Jim Bridenstine will soon, as he promised, step down as administrator of NASA. He served in that position for just two and three-quarters years. But in that time, he has set America and her allies on a firm path to return astronauts to the moon.
Bridenstine’s nomination and the subsequent contentious confirmation did not bode well. The grilling that he got by Democratic members of the Senate Commerce Committee was like something out of “Advise and Consent,” but in this case, as one Republican member quipped, the question was, “Are you or have you ever been a conservative?”
The hearings took place in November 2017. Bridenstine was confirmed by the full Senate, on a party-line vote, in April 2018. The new NASA administrator set to work on two tasks. He had to win over his former critics. He had to get Project Artemis, the program to return humans to the moon, on a full footing. Bridenstine succeeded in both tasks.
USA Today reported that one of the ways that Bridenstine reached out to some of his Democratic critics was to evolve his stance on climate change. As a Republican representative from Oklahoma, an oil state, he had been an opponent of measures to alleviate climate change. As NASA administrator, Bridenstine admitted that the phenomenon exists and that humans have something to do with it. The change was enough to impress some Democrats who had previously opposed him.
Bridenstine’s deftest maneuver concerned his chief tormentor during the hearings, Sen. Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida. Nelson, in a turn of events that seemed Shakespearean, lost his senate seat about a year after the hearings. In a move that was both magnanimous and cunning, Bridenstine appointed his former enemy to NASA’s advisory panel.
Bridenstine’s other success was garnering both congressional and international support for Artemis. He proved to be a relentless salesman for the program, with the result that funding, at least on a certain level, passed Congress on a bipartisan basis. Indeed, the 2020 Democratic Party platform specifically endorsed the "Back to the moon and on to Mars" program.
NASA, under Bridenstine, has also forged a number of international agreements related to the Artemis program. The Artemis Accords have set forth a code of conduct for nations engaged in space exploration. Canada, the European Union, and Japan have become partners in the construction of the so-called Lunar Gateway, a miniature space station in lunar orbit that will serve as a transfer point for astronauts headed for the moon’s surface. A Canadian astronaut will fly on Artemis 2, a mission to orbit the moon before the next moon landing.
NASA has also started a human lunar lander version of the commercial crew program. Three companies, SpaceX, a team led by Blue Origin, and Dynetics, are vying for the right to carry the first astronauts to land on the moon since Apollo 17. Even before the next moonwalkers, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program will land robotic missions on the lunar surface, the first two scheduled for 2021. Some of these probes will collect moon rocks for later collection by NASA. In short, the commercial sector will be full partners with NASA and its international allies in the return to the moon.
The only major failure that occurred on Bridenstine’s watch was not securing enough funding to develop the hardware to get the first astronauts back on the moon by 2024. Congress provided some funding for human lunar landers, but it is now very unlikely that Americans will walk on the moon in three years.
Bridenstine is stepping down from NASA as the Biden presidency begins. He leaves behind a record of accomplishment that few have matched. Because of his tenure, Americans are very likely to return to the moon and eventually go to Mars at some point. Joe Biden, when he gets around to naming a successor and formulating his space policy, would do well to remember that. He should seek to build on what Bridenstine has accomplished and not to derail it. Continuity should become the norm for NASA, not the start-stop-start pattern that has prevailed for so many decades.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration titled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
