Who Will be NASA's Administrator?

One of the names that had been bouncing around as the new Administrator is retired Air Force Major General Scott Gration, one of his advisors during the campaign. However, not everyone was happy with this name, including Senator Nelson from Florida.

So, what is the situation today? Well, the Major General will be going to Sudan after being selected as a special envoy. President Obama stated "Standing alongside Secretary Clinton and Ambassador Rice, his appointment is a strong signal of my Administration’s commitment to support the people of Sudan while seeking a lasting settlement to the violence that has claimed so many innocent lives." Interestingly enough, the Major General was born in Congo. This is good news for Sudan, but what about NASA?

Also, maybe this is not where the Major General wants to be. The New Republic notes that "...Gration originally had his heart set on running NASA. Obama tried to put him there until defense lobbyists scotched the idea."

So who else is on the NASA list? Other names have been U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden, a former space shuttle commander; Charles Kennel, who chairs the National Academy of Science's Space Studies Board; Alan Stern, former NASA associate administrator for science; Scott Hubbard, former director of NASA's Ames Research Center; Wesley Huntress, former NASA associate administrator for space science; and Steve Isakowitz, who was recently reappointed chief financial officer at the Energy Department.

According to The Washington Post, President Obama said he will make a selection any day now. We shall see, since he had orginally planned to this before the inauguration. The Congress is certainly getting impatient, as the letter below demonstrates.

Bipartisan Letter Expressing Need for an Administrator Who Will Minimize the Spaceflight Gap

Dear President Obama:

We write to you as Members of Congress with an abiding interest in the important contributions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA has been a leading catalyst for innovation and technology development and has enjoyed over 50 years of broad public interest and strong bipartisan political support. The agency’s work is linked to larger issues facing our country such as national security, climate change and American competitiveness. Currently, NASA faces numerous time-sensitive challenges and needs decisive leadership.

One of the most important issues facing NASA and our nation is the impending retirement of the Space Shuttle, and the subsequent five year gap in independent U.S. access to the International Space Station before the Ares 1 and Orion systems can be deployed. This issue has been identified by the Government Accountability Office as one of thirteen ‘urgent’ items for your administration to address. As you know, this issue is linked to our economic recovery since the gap could result in layoffs for several thousand highly skilled aerospace engineers and technicians over the next two years.

We believe it is imperative for NASA to have a leader who understands the implications of a five year or longer hiatus in America’s independent access to space. The new NASA Administrator should grasp the broad strategic and international aspects of NASA’s mission, as well as the technical, budgetary and programmatic tradeoffs that lie ahead. We urge you to keep these issues in mind as you search for a NASA Administrator candidate with the right background, integrity and focus on minimizing the spaceflight gap and preserving the agency’s cutting edge science and aeronautics programs. Maintaining a focused policy and providing the necessary funding to allow NASA to succeed are essential to the technological advances and scientific discoveries that benefit all Americans.

We fully recognize the difficult challenges our nation faces, and we believe that a focused and properly funded NASA can aid our national economy and contribute to our shared goals of sustaining our technological edge and competing on a global stage.

We look forward to working with you and a new Administrator to ensure a robust, successful NASA. We stand ready to work together with you and continue providing the nation’s civilian space and aeronautics agency our steadfast support.

Thank you for your attention to this important issue.

Sincerely,

Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL)
Ken Calvert (R-CA)
Robert Aderholt (R-AL)
John Culberson (R-TX)
Al Green (D-TX)
Parker Griffith (D-AL)
Ralph Hall (R-TX)
Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX)
Michael McCaul (R-TX)
Pete Olson (R-TX)
Bill Posey (R-FL)
Adam Schiff (D-CA)
Lamar Smith (R-TX)
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL)

Source: Office of Rep. Suzanne Kosmas

Where is NASA Going?

As of today, if you review the NASA organizational chart you will see an acting Administrator (Christopher Scolese) and a missing Deputy Administrator. So, when do we see some new leadership at NASA, and will the priorities change? A January article in The Economist magazine called "Mars Rising?" that spelled out a few arguments for a change in the U.S. space policy, including a greater reliance on robots. What concerns me more is a possible Obama Adminstration preference for satellites looking back onto Earth rather than keeping our eyes on the Heavens. I would prefer to place the Earth-focused projects into another agency so NASA's mission can be primarily other-worldly. We have plenty to explore and better understand on this planet, including the oceans that cover most of our world, but we should have the resources to stare back at our navel and reach for distant locations.

