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Has Anyone Seen NASA's New Administrator – Or A Space Policy?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 11, 2017
Filed under

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

20 responses to “Has Anyone Seen NASA's New Administrator – Or A Space Policy?”

  1. RocketScientist327 says:
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    We have time. President Obama didn’t appoint General Bolden until May 23rd, 2009. NASA, bluntly, is not a tier one issue. We have had some news but truthfully it may be awhile longer.

    https://www.nasa.gov/home/b

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      Yes, and President Obama didn’t make his speech on his space policy to almost a year later.

      https://www.nasa.gov/news/m

      And President Bush didn’t nominate a NASA Administrator until November, 2001

      http://www.sciencemag.org/n

      So why does everyone expect a new Administrator now?

      • Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
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        maybe this time we are at a tipping point. previously we were flying shuttles and had stuff to do. this time the battle between staying the course and a new direction with new commercial partners is up for grabs. I would expect the new space folks are the ones bailing cause they are used to moving quickly and agile where as the old space cabal are happy to wait things out and win by default.

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          I think new space is hoping for a longer delay, until CCP is flying and SpaceX goes around the Moon on a reusable Falcon Heavy and Dragon2. Then nothing will be able to save the SLS and disposable Orion.

          And President Trump may be listening to them, after all Elon Musk does meet with him.

      • jamesmuncy says:
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        Well, not all of us expect one now.

        But a whole bunch of us would like a new one sooner than later, for a pretty huge spectrum of reasons, beliefs, hopes, fears, and crazy dreams.

    • Bill Housley says:
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      Those who, for the most part, like the direction NASA has been going should like that no one is messing with it yet. SLS is too far along and the appropriations already in place for it to fly at least once. Commercial Crew is too far along to kill as long as there is an ISS to fly to (and Dragon v2 would fly at least once as proof of concept and start collecting contracts anyway at this point). No one at NASA or in Congress can stop the FH test launch this summer, and that will open enough doors to ring the bell on a new round of power struggles between Old Space and New Space anyway regardless of who’s at the helm.

  2. Moonman1969 says:
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    Have not had a real policy in about 8 years. Even the four years before that was not a policy that anyone was supporting. Why expect a change now?

  3. Patrick Judd says:
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    Patience kids…

  4. ThomasLMatula says:
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    You do know that both SpaceX and COTS date to the Bush Administration. So President Bush, who also decided to retire the Shuttle, should get credit if SpaceX is a game changer, not President Obama who saw NASA as merely STEM education.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      Your comments would be more convincing if they were less political. Commercial crew did not start during the Bush administration. COTS was proposed as a stop gap measure only when it became clear that ISS could not be cancelled with the end of Shuttle. The Ares I/Orion, was proposed by the Bush Administration proposed as a replacement for ISS logistics and crew rotation, but it was such a poor design that even a congressional mandate could not make it fly. Shuttle would be gone and the US would have no way to support the ISS, and the international partners were aghast at the prospect of the ISS program ending prematurely. COTS-D, a manned version of COTS, was a conceptual proposal but never implemented. The COTS vehicles were not even required to provide re-entry capability and OSC did not; it was added by SpaceX only because of Musk’s desire to evolve the Dragon toward human flight.

      President Obama had to fight for every dollar Commercial Crew got and his requests were massively cut by the Republicans in Congress, delaying the program for years, until it became obvious that Commercial Crew was going to succeed while SLS remains unaffordable.

      Moreover, attempts to politicize credit and blame, while it’s a common strategy in American government, do nothing to advance human spaceflight. Some of the decisions of the Obama administration, such as the decision to cancel Constellation and focus on Commercial Crew, so as to reduce the cost of human spaceflight, were right on target. Conversely, the Bush administration ignored the unaffordable cost of Constellation even when it was forcefully identified by Senator John McCain.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        You are the one being political trying to make it seem President Obama cared about space. The only thing he did after killing Constellation, ignoring the Augustine Commission, and getting his photo op by promising to send astronauts to and asteroid, a goal that morphed into bringing the asteroid to them (ARM), was to cut planetary science at NASA.

        http://www.space.com/24157-

        He didn’t even follow the recommendations of the Augustine Commission beyond using it as cover to kill Constellation. The thin support from the Executive Branch for CCP you claim for President Obama actually came from Lori Graver until she left NASA in 2013. If he actually had cared about it beyond sound bytes it would have been funded better.

        It is really funny watching how folks are trying to rewrite history… A blast from the recent past…

        http://nasawatch.com/archiv

        But that was before election day 🙂

        • Daniel Woodard says:
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          Interesting that you mention Lori Garver. She was Obama’s first choice for Administrator, but there was intractible resistance. I’ve seen Garver speak and feel she had the technical understanding, strategic vision, and political acumen to do the job well.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Pity President Obama was not willing to spend the political capital to make her Administrator. But again, he really didn’t care about space.

        • Chuck_Divine says:
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          Obama did something interesting in the last months of his presidency that does show some interest in space in particular and technology in general. He was guest editor of the magazine Wired in November 2016. There was one section of that issue that was devoted to the Final Frontiers. Yes, space was prominently featured in that section. Also in that issue was a piece in which Obama came out as a Star Trek nerd. Here is a link to that copy of the magazine: President Obama Guest Edits Wired.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Yes, funny how he waited until the end of his Administration..

            http://nasawatch.com/archiv

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            Viewing events early in the new Presidency through a dispassionate lens, recall that Mr. Obama was otherwise occupied in 2008-2009, dealing with what are charitably called ‘leftovers’.

            Were I President in those dreadful months, space would be an invisible item on my GTD list. As it should be.

  5. Ben Russell-Gough says:
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    I just think that the U S Government has a lot more important things (at least in its own priorities) upon which to focus right now. It’s a bitter realisation but this really does illustrate how low space exploration and space utilisation is on the government’s real list of priorities.

  6. Bill Housley says:
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    It just means more time for Old Space and New Space to fight it out in the halls. New Space may have reached the tipping point now anyway (by the time funding on current contracts expires), so maybe it doesn’t matter.
    Come on CCDev and FH. The revolution has begun. Fly baby fly!

  7. Gerald Cecil says:
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    I suppose that one can dream that multiple launches of a FH + ancillary hardware could dispatch a modified Dragon 2 +Bigelow-to-bury to the Moon. With reuse of the FH core stages, one way to deposit the hardware seems feasible at moderate cost. But getting inhabitants in and out of the lunar gravity well is the expensive unknown. Until Musk has at least a space taxi available for that, we’ll wait (many years) for Old Space to drag itself over there. Powering into/out of lunar orbit a la Apollo 8 would seem a next SpaceX step after the Cameron/Brightman(?) fly-by.

    Don’t know where the NASA administrator is in that scenario.

  8. mfwright says:
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    NASA does more stuff besides putting astronauts into space and rovers on Mars. Question is for lesser known programs and projects, what is impact if administrator nominated now or months from now? We have seen certain Trump appointees can have huge impact on an agency, i.e. EPA.