A Fond Farewell to Trump ’s NASA Administrator

There were plenty of reasons to wince back in 2017 when U.S. President Donald Trump announced he was appointing Jim Bridenstine as NASA administrator. A former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, Bridenstine was a political pick—unlike most of his predecessors, who came out of the astronaut corps or the aerospace industry. Moreover, Bridenstine had previously questioned the role of human beings in climate change. A politician with so wrong-headed a view of so fundamental and existential an issue was not someone you wanted anywhere near the helm of a science-driven agency. But flash forward to 2020. With Trump now a lame duck and President-elect Joe Biden just 68 days away from moving into the Oval Office, there is reason to regret Bridenstine’s announcement this week that he’s stepping down. “What you need is somebody who has a close relationship with the President of the United States,” Bridenstine told Aviation Week. “You need somebody who is trusted by the administration…including the OMB [Office of Management and Budget], the National Space Council and the National Security Council, and I think that I would not be the right person for that in a new administration.” That’s a shame, since Bridenstine’s brief tenure has been an unexpected success. Early in his confirmation process, he cleared up the climate change nonsense, saying he now embraced the science fully. While he couldn’t wave his lack of space ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news