goldin_mccurdy_011017 Professor Howard McCurdy, the author of four books on the history and evolution of NASA, said now is not a good time for instability at the space agency, cautioning that anything short of a permanent replacement for Dan Goldin, who announced his resignation today, would be a mistake.
Goldin, NASA's top official for nearly 10 years, will leave the agency in Nov. 17. No replacement has been announced, though Goldin said he would help find that person.
| Daniel S. Goldin: A History |
The Goldin Years at NASA:
He's been described as everything from a champion of change to the "Captain of Craziness." In a town where careers rest on a bedrock of political quicksand, NASA administrator, Daniel Saul Goldin, has silently floated past a bureaucratic milestone. |
Report Card on NASA's Dan Goldin:
Civilian space chief Daniel Goldin is a man of constant vision. As a post-Cold War warrior for change, the NASA administrator has chalked up an impressive suite of agency successes, but also faltered in several key areas. |
"The lesson from history is that NASA should not have an interim leader, said McCurdy, an American University professor. "NASA needs a full-time administrator."
McCurdy cited the fact that NASA was overseen by an interim leader during the Challenger disaster. The agency was without a permanent administrator from Dec. 4, 1985, until May 12, 1986. The Challenger shuttle explosion occurred on Jan. 28, 1986.
In a telephone interview, McCurdy said looming budget cuts to the agency, along with current tensions in America related to the war on terrorism, make the choice of a successor all the more critical to ensure a smooth transition and effective oversight. NASA plays a significant role in supporting defense efforts by designing and launching satellites that aid in everything from communications to weather forecasts.
NASA mission mangers, who did not wish to be named, also expressed concern today over NASA's ability to fight for its share of the budget pie with Goldin departing and no new leader yet named.
Dan Goldin was one of the two most influential administrators in the history of the space agency, said McCurdy, who compared the departing chief to James Webb, who led NASA during the Apollo era.
While Webb engineered the first human trips to the Moon by ramping up a massive and costly space program in short order, Goldin re-engineered the agency by dismantling the institutional baggage that accompanied a history of multi-billion-dollar missions.
Goldin led NASA toward more frequent, lower-cost missions with the mantra "faster, better, cheaper."
Good science
While not without pitfalls, the sea change in how NASA does business has been good for scientific discovery, McCurdy and others say, providing for more missions -- with more focused scientific goals -- to more places in the solar system than was possible in the pre-Goldin era.
Harvey Tananbaum is director of the Chandra X-ray Center, which operates the space-based telescope for NASA. He said Goldin forged better relations between Congress, the White House, and NASA. While there were also difficult times in the past decade, including
three Mars mission failures, Tananbaum said Goldin had been a strong and effective leader from the view of scientists."Goldin was tremendously enthusiastic about the science potential of missions," said Tananbaum, who has worked in the space industry for 30 years. "He probably showed more interest than any previous administrator in the science we can do."
Tannanbaum told SPACE.com that it's not possible to know what sorts of changes might come at NASA until a successor is named. That's a process that could take anywhere from a month to three months or more, he said, depending on how much time officials might already have spent looking into candidates.
"Everything is a bit uncertain right now," he said. "The whole government is in play" in terms of budgets that might change as resources are redirected to fighting terrorism.
NASA faces a near-certain 5 percent budget cut, and
potentially more, according to analysts.Military might
Dan Goldin was NASA's ninth administrator dating back to the agency's birth in 1958, when T. Keith Glennan first took the helm.
McCurdy said America's current
military prowess in space is owed in part to NASA's reinvention during the Goldin's reign."Goldin was a great leader on the civil side, but he also made contributions on the military side," McCurdy said, adding that before becoming NASA's chief, Goldin had worked on satellite technology.
NASA's role may become even more crucial as humans wrangle with problems from national security to energy production to pollution monitoring -- all things that benefit from a good view from space, McCurdy points out.
Looking ahead
"Space is essential to everything we're going to be doing in the 21st Century," said McCurdy, whose latest book, "Faster, Better, Cheaper," is due out this month from Johns Hopkins University Press.
In a press conference at NASA headquarters, Goldin gave a glimpse of his vision of that future. He said satellites would help improve weather forecasts from being useful three days in advance to eight to 12 days.
And he seemed to commit his successor to achieving one long-sought goal:
"If life exists within 100 light-yeas of Earth, we're going to find it with Terrestrial Planet Finder," he said. TPF is a proposed space-based observatory that has not yet been designed.
Goldin said NASA would always be in his heart, but he made it clear that he would stay out of the way once a successor is picked: "I intend to be quiet, because the new administrator needs to have the public spotlight to do what he or she thinks is right."
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