Main Engine Cut Off - T+185: Bill Nelson Nominated as NASA Administrator

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

President Biden nominated Bill Nelson to be the new NASA Administrator, so I check in on some of my past thoughts on NASA Administrators and Jim Bridenstine, talk about Bill Nelson’s history in space policy, and what the future may hold under a Bill Nelson NASA.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 39 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, and seven anonymous—and 523 other supporters.TopicsPresident Biden Announces his Intent to Nominate Bill Nelson for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration | The White HouseWidespread support for Nelson nomination to lead NASA - SpaceNewsSen. Nelson Floats Alternate Use for NASA Commercial Crew Money - SpaceNewsNASA to offer funding for initial studies of commercial space stations - SpaceNewsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Manage and Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. And I wanted to talk today about the recent news that Senator, former Senator Bill Nelson has been nominated to be the next NASA administrator under the Joe Biden administration. This had been rumored for a while, talked about for a while. It was made official last week, and I've been thinking a lot about it since, kicking around a lot of different thoughts, disagreeing with myself a lot. So this is probably going to be one of the most thinking out loud shows that I've done in a while, because there is a lot to unpack. And, you know, we do this every couple of years, apparently. I did this around the time that

Jim Bridenstine was nominated, thinking about, do administrators matter at all? Probably we'll talk about that a little bit here. What might they find themselves doing? Why is Nelson being floated for this position? A lot of thoughts about how this will all play out. So let's dive in. It probably helps to start with the table setting about who Bill Nelson is. He is a politician's politician. He is a close friend of Joe Biden's going back forever. He was a member of the House of Representatives for a while for Florida and then was a senator, recently lost re-election back in 2018, I believe. During

his time in Congress, he was one of the Congress people that were flown on the space shuttle. He launched the shuttle launch right before Challenger, came down just two weeks or so before the Challenger incident happened. At the time, that was derided by his crew members, famously called him Ballast Bill, because that was his role on the mission. And it was a very political situation back then of flying these senators and representatives on the shuttle. So that was a whole thing. So that's who he is. And in terms of the connection to Joe Biden, I said they're old friends. They both know how the Senate works. They lived it. They breathed it for such a long time. They are Senate creatures. So I think they see eye to eye on a lot of stuff because of that.

And clearly, this was the case of Bill Nelson seeing his opportunity to step up into this role. And I think in a lot of ways, Jim Bridenstine was in a similar boat where he had been positioning himself through the American Space Renaissance Act as a thought leader in space, specifically from Congress. And then he really gambled, I would say, politically. He was one of the first people to endorse Donald Trump back in the day, and that ended up with him in charge of NASA. So I think when you're looking at it tactically, it was a big gamble at the time but it worked out for him he became the head of NASA so very similar situations there where it's like using your influence on that person to get the job that you want and of course Bill Nelson during the time

that Bridenstine was being confirmed by the Senate he was there in the Senate and he said that he doesn't think politicians should be in charge of NASA, that he thinks it should be a space professional. So all that stuff's being dredged up. That's just like, it's politics. You know, everyone's getting hot and bothered about that, but that is just straight up politics. That's the kind of thing that you do. Now to talk about how Bill Nelson would fit in as the head of NASA, I want to revisit some past positions of mine to play on those a little bit. Two things specifically. Number one, I had a lot of thoughts in, you know, five years ago about do administrators matter at all? You know, NASA is very much at the behest of the White House,

the administration in charge, and Congress specifically. You look back at the past 10 or 20 years, and it's been political whiplash between the White House and Congress fighting over priorities. Famously, when SLS was created by Congress, that was because it was canceled by the White House. In effect, it was canceled. It was the Ares V at the time, and the Ares program overall, Project Constellation, and that was revitalized into SLS Orion. After that cancellation, disagreement on the way things should go, and NASA was handed down this directive to build this launch vehicle in the way that they are, and that was pretty much the model for the way things go in recent years, with NASA's priorities being set at this higher political battleground.

