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Obama Taps Charles Bolden To Lead NASA
viyh notes that President Obama has named former astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr. as NASA administrator. Obama's campaign space adviser, Lori Garver, will be Bolden's deputy. Bolden flew four shuttle missions, two as commander, as well as 100 combat missions over Viet Nam. If confirmed, Bolden will take over an agency uncertain of its direction. The shuttle Atlantis's landing will mark the end of the servicing era — it was the last planned mission to repair any satellite. Some inside the agency are less than happy about how NASA's future looks from here.
What is NASA?
It is a series of somewhat or even merely marginally related pork barrel projects created to provide economic stimulus to the aerospace engineering field. Each feast/famine cycle creates enough new engineers that when the next bust cycle happens there are enough unemployed engineers and technicians to start the next round of technology start-ups at pitiful wages.
Does it have much if anything to do with space itself? Not really. Since NASA is now going to be without a spacecraft to send up astronauts for the next dozen years or so (assuming that the Orion/Ares vehicles ever even get built) they might as well kill off the astronaut corp while they are at it.
I hate to be this pessimistic about NASA, and they did a lot of good back in the day. It is increasingly becoming ossified with institutional paranoia about trying anything new or even remotely dangerous (called risk aversion) and so much political in-fighting about a host of problems that for me it would be better to simply kill NASA as an agency altogether.
This is hardly the first time I've said this as well, but it is increasingly becoming more and more apparent all of the time. The aviation research could be done by the National Science Foundation (the first "A" in NASA) or reassigned to the FAA instead. Let the Jet Propulsion Lab be an independent agency with its own budget and a couple of the more valuable parts of NASA kept in the hands of other agencies (like NOAA) and then there is no reason at all to keep NASA.
There is no reason to care about space because there is nothing in NASA to care about other than NASA pork-barrel jobs in your own congressional district. That and that alone is all that is keeping NASA going at the moment.