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Biden Space

Jim Bridenstine: Will He Stay Or Will He Go?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
November 8, 2020
Filed under , ,
Jim Bridenstine: Will He Stay Or Will He Go?

Keith’s note: A lot of people want Jim Bridenstine to stay at NASA. There’s even a petition online. It should be no surprise to people that I am a fan of Jim Bridenstine – starting with my posts prior to his nomination and confirmation. And I’d like to see him stay in the job. But as Jim notes in these quotes from Irene Klotz, it is preferable for an incoming Administration to have their agency heads and cabinet secretaries totally aligned politically with the Administration’s policies.
Moreover, the Administration needs to know that they can count on their political appointees to work toward these goals. Not that Jim Bridenstine is incapable of doing so under a Biden Administration. Rather, he feels that they should have the best person they can find who they have the strongest confidence in. And before you cite Dan Goldin’s ability to span 3 Administrations, let’s just say: that was then – this is now. Let me add that space exploration is not done with Jim Bridenstine.

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

26 responses to “Jim Bridenstine: Will He Stay Or Will He Go?”

  1. SouthwestExGOP says:
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    We need to show him the door as soon as possible. When pence announced that we were going to land on the Moon in 2024, Jim should have looked at the possible test flights and been honest enough to say that we could not make it. That would have been his last day in the job of course.

    The current Artemis plan, where people land on the Moon on the third flight and only the second flight with a crew – is enormously risky. NASA learned nothing from the Challenger accident or from the Columbia accident, our safety organization has been asleep during this entire last several years.

    Certainly many people would rather preserve their careers than stand up and ask why are we first testing hardware on a Lunar landing. Where are the people from the SLS team that should be raising an alarm about the tight schedule?

    • Mark Friedenbach says:
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      You’re looking for his successes in the wrong place. The Artemis Accords and the HLS contracts are the two largest wins I would point to. Jim Bridenstine has been commercial spaceflight’s greatest advocate in practice, even if his words are carefully chosen to appease all sides.

    • Not Invented Here says:
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      Not this non-sense again, how many time do we have to explain an aggressive timeline is the best way to inject urgency and get everyone moving in an organization? Elon Musk uses this all the time in all his companies.

      And under Obama administration’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, astronauts will meet up with an asteroid on the 3rd flight and 2nd flight with a crew, why nobody thought it was risky back then? The 3rd flight of SLS/Orion is always deemed operational even under Charlie Bolden, this is no different from the 3rd flight of Crew Dragon is deemed operational.

      Jim Bridenstine is the best NASA administrator for a long time, the fact that there’re people signing petitions to keep him is proof enough, and his actions speak for themselves:
      1. Started a study of launching Orion on commercial LV, this lighted a fire under SLS contractors, and opened the door for the possibility of moving Orion to commercial LV in the future
      2. Proposed postponement of EUS development, stop wasting money on further SLS development.
      3. Proposed launching Europa Clipper on commercial LV instead of SLS, saving billions of taxpayers’ dollars
      4. Used milestone based, fixed price contracting in nearly all lunar missions, including CLPS, GLS, HLS.
      5. Changed HLS from NASA acting as prime and builds ascent module to public private partnership
      6. Moved nearly all Gateway components to launch on commercial LV
      7. Started Artemis Accords to build international support for lunar program, also solidified the position that space resources can be harvested for private use.
      8. As a SpaceX fan, I need to single out the fact that HLS picked Starship as a major accomplishment too, shows the NASA under his management has the guts to invest in high risk high reward proposals, comparing to Bolden’s “I’m not a big fan of commercial investment in large launch vehicles”, it’s like night and day.

      • kcowing says:
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        Pretty much everyone thought ARM was risky and unfeasible – starting with NASA.

        • Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
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          and kind of pointless as the mission got less ambitious until it was reduced to some suitcase of rocks

      • SouthwestExGOP says:
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        There are SO MANY places that we could point out that you are wrong or using examples that are not applicable. The fact that CLPS may entirely use fixed price contracts is not applicable to the fact that Jim accepted enormous risk to promise that we will land people on the Moon in 2024. The fixed price contracts MAY get some payloads to the Moon but if some companies can’t make it – they get some money but just don’t land anything on the Moon. CLPS has little to do with landing people on the Moon.