So it's always been a little bit of a thing that I've wondered, you know, do administrators matter that much? Can they have that much of an effect on the agency when they are at the will of these other political players? Obviously, they're part of the administration, but in all honesty, there's a lot of pieces on the administration side. It's not just the administrator. So even when Jim Bridenstine was floated as the administrator, and I was very supportive of that, I really liked his instincts for the industry. I thought a politician would make an effective administrator, much to the contrary of a lot of the talk around the time.

I thought he knew how this stuff works and he'd be able to know which hands to shake and what meetings to be in. There were times when he was showing up in hearings as a member of the public, just sitting in the back of the room. And I thought that kind of stuff is indicative of the fact that he knows how this stuff works. And, you know, even though I liked his instincts for the industry and I thought he would be a good influence, I didn't think it would really matter that much. I thought he would be able to have a little bit of an effect day to day, be a good voice for the kind of opinions that he had, but overall didn't know if it would move the needle too much. And over a couple short years, I've revised that opinion. I think I mentioned

this just a couple of weeks ago when he was no longer the administrator, but what I found out was, okay, I think they do matter a little bit. I don't know if they can drastically change the direction of NASA. Can they completely turn the way that NASA's heading? Probably not. But they can either speed things up or slow things down within the constraints that they're given. And that's the strength that I see as this position is that there are things that NASA wanted to do under Jim Bridenstine that they found ways to do because they were driven to do it. So they stuck stuff into next step proposals, or they stuck stuff into the gateway program. They found all these different areas, right? Commercial lunar payload services flew under the radar. And all of a sudden we've got a lot of missions manifested to land on the moon within the next couple of years.

And they've on-ramped bigger landers into that program, which is an easy way in to start developing some of the things that you would need for a human landing system. So there's a lot of ways that there was this kind of gritty approach to it, right? Like, we have a direction in mind. We know we want to go there. kind of gritty approach to it, right? Like we have a direction in mind. We know we want to go there. Where can we stick this stuff that is under the radar, would still get approved, is legally defensible, and doesn't require us going to Congress and saying we need $3 billion a year for this effort. Now, they also did that, right? They also went and said we need $3 billion a year. But there's a bunch of other stuff that's already happening that's in flow that they found a space for within the constraints of the environment.

And there's other times when there's things that they didn't want to do that they slow rolled. There's also straight up messaging, right? There was the whole thing where Mike Pence did this announcement. And Mike Pence and Jim Brine sign, I think, were very aligned overall on the vision for space there. Pence and Jim Bridenstine, I think we're very aligned overall on the vision for space there. There was that big announcement where he said, or a big speech where he said, if the current contractors can't do the job, we'll find new ones that will. And there was this very hard line messaging against Boeing to put pressure on SLS.

And then there's the whole thing with SpaceX doing Starship tests and Crew Dragon tests. And it led to this big blow up where Jim Bridenstine made this statement that he thinks SpaceX needs to be focused on commercial crew. That led to a bunch of back and forth. And all of a sudden, Jim Bridenstine and Elon Musk are appearing alongside each other talking about their relationship and how great things are, and mending fences a little bit. And then Jim Bridenstine saying, I'm really excited about Starship. So there's a lot of messaging that went in as well, right? And those are the three things that I think can be done. It's messaging, it's finding places for projects to live within NASA, and it's slow rolling stuff that you don't necessarily like. Now, none of that is going to drastically

change the direction of NASA, you know, on a dime. It's not like in over the two years or whatever, three years that Jim Bridenstine was there that NASA has pointed in completely a different direction. But there's a lot of finesse involved to start moving certain pieces in the right direction and build momentum behind that. The other thing that was really interesting in the last couple of years is the way that Jim Bridenstine and his colleagues really looked to the international community to find places to even more so implant themselves in other nations' space programs as a way to make things really sticky. So there's been a lot of outreach around the Lunar Gateway. There's been a lot of outreach around the Artemis Accords, both things that we've talked about on the show. So if those

