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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 Wednesday September 06 2017, @06:12PM (1 child)
Bolden had high profile and highly publicized globe trotting affairs in the Mideast organizing agreements with Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE and more. And that's of course just the tiny fraction that receive media coverage. I've been unable to find a complete list of NASA's Space Act Agreements (SAA), but I was able to find this [nasa.gov] which is, somewhat coincidentally, helpful. That's a scathing audit of NASA's usage of SAAs from the Office of Inspector General. It provides a few interesting datums. It shows exponential growth in "international agreements" from NASA with a total of 539 agreements made from 2008 to 2012. Japan, Canada, and the EU accounted for 38% of all international partners. The organized and public list of all SAAs should be publicly available and quite informative if you can find it.
It's easy to forget that just because something doesn't show up on facebook or our preferred headline aggregators doesn't mean it's not happening. Bolden was undoubtedly instructed to keep things more quite following the press that event received. And the press, at large, rarely went against our last political regime.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 07 2017, @12:53AM