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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, @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.