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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:03AM
I feel that congress is attempting to turn climate change into another gun ownership or abortion. Both sides make token gestures on these issues, but their overall action is more or less identical - perpetuation of the status quo.
Obama was, visually, strong on climate change. Yet his achievements? His "landmark environmental treaty" with China allows them to increase their pollution levels as high as they want until 2030 where they're then supposed to decrease their emissions. If they choose not to, there are no enforcement mechanisms. What that treaty effectively did was let China ignore any international pressure for the next 15 years. His actions on coal are even sillier. He did strengthen the rules against coal and coal operated plants. However, he only did so after it was 100% clear the industry was already going to die thanks to natural gas becoming cheaper than coal - making the rules completely pointless.
The reality is that we have a government that worships business. They need donations to get elected and those donations come from the very companies that would be hurt by any meaningful action on climate change. It is simply not going to happen. It's the same reason that most of the world is passing privacy legislation from the GDPR in the EU to even India that recently had their supreme court rule [indiatimes.com] that personal privacy is a fundamental right. Yet the US? Privacy interferes with the religion of business.
What I'm getting at here is that in reality you can focus on the actions you see as being most important, yet if progress is not realistically possible - you are completely wasting all your efforts. I think you need to pick fights that you can win. So long as democrats and republicans control our government, you're never going to see meaningful action on climate change - regardless of their rhetoric. However, private industry in space, colonization of Mars, asteroid mining, and all of these other revolutionary technologies are kosher under the religion of business. And so these are areas that we, and more specifically NASA, can actually make progress. And on top of this, Trump has expressed an interest in centralizing climate research to NOAA. While it's obvious that he's doing this since it's easier to 'contain' a single body, I also don't think it's a terrible idea. Multiple disparate agencies, each individually strapped for funds, working on the same topic is rather an inefficient use of brain power and what economic power is available.