NASA, White House

More Holdren comments

The journal Science wasn’t the only publication new presidential science advisor John Holdren talked with this week when he discussed issues like the future of the shuttle and cooperation with China. In an interview with Nature, Holdren addresses that comment by President Obama regarding the “sense of drift” at NASA:

The president said recently that there is a “sense of drift” at NASA, and yet the 2010 budget outline broadly supports the status-quo by retiring the shuttle to make room for manned spaceflight. Does NASA’s mission need to be re-evaluated or not?

What the president said is our space programme has been drifting. What we had in the last administration was the articulation of a grand vision for going back to the moon and going back to Mars, but no budget to go with it. The consequences of that for NASA have been quite devastating, in terms of decimating the Earth sciences programme at NASA, decimating the aeronautics programme at NASA and putting at risk the constellation of Earth observation satellites.

Clearly we need to reconcile NASA’s missions and budgets. We need to think about how we manage the right balance between manned space exploration and robotic space exploration. We need to manage the balance between looking up and looking down, the Earth observation part versus the space exploration part. We need to balance the aeronautics and the astronautics. That’s going to have to involve a new NASA administrator.

Do we know when that is going to happen?

I certainly hope we have a new administrator in place in the next month — that is a hope, and not a prediction.

Well, we can only hope, if for nothing else to put an end to all the administrator guessing games.

Those comments are also summarized by the AP at the end of its article on the interview.

11 comments to More Holdren comments

  • Margaret Leber

    I can’t imagine why there’s “a sense of drift at NASA” considering the strong leadership provided by our POTUS.

    We’ve got four years of this…indeed “we can only hope”. We can only hope there’s still a country left when the Democrats get done with it this time.

  • John Cunningham

    “he consequences of that for NASA have been quite devastating, in terms of decimating the Earth sciences programme at NASA”

    “We need to manage the balance between looking up and looking down, the Earth observation part versus the space exploration part.”

    Which to me says the “looking down” part is more important than the “looking up” part, so NASA will be used more and more to promote and support AGW Theory and climate research, and as a result US space technology and programs investment will decline and the US will end up without a manned spaceflight capability.

  • Blue

    Like I’ve been saying, Obama will gut NASA and focus the remaining budget on MTPE II.

  • richardb

    Obama has pleasantly surprised me on a number of issues, so I’m willing to wait until he has fleshed out his team before criticizing his NASA/space policy. He has provided more funding than Bush ever did and while Obama has disgracefully bashed Bush overseas and at home, Obama hasn’t overturned many key Bush initiatives with VSE among them. As for Holdren’s comments, I’d wait to hear from the big dog himself, I don’t think Holdren’s got much juice in this administration. His loony statement of spraying aerosols into the atmosphere to “retard” AGW won’t help with the boss either.

  • Vladislaw

    “investment will decline and the US will end up without a manned spaceflight capability.”

    There was a four year gap in manned spaceflight capability from day one. Regardless who became President unless they totally scraped “the stick”. Staying with that may lead to an even greater then four year gap, outwards to 2017. Again, nothing to do with President Obama.

    If President Bush was really serious about space why didn’t he pour the 230 billion dollar budget surplus he was handed by Clinton and fully fund a replacement for the shuttle AND a fully funded lunar architecture.

  • Pontificus

    “If President Bush was really serious about space why didn’t he pour the 230 billion dollar budget surplus he was handed by Clinton and fully fund a replacement for the shuttle AND a fully funded lunar architecture.”

    And if current POTUS is serious about space, why didn’t he carve a few bill off the $787B Bank Exec slush fund and do the same?

    Perhaps because the POTUS in today’s America, does not have the pull everybody everyone credits him (or her) with. Perhaps we should place this blame with a failure of Congress (the Board) to follow the Vision of the POTUS (CEO).

    “decimation of Earth science programme at NASA” – Are you kidding me? Give me a break. NASA has a “flotilla” (their own words) of Earth observing satellites. Ever hear of the A-Train?

    http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cloudsat/multimedia/a-train.html

    Yes, There is doom and gloom about these being past their design life, but that’s just marketing. Historical data shows these satellites last much longer than their original life, as much as five-times longer.

  • Vladislaw

    “And if current POTUS is serious about space, why didn’t he carve a few bill off the $787B Bank Exec slush fund and do the same?”

    because the current President didn’t come up with the VSE, it wasn’t his policy. The current President didn’t pick Griffin to come up with a shuttle replacement. When Griffin came up with the “stick” and Ares V that didn’t utilize the old shuttle parts, like Direct does, it was the last president’s problem to have stopped it.

    I have written several times about faults, I believe, the current President has made, including 3 articles on failure of using the stimulus for commercial space development. That is mixing apples and oranges though. So far NASA’s budget has seen increases not gutting under this President, and since he has not articulated where human space flight is going the jury is still out on what is going to get “gutted” if anything.

    President Obama has never used Constellation or Ares I & V in any public policies so it is still speculation if he is going to cut them, delay them or ask for increase funding to support them and cut the gap.

  • […] More Holdren comments – Space Politics […]

  • zero sum

    I have to agree that there is a sense of drift at NASA. Maybe… I know this is a radical thought, but maybe we should use our citizen’s hard-earned tax dollars to do things that are of practical value to America.

  • […] may sound promising, but it’s not the first time we’ve heard such statements. Holdren told Nature he hoped to have “a new administrator in place in the next month”—in an interview a little over a month ago, for example. And President Obama himself said he […]

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