STICKing With Their Core Incompetencies

So, it looks like I may have been wrong about something. I figured that with the budget shortfall that NASA is likely to be facing, that NASA would slow down work on the CEV and CLV. You know, following their "pay as you go" philosophy. However, according to Griffin, NASA's main procurement priority in 2007 is the Ares I, and that:

"I will do everything I can to keep Orion and Ares I on schedule," he [Griffin] says. "That will be right behind keeping shuttle and station on track, and then after that we'll fill up the bucket with our other priorities."

Griffin's plan is that:

We will find what we believe are the lowest priority half-billion dollars in content, and we'll extract it, across the agency.

Now, I don't think NASA is dumb enough yet to trim out COTS, but I think that this more or less means that we won't be seeing anything new from Centennial Challenges for a while. But it will be interesting to see who gets the knife so the Shaft can fill a "badly needed gap" in US space launch capabilities.

Good to see that NASA is sticking so well to its core incompetencies.