Scott
"Doc" Horowitz, head of NASA's effort to replace the space shuttle and
return astronauts to the Moon, is stepping down to spend more time with his
family, he said Friday.
Horowitz
said he will leave
his post as NASA's associate administrator for the Exploration Systems
Directorate, which he's held since 2005, on Oct. 1 to devote more time to his
wife Lisa and three children.
"It's
taken a tremendous toll on my family, and I really do need to put some energy and
effort into that," Horowitz said of his wife, 11-year-old daughter and
four-year-old fraternal twins during a teleconference with reporters. "To
be able to do all the exciting and fun things I've gotten to do, they've taken
kind of a back seat for quite a while, and the last two years are no exception."
Horowitz
informed coworkers of his resignation plan on Wednesday, the same day that NASA
associate administrator Rex Geveden -- the agency's third-highest ranking
official -- announced his intent to leave his own post to serve as president of
the Huntsville, Alabama firm Teledyne Engineering. NASA's current chief
engineer Chris Scolese will succeed Geveden, though a successor has not yet
been named to replace Horowitz.
Horowitz said
the timing between both announcements is unrelated and should not be taken as a
sign of internal restructuring.
"It
truly is coincidence, so there is no major realignment," he added. "We
don't plan to make any changes to the structure of what we're doing."
A retired
U.S. Air Force colonel, Horowitz first joined NASA as an astronaut in 1992 and flew
on three space shuttle missions as pilot, as well as a fourth
as commander. He left NASA in 2004 for the aerospace firm Alliant
Techsystems, where he served as the director of exploration and space transportation. It was while there that Horowitz
vigorously supported using the reusable space shuttle solid rocket booster
(SRB) as the basis for the first stage of NASA's next crewed launch vehicle,
the Ares
I rocket.
"The
Ares I crew launch vehicle concept is Doc's brainchild, a fact that crews
launching safely a generation from now will remember with gratitude," NASA
administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement released today. "[He]
has been the key person for NASA's exploration effort during the critical
period immediately following definition of the architecture for shuttle
replacement and lunar return."
The Ares I
booster will launch the Orion Crew
Exploration Vehicle, NASA's capsule-based shuttle successor, with an
SRB-derived first stage to be built by Alliant Techsystems. NASA chose the
design over competing boosters, such as the Atlas 5 or Delta 4 expendable
launch vehicles (ELVs), before Horowitz rejoined the space agency as its
exploration chief in September 2005.
"The
physics are [that] the ELV is not the right answer for this problem,"
Horowitz said, adding that the SRB-derived design is on track. "Every
study and every single analysis shows that it's the right answer and I have no
doubt that that's where we'll continue to be headed."
A new
heavy-lift booster, the Ares V rocket, is also under development for future Moon
missions. NASA plans to retire its three-shuttle fleet by September 2010, launch
its first crewed Orion mission by March of 2015 and aims for a manned Moon
mission by no later than 2020.
"That
is fully within our grasp, given everything that we know today," Horowitz
said of the Moon plan.
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