        The Artemis Accords may be an improvement over what we had but that is yet to be shown.

        ARM was very risky all right but did not involve landing on the Moon – there was a LOT of hardware that has been added to allow that.

        • Not Invented Here says:
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          Since we’re talking about Bridenstine’s competency as NASA administrator, CLPS is very much on topic as one of the good things NASA did under his leadership.

          It’s true that some CLPS landers may not make it, so what? Both CRS providers had failures during resupply missions, but that doesn’t eclipse the enormous benefits COTS/CRS brought to NASA and the country. CLPS is the logical next step after COTS/CRS, extending commercial cargo services beyond LEO.

          And you’re wrong to say CLPS has nothing to do with human landings, both Blue Moon and Starship are in the CLPS program, NASA can very well order CLPS flights from them which can serve as unmanned test flights for HLS.

          As for ARM, I have yet to see anybody formally stating it’s too risky, you’ll have to show some evidence for this claim.

          So you no longer thinks using 3rd flight of SLS/Orion for lunar landing is risky, and you’re now going after HLS landers? Your original post didn’t mention the landers at all. As far as I know all 3 HLS landers plan to fly at least one unmanned landing mission first, before the 2024 crew landing, so I don’t see anything extraordinarily risky here, it’s basically the same plan as Commercial Crew.

      • tutiger87 says:
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        You’re forgetting one important fact that you and the other Elon stans always forget: Elon doesnt have to placate Congress.

    • Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
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      rather have an aggressive schedule that pushed the agency to try new things like the BAA mechanism and embracing commercial space abilities. space flight is hard but not impossible. what is impossible is making progress with milestones so far out their is no incentive to meet them. hence SLS/Orion slip and slip and slip without repercussions as the government expands to fill the void of no schedule pressure. a noble goal of trying for 2024 and maybe missing it by a year is far better than get back to the Moon sometime around 2030 whenever the agency and cost plus contractors feel like it.

    • kcowing says:
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      “Honest enough”? So he was being less than honest i.e. dishonest. I always wonder if posters on NASAWatch would use the same words if they met with NASA Administrators face to have (I do). You do know that if funding had been in place this would not have been impossible. We did far riskier things in similar time frames in the 1960s. Are we no longer capable of doing things like that now?

      • SouthwestExGOP says:
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        We did LOTS of risky things with Apollo – and got “Apollo 1” and Apollo 13 in addition to the landings. BTW Apollo 1 was only designated that after the fire. We cancelled the later Apollo missions because they were “too risky” as I have read the histories.

        We did LOTS of risky things with Shuttle – several missions had lots of damage to the tiles, etc. We lost two crews. The investigations clearly stated that the safety organization was silent – I think that if the safety or other organizations had said “stop” we would not have lost Challenger at least.

        Today we are pressing ahead with a very minimal opportunity for testing, very little opportunity to verify that systems work. We should demand that NASA and contractor managers stand up if we cannot fly this mission as safely as we can reasonably make it. We should accept risk that is justified by the urgency or lack thereof. What is the reason that we “need” to land in 2024? There is none.

        • fcrary says:
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          I think you may be professionally biased. In other comments, I believe you have mentioned that you are a NASA contractor responsible for thing like flight safety. Is that correct?

          In my experience, people in that sort of job place an extremely high weight on safety, and a lower weight on actually accomplishing something. I.e. that it is better to safely do nothing than risk failure by trying to do something.

          Since doing _anything_ requires taking risks, we have to balance the risks and the benefits. And that balance means we can not base our decisions on the views of people whose jobs are to _solely_ consider the risks.

          • SouthwestExGOP says:
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            I haven’t been a safety guy (or any NASA contractor) for ten years – still I have very good common sense. I can certainly still see when political figures decide to accept risk that has no justification, just to make themselves look good.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        “use the same words”

        That’s precisely what’s wrong with social media, Keith. It allows international exposure to our baser selves.