words confuse you, roll it back. The podcast feed a bit to my Artemis Accords episode, we cover all that stuff. There's even some of these agreements in place for different science missions, for, you know, JAXA building a moon rover for our eventual lunar base. There's a lot of these international interests that had been woven into all these different programs that are going on at NASA. interests that had been woven into all these different programs that are going on at NASA. So I think, you know, my previous take on do administrators matter? I was wrong. I think they do matter. Do they matter as much as we'd like to say? Probably not. But do they matter? Yes. And I really liked Jim Bridenstine's instincts for the industry. I thought he had a good mindset around where things were going and where things needed to go.

And I thought a politician would be very effective at all those things. So that was kind of the triumvirate of my opinions five years ago this time. So now let's apply that to the Bill Nelson era here. Bill Nelson is even more of a politician than Jim Brinstein. Bill Nelson had spent decades in Congress. He's got tons of relationships. He's like best friends with the president. So he will have the president's ear. He knows a lot of the people in the Senate. He knows how to make things happen. So I think for that reason, he will make an even more effective administrator when it comes to having a politician in charge of NASA. Now where things greatly diverge are that his instincts are terrible.

I do not think his industry instincts are any good, and I think we would disagree on many things about the industry. But the problem is, is that I don't necessarily know that. I know that about politician Bill Nelson. I don't know that about Bill Nelson. This is another tieback to Jim Bridenstine. There's a lot of things in Jim Bridenstine's past that he had signed on to, specifically around climate change, a lot of social issues. And the climate change one is an example I want to stick on here, is that in his nomination process, he had a complete reversal on those issues. And a lot of people can say, well, he was doing it because it was politically expedient to reverse his position. And I would argue, yes, or was it politically expedient before, when people were actually

going into a voting booth and pulling his lever? Which one was the politically expedient thing? Was it going against that view once he was put up by a Republican president to be in charge of NASA? Or was it when he needed a lot of people to go into a voting booth and push his button? So even that was like, which one is the real Jim Bridenstine? And I have similar thoughts about Bill Nelson and his industry instincts. He is a Florida congressperson. He is a congress critter from Florida. And what comes with that is a lot of parochial interests in Florida. So, you know, historically and famously, 10 years to the day before he was nominated as NASA administrator, he was in front of a Senate

committee, and he was talking about how maybe we should take all the money that was allotted for commercial crew and spend it on SLS instead. He was fighting commercial crew very hard in those days and wanted to spend it on SLS Orion and the exploration ground systems. Now, does he actually think that was a good idea? Or was he playing that role because he was the senator from Florida? I don't know. Maybe both, maybe one. I have no idea. So maybe his instincts are better than I'm giving him credit for. And maybe it's that he's a really good politician who knows how to fight for Florida. And if that's true, then he has these political superpowers to be able to make things happen for his constituents. Now, obviously,

Commercial Crew got funded, but famously not as fast as they really wanted it to. And SLS has certainly been fine with funding, and Exhal SLS has certainly been fine with funding, and exhalation ground systems have been fine with funding over the past 10 years. So was he playing politics really well and looking out for Florida? Certainly. Does he necessarily think it was the best thing? I sort of think so, but I don't know. And that's the big variable here, is that in this new role, he's not fighting for Florida. and that's the big variable here is that in this new role, he's not fighting for Florida. He is put in charge of NASA. NASA has centers all over the country. He no longer is parochial about Florida. That is part of his job, but it is not solely his job.

So I think that does change the dynamics a little bit, or at least it has the potential to change the dynamics a little bit. So I want to explore where things could go and what kind of stuff we're going to see here in a Nelson administration going forward for NASA. But first, I want to say thank you to all of you out there who make this episode of Main Engine Cutoff possible. There are 562 supporters over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support.

