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President Trump has nominated Representative Jim Bridenstine as NASA's next administrator, to replace the acting administrator Robert M. Lightfoot:
Representative Jim Bridenstine, Republican of Oklahoma, will be nominated by President Trump to serve as NASA's next administrator, the White House said on Friday night.
Mr. Bridenstine, a strong advocate for drawing private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin more deeply into NASA's exploration of space, had been rumored to be the leading candidate for the job, but months passed without an announcement. If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Bridenstine, 42, would be the first elected official to hold that job.
[...] Although NASA has little presence in Oklahoma, Mr. Bridenstine, a former Navy Reserve pilot who is now in his third term in the House [of] Representatives, has long had an interest in space. Before being elected to Congress in 2012, he was executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium from 2008 to 2010.
[...] Mr. Bridenstine has supported a return to the moon, a departure from the Obama administration's focus on sending astronauts to Mars in coming decades.
Florida's Senators Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson blasted the choice. Nelson said that "The head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician."
NASA statement. NASA Watch analysis.
(Score: 5, Informative) by tonyPick on Monday September 04 2017, @11:38AM (19 children)
Compare Trump's to Obama's NASA appointees.
One chose a vietnam combat veteran and test pilot who served as an astronaut for 14 years, received 16 military awards, had a Bachelor Of Science from the US Naval Academy, a Master of Science from the university of Southern California and four honorary doctorates before being appointed and has picked up six more since then.
The other has chosen a career politician with an MBA, no science or technology qualifications, who denies climate change is happening, and has been known to make stuff up [thinkprogress.org] and attempts to shut down the research that proves him wrong.
Guess which is which.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by khallow on Monday September 04 2017, @12:15PM (4 children)
From the link above, that's an announcement for reform of space-related law that is probably the best legislative approach I've heard of since the mid 1980s when commercial space launch was legalized and some related space law was passed to open things up to the commercial world. And as a representative from Oklahoma, Bridenstine has to be doing this as a labor of love rather than pandering to the near non-existent Oklahoma space industry (or even the whole "Alt Space" industry which just doesn't have the money that established space industry players have). We'll see what happens, but my take is that NASA won't go anywhere until it gets someone willing to push the agency into doing great things again.
Even so, those great things have to make some sense. Michael D. Griffin who served from 2005 to 2009 as NASA administrator was a disaster because he took on the cause of Constellation [wikipedia.org] (which now lingers on as the Space Launch System [wikipedia.org]), the obsession with using the former Space Shuttle supply chain to build a big rocket.
We'll see. This could be a turning point, or Bridenstine could be another mediocre administrator in a long line of mediocre administrators. But at this point, I couldn't care less about how much experience the new administrator has. NASA is almost irrelevant to space development these days. Even as a funding source, it tends to have so many strings attached, that NASA support hinders more than it helps (lots of small groups and businesses have been burned by onerous NASA contracts).
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 04 2017, @01:21PM (3 children)
Constellation was the brain child of W, as such it was doomed to failure by idiotic conception.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:51AM (2 children)
For example, in July 2004, Griffin steered a Planetary Society report [usra.edu] to favor Shuttle-derived heavy lift. That was almost a full year before his appointment as NASA administrator (and half a year after Bush's initial "Vision for Space Exploration" [wikipedia.org] speech). Then after his appointment, Griffin contrived the Exploration Systems Architecture Study [wikipedia.org] (ESAS) to recommend the Constellation launch architecture (which purported to compare the Shuttle-derived architecture to rival approaches, but slanted [selenianboondocks.com] the evaluation to favor the eventual Constellation architecture). On the link I just posted, that is written a full four years after ESAS was published. It took that long to reveal (via FOIA requests I believe) the hidden, biased criteria for deciding on the Constellation architecture.
I don't know how long before, but Griffin had decided on the Constellation architecture (and its heavy reliance on ATK solid rocket motors) well before becoming NASA administrator - perhaps even before George W. Bush became president.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 05 2017, @01:04PM (1 child)
As I said, brain child - W made the "I wanna be JFK" speech and left the heavy lifting to everyone else. Entirely logical that there were plans in place prior to the speech and he just let one of them step up and start development. When Martinez became Governor of Florida he increased sales tax (Florida government's primary income stream) by 25%, which accelerated all sorts of existing project schedules across the board. On the one hand, Martinez might take credit for making all of those things happen faster, on the other, he had nothing at all to do with their conception or planning.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 05 2017, @10:39PM
Being president doesn't magically make you an expert on Mars exploration, even if you are smart. Delegation is the norm.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 04 2017, @01:18PM (10 children)
O.K. - you're not wrong, but... the new guy actually has equal, perhaps better, chance of getting funding for NASA to actually do something great. Now, maybe those great things NASA will be doing are BS, wasteful, and an affront to "good science" - but wouldn't it be nice for NASA to actually do some great things again, instead of slowly dwindling into irrelevance - able to be ignored by politicians and large segments of the population when they inform us of things like climate change?
Or, it could be a hatchet job, intended to sink NASA into obscurity faster.
