources told the post, he is willing to oust as many as 50 senior managers in a housecleaning rivalling the purge after the 1986 challenger explosion.

The sources said associate administrator for space operations, William F Readdy, a former astronaut, and retired Air Force Major General Michael C Kostelnik, Readdy’s deputy for the shuttle and international space station, will leave their jobs. They are supervising preparations for space shuttle discovery’s scheduled July 13 launch, the first time a shuttle will be flying since Columbia exploded on February 1, 2003.

The sources said Reddy will stay in his post through the July mission.

Singh, who laid the foundation stone for a 44 mw power project in Kargil earlier, said the people of the state have been suffering a lot of problems because of conflict with Pakistan.

Recalling the 1999 Pakistani aggression in Kargil, Singh Said, "our effort is to ensure that such dangers do not recur. That is why we have started talks with Pakistan government to ensure permanent end to mutual conflicts and so that people of two countries could live peacefully.