That is a gigantic number. I'm so thankful for that number. It kind of blows my mind every time I look at it. So thank you all so much for making this possible. And of that 562, there are 39 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, Chris, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. You are here every single

month. And it is why I keep doing the show. It is why the show is continuing to grow. And fairly soon, now that I have received my second vaccine dose i'll be back on the road doing space things so i'm very excited to get back out there i bought a whole road rig because of all your support uh right around this time last year all of my stuff was coming in actually like slightly before uh you know early march all my road rig stuff was coming in i was pumped there was all these events coming up and then then none of it happened. So I have this pent up. I'm very ready to get back out there, go see some Starship stuff, maybe a lot of opportunities in the next year that I'm very excited to get out and do those things for you. And it's all because you are making it possible over at MainEngineCutoff.com

slash support. Thank you all so much. All right, now continuing on the thread of Bill Nelson no longer being a Florida man in terms of his political position within NASA. There is a lot of stuff that is going to be up to the administration, and I mean that by the Biden administration, to see how they want to roll out their space policy. We've seen some light attempts at talking about what their space policy might be. We've seen some support for the Artemis program generally. We've seen some light attempts at talking about what their space policy might be we've seen some support for the artemis program generally we've seen some support for the space force generally though it's kind of you know uh dressed up with jokes and whatnot they've kind of dipped their

toe into talking about space issues but they haven't really rolled out a grand plan here yet and it sounds like we might see that in the coming weeks uh there's going to be some budget making its way through the budget request uh is going to make its way through sometimes next week for the things that matter to NASA. But there's also all the context that they're coming into this with, right? And that's what I want to talk about here, because it does certainly feel like the last couple of years, there's been a marked change in the industry, but also the politics around the industry here in the US. And if we look 10 years ago, right, when Nelson was making that statement

in front of that Senate committee, the industry is entirely changed from them. It doesn't even look like the same industry. 10 years ago, it was a lot easier to argue that the old way was the way to go. Commercial crew was years off. SpaceX really wasn't even doing anything yet. New space was kind of just a theory, right? There was a lot of talk about what the industry could be and the way that things could work, but it was all yet unproven. So it was much easier to argue that the NASA way, the old NASA way, the way that Bill Nelson's grandparents, you'll hear a lot about in the next couple of years, the way that they did it back in the day is the way that works. It got us to the moon, it got us the shuttle, it made the ISS. That's the way we got to triple down on.

Now here we are in 2021, SpaceX is on top of the world. They've got everything from reusability to Falcon Heavy flying, commercial crew, Starlink's got 1300 satellites in orbit, Starship's doing all this stuff down in Boca Chica. There are so many companies contributing to the industry in ways that only government programs did before that. And it's, you know, SpaceX on the flashy side, but you look recently at the Suez Canal situation, and we've got tons of high res imagery and synthetic aperture radar imagery coming out from all these different angles of this ship stuck in the Suez Canal. And it's all just being posted to Twitter in real time. And it's like, man, this is an interesting thing in the world now is that we have this kind of imagery instantly from all these commercial

companies and resolution that is, you know, not quite what the National Reconnaissance Office has, but pretty darn close. You've got commercial crew up and flying to the ISS and operating well. We've got, you know, hopefully Starliner comes online in the not too distant future, but Dragon 2 is flying operational missions to the ISS now in a dependable way. And, you know, we're trying to sort out things with Roscosmos about trading astronauts and cosmonauts, but we have a dependable flight and plannable flights to the ISS. And that includes an extra crew member that totally changes the game in terms of what's possible on the ISS today. The ISS port has been allocated to Axiom, who is about to start flying

private astronaut missions to the station and is working on modules that will expand the space station in the near future. And then recently, we've seen that the commercial stations initiative, the actual free flying commercial space stations initiative, seems to be progressing again under this new commercial LEO destinations program. Sounds like something that's going to be a year long storyline as they work out all the details there, but a lot has changed in that environment. And then we've got the gateway side of things that at this point, as I mentioned with the international partners, is pretty well committed to. There's actual hardware being built and put together there for that. You've got SpaceX

