Understanding

"I can explain it to you again, but I can't understand it for you."

I heard that Mike Griffin said this to a reporter during a press conference once. On the one hand, I laugh because I know exactly how he feels. A few days ago, I was reading the comments on this post Wired's science blog, and I got so mad I had to quit reading. I don't understand how people can possibly think that NASA is just being dense about the foam falling off the tank. Don't you think that if it was easy, we would have fixed it long ago? I mean obviously we just love having to go through all this analysis and discussion every mission.

On the other hand, it's the job of the administrator to make congress and the nation understand the difficult technical issues that face us. It's his job to explain why it's so hard for us to solve these problems. It's unfortunate that it seems to be difficult to get a person into the position that both has the technical skills to understand the problem and has the people skills to explain it.