More likely, it's a random act that could go either way - or, possibly an intentional act in one direction or the other that has a roughly equal chance of backfiring on the intention.
Whatever it is, it's different than what's been tried in the past, and that has a better chance of changing NASA's course than maintaining the status quo, and I, for one, do not approve of the course that NASA has followed for the past 30+ years.
(The previous statement is in no way intended to endorse the current political administration, their policies, or the perception they are spreading around the world about the American people in general. It is, however, intended to point out that change - no matter the source, can be a good thing, and is often better than continuing to pursue failed strategies because they are still perceived as the "best possible course." When the "best possible course" has consistently led you to bad outcomes, maybe it is time to try something different?)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Monday September 04 2017, @02:03PM (1 child)
Try applying that to politics especially in direct contrast to
Essentially your first quote is the intellectual death of the left and the neocons and the globalists, which is why they have nothing left but Stalinist style repression and intimidation.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @04:42PM
He said "something different" not "anything different". The actual left has little to no representation in congress; what you call the left is probably just neoliberalism with a veneer of identity politics.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday September 04 2017, @06:42PM (7 children)
I'd agree to "equal". Certainly not "better". The simple reason is that NASA has a snowballs chance in Hell of doing something great when doing something great takes a decades-long effort and each president who comes in wants to redirect the mission so that they'll go down in history as the guy who set the mission that got people to Mars or something. Add to that legislators who see NASA more as a pork feeding trough than a goal in and of itself, and it's completely surprising that very little if anything gets accomplished in the manned missions outside of LEO.
One of the reasons the Apollo missions actually happened was that neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon didn't screw it up by saying "Whoops, never mind what JFK said, we're actually going to do something else."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday September 04 2017, @11:21PM
I wonder if they would have been so continuating if JFK hadn't been killed - was Apollo seen as a Kennedy legacy at the time? Johnson couldn't have overrode it, and Nixon even if he could would go down as an unorganised president - his name and signature on the moon long after the US and the rest of earth turned into a smoking crator.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 05 2017, @02:52AM (1 child)
Well, September 12, 1962 to July 20, 1969 is a bit less than a decade. W might blame BHO for not following through on his vision, but that's a bit disingenuous when W himself wasn't able to provide any more backup for return to manned deep spaceflight than Trump has demonstrated for getting his wall built.
I assume by "equal" you mean 0 = 0, I think we're better than that - not anywhere near what Stephen Hawking and I want, but better. I think what got Apollo done was Sputnik and the continued threat of Russian nukes raining down from ICBMs - we needed to demonstrate launch reliability and payload capability, and we did, in spades, and that backed up the MAD doctrine for the next 20 years.
Oh, I heard we're invading Afghanistan, again. Doesn't anybody pay attention to history? Afghanistan, more than any one other thing, is how the USSR lost the cold war. If we're struggling so with our economy, do we need to go in there and stabilize the Afghan political/economic situation so we can get their minerals on the world market, or are we just stupid? 10% of Gulf War II's funding would have put men on Mars and returned them safely to earth, I'm sure when the final bill comes in for this Afghanistan adventure, it will be enough that it could have accelerated Constellation's timetable by years and also established a lunar settlement.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:26AM
We never fully pulled out of Afghanistan.
Maybe there is a way to combine the missions and put Afghanistan on the Moon.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday September 05 2017, @04:58AM (2 children)
Actually Nixon did screw Apollo in favour of the shuttle, just took a year or so. Remember, Nixon got inaugurated shortly after Apollo 8 visited the Moon, it was hard to cancel it quickly but Apollo 18 and 19 never flew along with the other planned skylab missions.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:53AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday September 05 2017, @03:12PM
Good points.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:19PM
This whole 'space takes decades to do anything' is simply not true.
In 1962 when JFK gave his space speech, we had barely put a man in orbit. Granted that is an achievement, but it's millenia away from putting a man on the moon. At least ostensibly. We landed on the moon 7 years later. Or even go back a little bit more. The first time we put anything into space was 1958 - Explorer 1. So we went from having done nothing in space to landing on the moon 11 years later. Or zoom forward to modern times. SpaceX was founded just 15 years ago. They've managed to completely revolutionize space, and have announced plans to send a man around the moon next year, all in 15 years with a budget of shoestrings and duct tape.
Give an organization a goal, sufficient funding, and sufficient manpower - and there is less than no reason that we could not be on the moon before Trump leaves office. The issue has nothing to do with the complexity or length of space, but rather the other part of what you said "legislators who see NASA more as a pork feeding trough than a goal in and of itself". I don't know why Bolden failed, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect than a man of personal merit and achievement was unable to discover how to deal with the manipulation and deceit that pervades our government today. And because of that I do think it's entirely possible a man who is going to be vastly more familiar with 'the game' might manage to achieve things that Bolden was unable to do so.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @02:08PM (1 child)
Yeah, clearly good ole' Obama clearly had NASA's best interests at heart, and advancing science and space travel were his top priorities. Obviously.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday September 05 2017, @02:39AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @05:35PM
And your over-achieving war hero got us...where?