Decade Of Civil Service, Financial Missteps, Dash Early Retirement Plans
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin has dominated the U.S. civil space program for nearly a decade, ruling the nation's space agency with an iron fist.
Serving at the pleasure of three presidents, the brusque native of New York City has held sway over a far-flung national network of NASA field centers, bullying long-entrenched bureaucrats as he pursued his trademark "faster, better, cheaper" approach to space exploration.
But when Goldin departs Saturday after a record 3,517-day stint as the agency's chief executive, the 61-year-old will face a decidedly less powerful life after NASA.
Near-daily encounters with congressional power-players will be a thing of the past. Heady meetings with international heads-of-state will be but a memory, and his influence over high-ranking U.S. aerospace executives will be long gone.
Instead, the polemic Goldin -- a figure both revered and reviled within U.S. aerospace circles -- will take on a role that he admittedly has neglected during his tenure with NASA: Family Man.
"I've missed too many birthdays and too many holidays and too many religious occasions," Goldin, a married father of two grown daughters, said in a recent teleconference with reporters."And you want to know something? For a multi-month period, I don't mind being a grandfather who picks up his grandchildren at school -- who takes them to school in the morning, picks them up in the afternoon and plays with them all afternoon," he said. "It's okay with me."
Born in the Bronx, Goldin began his career at NASA's Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1962, working on electric propulsion systems for spaceships being designed to carry astronauts to the moon, Mars or beyond.
Five years later, he took a job with TRW Inc., and during the next quarter century, Goldin led both civil and classified satellite projects, rising up to a well-paid position as vice president and general manager of the company's Space and Technology Group in Redondo Beach, Calif.
Relatively unknown outside the aerospace industry at the time, Goldin reportedly took a huge pay cut when he rejoined NASA on April Fools Day, 1992, and there will be no golden parachute when he bails out of the agency administrator post.
In fact, a small family fortune built up during his TRW days largely has withered away, dashing plans for an early California retirement after a decade in Washington, D.C.
"Here's the sad tale of woe," Goldin said.
"We used to own a house in the sand section of Manhattan Beach, right near the ocean, and we couldn't afford to have two houses, so the Goldins bought high and sold low. We then had some real estate we had kept, and I had to sell two of the three lots."
Gone with the real estate: Plans for a family compound on the Pacific Ocean. Further complicating financial matters: Goldin's retirement nest egg has not exactly reached maturity.
"Your NASA Administrator didn't calculate properly about his retirement fund, and I was off by a factor of two, of course, in the wrong direction," Goldin said with a laugh.
"So we're going to have to regroup financially, and what we'll probably do is we'll probably rent a very, very small apartment in Los Angeles until we get a little cash flow here," he added. "So I am going to be -- and my wife is going to be -- very, very frugal."
For Goldin, life after NASA will start with the non-profit Council on Competitiveness, a think tank created in 1986 to foster technological innovation and workforce development while benchmarking the performance of the U.S. economy against those of other nations.
He'll serve as a senior fellow with the council, which is made up of corporate executives, university presidents and labor leaders.
"The focus of this group is to try and see how America can become more effective and competitive, and to get at the economy, which is a very important issue right now," Goldin said. "The American people have been good to me in this job, and this is a chance to give a little back. And it will also give me a chance to decompress."
To be sure, the fellowship with the council will be less time-consuming than the NASA administrator post, a job that often kept Goldin working 18 hours a day.
"And at the very best on weekend, I have no social life. My wife has no social life. We generally go to a movie and that's about it," Goldin said. "So if I could just have my weekends and holidays and take four to six weeks a year on vacation, life will be wonderful."
Goldin and his wife, Judy, plan to maintain their residence in the Washington area while they look for a place in Los Angeles. They expect to make frequent trips to the West Coast to visit his two daughters, Ariel and Laura, and his grandson, Zachary, who turned 10 on Nov. 7.
Given his financial situation, though, Goldin also will be looking for a full-time job.
"I would love to be semi-retired," he said, "but that's not in the cards for this gentleman here."
The longtime NASA chief said he isn't exactly certain what type of job he'll pursue in the private sector. A return to the aerospace industry might prove difficult, based upon the number of executive feathers Goldin ruffled over the past decade. But an opportunity to head-up a fledgling technology company, or to lead a turnaround at a fallen Silicon Valley firm, might be attractive.
A permanent move to California, meanwhile, is a virtual certainty, eventually.
"I'm just going to explore. I really would like to return to be back in the private sector, and I don't know exactly what I'll do," Goldin said. "But one thing is sure: I want to die in my own house, and I'm going to build it in California."
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