Former NASA chief Griffin now wants to save the shuttle, Houston Chronicle

"In his e-mail, Griffin writes:

"At this point I'm in agreement with Dr. Kraft ... In a world of limited budgets, I was willing to retire the shuttle as the price of getting a follow-on system that could allow us to establish a manned lunar base. Not that my opinion matters, but I see no sense in retiring the shuttle in favor of nothing. That is beyond foolish."

It's a pretty stunning reversal from the man who, just a few years ago, couldn't get rid of the shuttle soon enough."

Keith's note: Mike Griffin and his self-described "band of brothers" often referred to the Space Shuttle as an "albatross" and was indeed in a big hurry for it to go away. He seemed to have little worry that the "gap" that he so despised grew rather healthily under his tenure. Now that his self-described "Apollo on Steroids" architecture collapsed under its own flawed engineering and program execution, he's suddenly a space shuttle advocate.

That's the problem with steroids, Mike: they affect both your memory and your judgement.