 With every new U.S. president comes a new administrator for NASA. And this one, Jim Bridenstine, has been raising a lot of eyebrows because he doesn't have a science background. So I thought it might be an interesting opportunity to step back and look at what makes a good NASA administrator. Does the administrator actually need a science background? The bulk of the problems that people have with Jim Bridenstine is that he doesn't have a science background. Now, for me personally, the more troubling bit is that he's not necessarily someone who believes in climate change because climate change is real. We really need to stop having people in power that don't believe climate change is real. That's a problem. But let's put that one aside and look specifically at the fact that he doesn't have a science background. Now, I'm also just going to flat out ignore the political issue here because it generally goes that the administrator of NASA has the same political affiliation as the president since the president does appoint the NASA administrator. So of course, there's also pushback because people don't want a certain party running the space agency. But since that's tied up in the presidency, and it's all a whole bigger thing, we're not discussing that. What we're looking at today is specifically whether or not an effective administrator for NASA needs to have a science background. So I thought we might start by taking a look back at past administrators. Start by looking at who had a science background, if they did have a science background, what was it? And then what did they do for the agency? And from there, maybe discuss whether or not the NASA administrator really does need to be a scientist. The first one we've got is T. Keith Glennon, who served as administrator from August 19th, 1958 to January 20th of 1961. He was NASA's first administrator and took over an agency that no one really knew what to do with because space and the idea of a space agency was so new. But he did bring a science background to it. He had a degree in electrical engineering. He had worked on the technical side of the then nascent sound motion picture industry. Yes, we are going back that far. And during the Second World War, he had served as the first administrator and then director of the US Navy's underwater sound laboratories. So he did have a lot of technical background that he brought to NASA, though it's really not space related per se. As administrator, he facilitated the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics's shift into NASA as well as NASA's absorption of other sites, specifically the Army Ballistic Missile Association in Huntsville, which is where Werner von Braun's team was working, and also JPL at Caltech. When JFK moved into the White House, he appointed Jim Webb. Jim Webb served from February 14th, 1961 to October 7th of 1968. He did not have a science background. Though he did have a kind of science-related background. Jim Webb's degree was in education, and then he joined the Marine Corps where he trained as a pilot. He eventually left the service to study law and then entered a career as a public servant. He served as secretary and assistance to various congressmen before moving to the Sperry Gyroscope Company and then returning to the Marine Corps in the Second World War. Post-war, he served as director of the Bureau of the Budget, then under secretary of the Treasury, and then ended up working for the Kermige Oil Company in Oklahoma. He was in Oklahoma when President Kennedy appointed him as NASA administrator. That was his return to Washington. Webb is notable as the administrator that put all the pieces of Apollo together. Webb basically took NASA from this weird agency that no one really knew what space was and what NASA was going to do into the beast with the massive legacy that we all know and love today. Webb's successor was Thomas O. Payne. He served from March 20, 1969 to September 15, 1970. Before working with NASA, Payne was a research associate at Stanford in the late 1940s, working with high-temperature alloys and liquid metals for naval nuclear reactors. He then moved to the General Electric Research Laboratory where he was again working with composite metals. So there's a theme of engineering here. After Payne, NASA flew the first seven Apollo missions and he really did help push the program to the moon by the end of the decade. He basically made sure that what Webb started, he finished. However, he did misread the Nixon administration's plan for space policy and ultimately resigned before his term was over. That's why he was at the agency for such a short time. Payne's successor was James Chipman Fletcher, who actually served as administrator twice. The first time he served from April 27, 1971 to May 1, 1977 under Nixon, and then he took a hiatus and came back again from May 12, 1986 to April 8, 1989 under Reagan. Fletcher held undergraduate and doctorate degrees in physics and worked as a researcher at Harvard and at Princeton before joining the Hughes Aircraft Company in the 1940s. Fletcher worked with guided missiles, he co-founded the Space Electrics Corporation before moving to Aerojet and eventually became president of the University of Utah, a position he held until his first appointment at NASA. After he left NASA in 1977, he did a lot of independent consulting. Most notably, he was on the board that helped define Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, which I talked about a little bit more in this video right up here. Fletcher presided over programs that had their roots before he was administrator. Notably, he helped move the shuttle program forward. He oversaw the Skylab missions and also the Mars Viking Lander missions, but he also approved the Voyager missions, the famous grand tour of the outer planets, and also early plans for the Hubble Space Telescope. On the human space flight side of things, Fletcher was the one who okayed the Apollo Soyuz test project and during his second term as administrator, he helped move NASA forward after the challenge or disaster. A large part of his work with the shuttle program came in overseeing NASA's reinvestment in the program's safety, reliability, and efficiency, as well as the organizational restructuring designed to prevent another fatality. It was also under his guidance that NASA developed the crew escape system for astronauts in the space shuttle. Fletcher's first successor was Dr. Robert A. Frosh, who served under Jimmy Carter from June 21, 1977 to January 