The US Senate on Wednesday cleared the way for Jim Bridenstine, a Republican Congress member from Oklahoma, to become the next administrator of NASA. The post has remained vacant since January 2017, when Charles Bolden, the space agency’s leader under President Obama, stepped down.
If Bridenstine is approved in the final Senate vote expected this week, he’ll bring some odd qualifications to the job, and likely some controversy. Typically, NASA administrators are chosen from within NASA’s ranks or come up through the military. If confirmed, Bridenstine — a former Navy pilot and former director of the Air and Space Museum in Tulsa — will be the first member of Congress to hold the job. And even members of Bridenstine’s own party have voiced concerns over what putting a politician in charge could mean for the future of the agency.
As a politician, Bridenstine has hedged on climate change, an issue NASA scientists study and track in many different ways. During his confirmation hearing in November, Bridenstine agreed that humans are the driving force behind climate change, but he would not agree with the assertion that human activity is the primary cause of it. It’s an odd position to hold as the leader of an agency that provides some of the most comprehensive data on climate change in the world.
NASA has a staff of 17,000 and a budget of nearly $19 billion (not to mention the numerous contractors it works with). Bridenstine’s experience of managing a museum in Tulsa pales in comparison to the enormous complexity of NASA. Plus, there are new questions, raised by reporting from the Daily Beast, about whether Bridenstein used funds from the Tulsa Air and Space Museum to prop up a private venture.
Bridenstine will also be controversial because he’s been outspoken against LGBTQ rights. In 2013, he called the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage a “disappointment.” He has also spoken out on the House floor criticizing the Boy Scouts of America’s decision to allowed LGBTQ members. In a speech, he charged that the left wing in the US wants to “reshape organizations like the Boy Scouts into instruments for social change.”
President Donald Trump first nominated Bridenstine to the position in September, and he was cleared by the Senate Commerce Committee in November.
But it was never clear if Bridenstine could clear the 50 Senate votes needed to nab the job. He faced unanimous opposition from Democrats and from a few within his own party. Notably, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was worried about giving the job to a politician.
NASA is “the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics,” Rubio said in September, echoing the same concerns as his Florida colleague Sen. Bill Nelson, a former astronaut and the top Democrat on the Commerce Committee. “I just think it could be devastating for the space program,” Rubio said.
Rubio ultimately voted Wednesday in favor of moving forward with Bridenstine’s nomination, citing concerns that NASA’s acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, is set to retire at the end of the month. “While I wish the president would have nominated a space professional to run NASA,” Rubio said in a statement, he wanted to avoid “a gaping leadership void.”
But it was actually Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, who, in a surprise twist, cast what ended up being the deciding vote of yes. As to why he had a last-minute change of heart, Flake told reporters he “just needed to have some extra discussions, some extra time.” The final Senate vote confirming Bridenstine is expected in the next day or so.
It’s hard to know what Bridenstine’s plans for the agency are because he has so little experience in the area and hasn’t said much about them.
But there will be challenges. NASA will be launching hugely important missions in the coming years, including the long-delayed and far over-budget James Webb Space Telescope. NASA also plans to launch the Parker Probe Plus, a spacecraft to study the sun, and needs to decide whether to extend the mission of the International Space Station.
In the past, Bridenstine has called for a permanent US lunar outpost. And during his confirmation hearing, he said that finishing the Space Launch System and Orion programs — NASA’s unfinished next generation of rockets and spacecraft for human missions — will be critical for the space agency. He also said he’d work with Congress to decide the fate of the International Space Station, which is only funded until 2025.
Bridenstine has expressed enthusiasm about supporting research when it comes to weather forecasting. “My constituents get killed in tornadoes,” he once said at an industry conference. “I care about space.” And during his confirmation hearing, he said he wouldn’t let politics interfere with earth science research.
Much remains unclear. What we do know is that the Trump administration, as a whole, has been hostile to the idea of NASA as an earth science agency and left it to languish without a full-time administrator longer than any previous administration. In 2017, the administration proposed cutting $102 million from NASA’s earth science programs and eliminating four NASA earth science missions completely. Congress didn’t allow those cuts to come to pass. But NASA’s long-term future is far from assured.
For better or worse, the confirmation will break NASA out of the holding pattern it’s been in for the past year. The lapse in leadership has made it harder for the agency to plan long-term missions in space exploration.
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