Current and former NASA leaders discuss space agency at 60

NASA chief Jim Bridenstine, 43, wasn't born yet when the space agency pulled off its greatest achievements, the Apollo moon landings.

"Think about that: I wasn’t alive," Bridenstine said Monday in Orlando to an AIAA Space Forum audience that included Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, explaining the agency's latest human exploration focus. "It’s time we go back to the moon, friends."

Bridenstine was joined on the stage by five predecessors whose careers the Apollo program helped inspire, in what was billed as the largest gathering of NASA administrators at one place and time.

Dick Truly, Dan Goldin, Sean O'Keefe, Mike Griffin and Charlie Bolden reminisced about the toughest challenges they faced and shared hopes for the future as the space agency nears its 60th birthday next month, and the 50th anniversary of astronauts' first moon landing next year.

"The world changed, and we had to change with it," recalled Goldin, NASA's longest-serving administrator at nearly 10 years, about the need to cooperate with Russia after the Cold War when he took over the job in 1992.

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Bolden, a former shuttle commander who was Bridenstine's immediate predecessor during the Obama administration, noted that leaders sometimes get credit or blame for decisions made by previous administrations. 

"It became difficult to go back home to Houston, because I was the guy who was going to retire the space shuttle program, and end human spaceflight," he said, noting that plans to retire the shuttle, which ended in 2011, had been announced years earlier. 

Bolden spoke in not-so-flattering terms about his mandate to work with "commercial space ideologues" who wanted to "decimate" much of the NASA leadership they regarded as "old space."

Commercial partnerships forged during his tenure are expected to result in a resumption of astronaut flights from U.S. soil within the next year on Boeing and SpaceX capsules.

Bridenstine credited a “very robust commercial space enterprise” as one of the modern changes that would make NASA’s current deep space goals more sustainable than other post-Apollo efforts.

Two of the former administrators present Monday, Truly and O’Keefe, served under presidents who unveiled ambitious plans to return to the moon and Mars that failed to materialize — George H. W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative in 1989, and George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration in 2004.

Goldin, known for instituting the “faster, better, cheaper" approach to project management, said NASA programs should be shorter and embrace the commercial technology sector's pace to succeed.

“I would say no program should be more than one presidential term, and absolutely no more than two presidential terms,” he said. “The high-tech industry in America is moving at the speed of light, and NASA better get with the program.”

NASA has been developing a new deep space rocket and spacecraft — now called the Space Launch System and Orion capsule — since Griffin was the administrator in the mid-2000s, before the shuttle’s retirement in 2011.

A first launch from Kennedy Space Center of a crew flying around the moon is possible by 2022, approaching the end of a second term by President Trump, if he wins one.

Some “new space” advocates continue to urge NASA to stop designing and operating its own rockets, and rely instead on more affordable heavy-lift rockets provided by SpaceX, Blue Origin or United Launch Alliance.

Even Bolden, who once said he was "not a big fan" of investing commercial heavy-lift boosters, suggested NASA focus more on the systems that get crews to the surfaces of the moon or Mars and enable them to harvest water ice and other resources for life support or rocket fuel.

“We spend a lot of money on launch vehicles, but we’ve got to start spending money on orbiters, orbiting platforms and on landers to get down to the surface of wherever we’re going,” he said.

The former administrators wouldn’t speculate on exactly what NASA might accomplish in the next 60 years, but said they hoped the agency would lead technology development and make the United States a spacefaring nation.

“I want to see the return of the cultural view that the key purpose of NASA is to make the United States preeminent in space,” said Griffin. “I want to see other people watching what we do on television, not us watching them.”

Truly, another former shuttle commander, urged continued bi-partisanship to maintain public support.

“In the final analysis, NASA is a very unusual agency in that America doesn’t have to do this,” he said. “And therefore, the public way beyond the people in this room have to believe in it.”

Bridenstine, a former Republican congressman whose confirmation was delayed by Democrats who considered him too partisan, pledged to work collaboratively and build upon the legacy of Apollo.

“A lot of us were not even born when all of that took place, and the visions that have come since then have not always materialized,” he said. “But because those visions existed, we at this point in history have more opportunity to do more than ever before. And we’re going to take advantage of that by going to the moon, retiring the risk, and going on to Mars.”

Contact Dean at 321-917-4534 or jdean@floridatoday.com. And follow on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/FlameTrench.

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