    • Not Invented Here says:
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      BTW, the 2024 landing goal is not different from CCtCAP’s goal of transporting crew to ISS using Commercial Crew vehicles no later than 2017, and SpaceX was originally planning to fly DM-2 in October 2016, which only gives them a little over 2 years to get Crew Dragon ready.

      But as we have seen, NASA and contractors are perfectly capable of balancing schedule and risk, if the ship is not ready they’ll delay the flight. And a lot of the postponements happened under Trump administration I might add. So frankly I don’t know what you’re getting at with regard to the 2024 landing goal, you’re making an issue out of nothing.

  2. Vladislaw says:
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    NASA Chief Says He Won’t Serve In Biden Administration

    “CAPE CANAVERAL — Even if asked by the President-elect Biden administration, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine told Aerospace DAILY he would pass on staying on as head of the U.S. space agency, not for…”

    https://aviationweek.com/de

  3. ed2291 says:
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    I believe Bridenstine has been good for Space X which is the best path to our future. He may not have been perfect, but he is the only one of the Trump appointees that grew in his job and that I would not be opposed to remaining in a Biden administration. Since becoming NASA Administrator he changed his mind from not believing to believing in man made global warming based on science. Perhaps it is time to move on and he certainly has the right to do so, but he is the only NASA Administrator I remember that I will miss when he is gone.

  4. Michael Spencer says:
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    Joe Biden spent 30 years running for President; along the way he has accumulated an awfully long list of mouths to feed. Finding spots won’t be easy. And a plum job like NASA will be highly prized.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      A down vote? Why? I’m simply stating a fact, or at least that was the intent.

      Related: I read somewhere that a new administration has something like 1600 positions that require Senate action. I really had no idea.

  5. Bad Horse says:
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    He did a good job. One of the few to standup to the Boeing creatures. The moon is again lost for another generation of Americans

  6. tutiger87 says:
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    The NASA Administrator should be a term position like the FBI Director.

    • fcrary says:
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      I see the advantages, but the FBI Director is not a good example. That’s a position which is, at least in theory, supposed to be apolitical and unbiased. It doesn’t always work that way (well, maybe not even usually…) but that’s the justification handling the FBI Director’s term of office differently. The NASA Administrator, on the other hand, has to work with the administration and Congress to establish priorities, agency goals and to get funding to accomplish them. Arguably, that’s the Administrator’s most important job. And that’s an inherently political job. So I don’t think the comparison to the FBI Director is sound.

  7. Bill Housley says:
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    Remember earlier when people complained that Bridenstine is a politician instead of a scientist? He’s done a great job, but not a Democrat great job and his Republicanism would be a constant and distracting source of friction to a Presidential administration and Congress struggling to find its new center.

    Next year will be a season of whiplash-inducing change…both in our country’s politics and at NASA. Boots on the Moon by 2024 is now effectively dead, Democrats will want an environmental science person heading NASA, and a non-scientist heading NASA is the personification of one of Democrats’ favorite gripes about Republicans.

    Covid, economic reforms, and the environment will be the new emphasis throughout our government. Jim Bridenstine’s leadership has been highly successful and he deserves to end on a high-note and not be remembered for the wrong things going forward.

    • Chris Owen says:
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      Going back to the way things were before the current administration is hardly whiplash inducing. Even the continuous shuffling at NASA is business as usual. I suppose the question is; will the big rocket fly and if so how many times?

      • Bill Housley says:
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        A better question is, without Artemis2024, why fly the SLS at all?

        Mission shrink is that rocket’s greatest threat. The goal to put boot on the Moon by 2024 was NASA’s last chance to accelerate and expand that rocket’s mission and fly it a few times before it becomes obsolete. That mission was already hobbled by a hostile House of Representatives. Will they change their mind now that a Democrat is in the Whitehouse? Closer margins in the Legislature can mean either worse gridlock or much needed compromise.