20, 1981. Academically, Frosh held an undergraduate and graduate degrees in theoretical physics, both from Columbia University. He worked as a research scientist on underwater sound, sonar oceanography, marine geology, and marine geophysics, eventually becoming director of the Hudson Laboratory at Columbia University. He also worked for ARPA, which is the predecessor to DARPA. He was assistant secretary of the Navy for research and development, and also assistant executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program. All of these jobs not only have a science component, they had him managing large staffs and even larger budgets, so kind of similar in a way to what running NASA meets. Under Frosh's guidance, NASA most notably saw continued development of the space shuttle program, especially the approach and landing tests with the Orbiter Enterprise. After Fletcher came James Montgomery Beggs, who served under Reagan from July 10, 1981, December 4 of 1985. Beggs was a graduate of the US Naval Academy, and he served with the Navy until 1954, at which point he left to pursue a master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. Professionally, Beggs served as executive vice president and then director of General Dynamics. He served as NASA's associate administrator in the Office of Advanced Research and Technology and under secretary of transportation. Beggs has a bit of a weird history with NASA in that he took an indefinite leave of absence, pending a disposition of indictment from the Justice Department for activities that predated his time with the Space Agency. Really, that is all his official bio says. It doesn't actually say what the issue was. It was eventually dismissed, and he was given a pardon by the US Attorney General for any embarrassment that it might have caused. However, it did force his retirement from NASA. After Beggs came Fletcher's second term, and after Fletcher left again, the new administrator was Vice Admiral Richard H. Truley, someone that may be more familiar to many of you guys as astronaut Dick Truley. He served as administrator from July 1st, 1989 to March 31st of 1992. Truley began his career as a naval aviator and then became an instructor at the US Air Force's Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base. In 1965, he was handpicked as one of the future astronauts for the manned orbiting laboratory program. And in 1969, he was among the MOL astronauts transferred to NASA because the MOL program was canceled. As an astronaut, he flew approach and landing tests in the Orbiter Enterprise and then made two space flights. He was on STS-2 and STS-8. In 1986, he became NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Flight, helping the agency rebuild after Challenger. As administrator, he really worked to push the shuttle program ahead and to recover from this disaster. And when Hubble launched with a bad mirror, it was he who helped push forward the repair mission. But he ultimately fell out of step with the Bush administration and didn't last super long. Dan Golden took over the position from Truley and served as administrator from April 1st, 1992 to November 17th of 2001. Golden had previously worked on electronic propulsion systems for human interplanetary travel at NASA's Langley Research Center before beginning a 25-year career with the TRW space and technology group, eventually serving as vice president and general manager. As administrator, Golden developed the idea of faster, better, cheaper, which actually did bring some low-cost but high-value missions to the American public, most notably the Mars Pathfinder mission. Golden took over NASA at a time when the agency was under severe criticism for having too many overly expensive missions and an imbalance between human and robotic exploration. So perhaps Golden's legacy is bringing aggressive management reform to NASA, reducing the overall budget and ultimately striking a balance between human and robotic spaceflight. He initiated the Origins program that was designed to understand how the universe has evolved and he laid the foundation for a vigorous exploration of Mars. Pretty much across the board, Golden has been lauded for revitalizing NASA. Golden's successor was Sean O'Keeffe who served from December 21st, 2001 to February 11th, 2005 under George W. Bush. O'Keeffe held a master's degree in public administration and worked in business and government policy. He worked in largely academic and advisory roles before serving as comptroller and chief financial officer of the Department of Defense and then secretary of the Navy before being appointed the NASA administrator. After O'Keeffe came Mike Griffin who served from April 14th, 2005 to January 20th, 2009. Notable highlights from his pre-administrator days include serving as space department head at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, as well as working as NASA's Associate Administrator for Exploration. A professional engineer, Griffin had more than two dozen technical papers to his name when he took over as NASA's administrator and in that role, he helped maintain the agency. And finally, we have Major General Charles Frank Bolden who served from July 17th, 2009 to January 20th of 2017. Bolden is another retired astronaut. He has a bachelor's degree in electrical science as well as a master's degree in systems management. He served at the Marine Corps before becoming a naval aviator and ultimately left when he joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1980. And he flew four missions. He was a pilot on STS-61C and STS-31 as well as commander on STS-45 and again on STS-60. Bolden guided NASA on the transition from the end of the shuttle period to the current period which is using the ISS to start unpacking and figuring out what the real challenges are and solutions to the problems of long duration interplanetary human spaceflight. And of course, after Bolden comes Jim Bridenstine which brings us back to the original question, what makes for the ideal NASA administrator? Now, we've just gone through all of them and you can see that some of them have science backgrounds and some of them don't but this doesn't say who was good at the job and who wasn't because figuring out what makes a good administrator is a very hard question to define. Is a good administrator someone who advances the cause of the agency? Someone who creates more jobs? Someone who helps NASA weather storms? Comparing administrators in different areas in different time periods is kind