Anyway, here is the article in full for those who are interested:

Mars rising?

Jan 22nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

Why NASA should give up its ambitions to send men into space

AS LONG as people have looked up at the night sky, they have wondered whether humanity is alone in the universe. Of places close enough for people to visit, Mars is the only one that anybody seriously thinks might support life. The recent confirmation of a five-year-old finding that there is methane in the Martian atmosphere has therefore excited the hopes of exobiologists—particularly as the sources of three large plumes of the gas now seem to have been located. These sources are probably geological but they might, just, prove to be biological.

The possibility of life on Mars is too thrilling for mankind to ignore. But how should we explore such questions—with men, or machines? Since America is the biggest spender in space, its approach will heavily influence the world’s. George Bush’s administration strongly supported manned exploration, but the new administration is likely to have different priorities—and so it should.

Bug-eyed monsters

Michael Griffin, the boss of American’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a physicist and aerospace engineer who supported Mr Bush’s plan to return to the moon and then push on to Mars, has gone. Mr Obama’s transition team had already been asking difficult questions of NASA, in particular about the cost of scrapping parts of the successor to the ageing and obsolete space shuttles that now form America’s manned space programme. That successor system is also designed to return humans to the moon by 2020, as a stepping stone to visiting Mars. Meanwhile, Mr Obama’s administration is wondering about spending more money on lots of new satellites designed to look down at the Earth, rather than outward into space.

These are sensible priorities. In space travel, as in politics, domestic policy should usually trump grandiose foreign adventures. Moreover, cash is short and space travel costly. Yet it would be a shame if man were to give up exploring celestial bodies, especially if there is a possibility of meeting life forms—even ones as lowly as microbes—as a result.

Luckily, technology means that man can explore both the moon and Mars more fully without going there himself. Robots are better and cheaper than they have ever been. They can work tirelessly for years, beaming back data and images, and returning samples to Earth. They can also be made sterile, which germ-infested humans, who risk spreading disease around the solar system, cannot.

Humanity, some will argue, is driven by a yearning to boldly go to places far beyond its crowded corner of the universe. If so, private efforts will surely carry people into space (though whether they should be allowed to, given the risk of contaminating distant ecosystems, is worth considering). In the meantime, Mr Obama’s promise in his inauguration speech to “restore science to its rightful place” sounds like good news for the sort of curiosity-driven research that will allow us to find out whether those plumes of gas are signs of life.

Keep Track of the New Planets

Now that the Kepler spacecraft is on its way, we need some way to keep track of all the new planets we hope to discover. Well, do not fear because The Planetary Society is here to help. The Society has set up a new Catalog of Exoplanets to store information on all the new discoveries. This Catalog will include essential information about each exoplanet, such as : (1) planet's location and home star; (2) mass; (3) orbital period; (4) method by which it was detected; and (5) date of discovery.

The Society notes that

Researchers have discovered more than 300 exoplanets to date. Most are gas giants hundreds of times the mass of the Earth, many orbiting very close to their home stars. But as the sensitivity of the search and the range of detection methods have increased, so has the variety of known exoplanets. Planetary systems composed of as many as five planets have been discovered, some of them sharing similarities with our own solar system. Planet-hunters are also detecting smaller and smaller planets, as small as twice the diameter of the Earth. As detection techniques improve, scientists are closing in on the exoplanet we are all waiting for: an alien “Earth” orbiting a distant star.

Life on Other Planets?

It's good to hear NASA's Kepler spacecraft is safely on its way into its 6-year mission to study the heavens and find other Earth-like planets. The Delta II rocket carried Kepler aloft on March 6th with no problems. Kepler is expected to study between 100,000 and 170,000 sunlike stars in the Milky Way galaxy in the hopes of finding orbiting planets. To do this, Kepler will analyze shifts in each star's brightness.

According to NASA, the mission is as follows:

The scientific objective of the Kepler Mission is to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems. This is achieved by surveying a large sample of stars to:

1. Determine the percentage of terrestrial and larger planets there are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars;
2. Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets;
3. Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems;
4. Determine the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivities, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets;
5. Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques; and
6. Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.

This is quite a mission and it should be interesting to read about the results in the years to come.