of like comparing apples and oranges so it's maybe not the best way to approach this question. But we need some measure of good for the sake of discussion. So we're going to take NASA's most recognizable event as a measure of good and that of course would be the moon landing and of course that's fitting because this is vintage space after all. Even though Apollo 11 landed when Tom Paine was administrator, I would argue that it was everything that Webb did, all the foundation that he laid when he was administrator that ultimately got us to the moon by the end of the decade. So we're gonna look a little bit more closely at Jim Webb as the an example of a very good administrator who doesn't actually have a science background and maybe start to understand what it means to run NASA. So up front we have to say that the NASA Webb to control over was not the NASA we know today. It was not the sprawling multi-pronged organization working together towards achieving a unified goal. It was a series of disparate laboratories that had just been thrust under one organization with the goal of getting an American in space but no one really knew how that was going to work or what the future looked like. Webb didn't actually want the job. So in 1961, he had to be personally asked by John Kennedy to take the job because he was worried, as were a lot of his friends, that it was going to be career suicide, that this whole space thing was all exciting and sexy now but ultimately it wasn't something that was going to have any longevity. That was the NASA that he took over from Glennon. And then three months later, Kennedy decided that we were going to the moon and everything changed. Webb wasn't a scientist but in the case of getting Apollo to the moon, NASA didn't really need a scientist up front. What NASA needed was someone who could convince Congress to actually give NASA the money that it needed to hire the scientists and engineers to develop the technology to then build the rockets to send it to the moon. And that was what Webb did best. Webb had such an intimate knowledge of how Washington worked that he was able to finesse all of the people he needed to finesse, to extract as much money from them as possible to get Apollo to the moon. Establishing the Johnson Space Center in Houston is a really good example of Webb's political prowess being vitally important to NASA's working. So when NASA was created, everything was run out of the Langley laboratory because it was one of the few centers that existed and it's where people were. But Webb realized that the center from Virginia wasn't really doing anything to help NASA. So it was starting to look at other places to set up a new mission control because there was going to be some expanded facilities at some point, they needed a new space. So of all the states that had locations, Texas came up as one that had a lot of land. And Webb was already leaning there. He knew that Texas had a lot of support. There was of course the Johnson, the LBJ connection in Texas, this was a very good political move for NASA. But he realized that he had an opportunity to actually sweeten the deal for everyone involved a little bit. He wanted to move NASA to Houston, but he also knew that President Kennedy needed the support of a senator from Texas to pass a couple bills through. So Webb told Kennedy, well, why don't you tell the senator, if he supports your bills, you'll push me to put NASA in Houston. So the senator got what he wanted, even though he was going to get it anyways. Kennedy got the support he needed and Webb got the money that he wanted from the Texas senator. That's how these things worked. What Jim Webb did best was parse the burden of getting America to the moon across multiple states and therefore multiple centers such that more people would be accountable and have skin in the game of getting NASA to that goal. So at the time in the 1960s, when no one knew what this whole space game was about, but Webb's asking for $20 billion to go to the moon, NASA absolutely needed at its head someone with the political savvy to get the money to make that happen. You can hire engineers to build stuff. You can hire the scientists to figure out the problems. You can't hire the money. So Webb went out and got it and he successfully got it such that Apollo developed on schedule and managed to go to the moon. I would hazard the guess that if at the time, NASA had had a giant space fan at its head, it might not have been able to get the political and financial support it needed to do something that was basically straight out of science fiction at the time. But what Webb did that was so successful for Apollo in breaking the burden of funding NASA through all these different states and all these different centers might now be the legacy that is kind of detrimental to the agency. With NASA now operating at a fraction of its Apollo era budget, there are more centers that are vying for more parts of less money, which means the person at the head of NASA, more than needing to know about the technical side of things or the engineering stuff or having a vision of a human future in different planets, needs to know how to manage a giant business with arms that are fighting each other all the time. So what makes the best administrator? I don't think it needs to be someone who has a science background. I think it needs to be someone who believes in science 100% right down to their very core and also ideally someone who loves science since that's what they will be working with day in, day out for the duration of their tenure at NASA. But whether they need to be a scientist or have a strong science background, I don't think so. I think what we ultimately need is someone who understands the business side of things. Now, does our current administrator have that? I can't answer that question at all. And again, all of this is my own opinion and I wanna know what you guys think. Do you agree with me? Do you think we need more business savvy than science savvy at the head of NASA? Let me know all of your thoughts and if you wanna throw in there who you think your favorite administrator is, let me know as well. As always guys, I also wanna hear what topics you would like to see discussed and covered in future episodes. If you would like to know a little bit more about past administrators, I do have a companion blog post over on Discover Magazine that has a lot of links so you can do a bit more research yourself. 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