assigned to fly logistics with a new vehicle out to the gateway. It's going to be launching on a Falcon Heavy with a really long fairing. You've got the Artemis Accords in place. That is a really big effort to establish the kinds of norms that NASA wants to see on the lunar surface. And you've got all these different countries with old space agencies and new ones locked in. Commercial lunar payload services. I'm really excited to see how that's going to play out, but that could change the mentality and really change the game for planetary missions. It's going to start at the moon, but if it works out well, it could change the game long-term about how we operate those things. And on the launch side, obviously, you know, there's tons of launch companies, tons coming online soon, big vehicles, small vehicles, everything that are changing the game for NASA science missions and how they get to orbit.

that are changing the game for NASA science missions and how they get to orbit. So there's a lot of these things that are in motion, some of which NASA had a part in, some of which were industry inventions, but a lot of it is totally unstoppable from the political forces here in the US. They are trends that are in motion, that are going to be in motion, and NASA has to decide, are we going to surf that wave or let it go by? So does it matter that Bill Nelson was an opponent of commercial crew 10 years ago? Not at all. Because now guess what? He's going to be in charge of NASA and he's going to be there every launch when astronauts are getting onto spaceships and flying to the space station every five months or so. And he gets to stand there and say, look how great NASA is.

And there's a NASA logo on side, on the side of every spaceship that goes through that. And he gets to do his whole thing about how he, one time we got on the space shuttle and he looked and he saw his homestead that was over in the Merritt Island refuge or whatever. He gets to do that every five months and say, this is Bill Nelson's NASA flying people to space. And he does not care that 10 years ago,

he was an opponent of that program. And that's politics right there. Now, the biggest things that are going to be indicative of the administration's attitude towards space is going to be how they handle the human landing system and how they handle SLS as it goes forward. These are the things that are probably going to be the most indicative things to watch for different reasons, right? HLS, the human landing system, is the program that was leading up to awarding a company or two with lander contracts. It got underfunded per the budget request. They requested like $3 billion for this. They got $825 million. Sounds like they're still going to figure out exactly how to play that. They have not yet figured out exactly what they want to do with that award.

So seeing how they play that, are they going to down select? Are they going to continue this in some sort of research and development phase? Seeing what they do there and the timeline that they attach to it is going to be very telling for their plans long term. And then on the SLS side, we're now through its green run. And we're going to see what the schedule is like. I don't imagine that it will launch for another year or so. But the first launch and the reaction to the launch and the results of the launch, and how it gets played into the future, all of that is going to happen under Bill Nelson's NASA. So watching the positioning around that will be very indicative. You know, like I said, I don't think they're going to get up there and say, if our current contractors can't do the job, we'll find new ones that will. I don't think that's going to be the attitude towards SLS.

But, you know, if we see a lot more issues, if we see a lot more delays, like SLS is not invincible. It has felt invincible because we're all watching it with new space eyes. A lot of the people that I talk to out there listening to the show and it is invincible right now, but it is not invincible forever. You know, if you do the thought process of like, what's it like if SLS doesn't launch for a year? What's it like if it doesn't launch for two years? What's it like if it doesn't launch for five years? It quickly gets away from you. And I don't think it's invincible forever. It's kind of similar to 10 years ago

when Bill Nelson was, you know, poo-pooing commercial crew and talking about how the NASA way is better. That worked well 10 years ago. Now that we're flying every couple of months to the space station, that works less well. It flips into a different kind of invincibility, right? Where now you're invincible because you are the way that things work. So the commercial crew model is a way that things work really well. It delivered and it's operating and it's doing its thing. Will this administration,

like the last one did, apply that model to future developments? That's what we've seen with gateway logistics, the thing that SpaceX is building Dragon XL for. It's what we've seen with the way that the last administration wanted to handle the human landing system, even parts of gateway.

Will that be how this administration looks at it? Or are they going to revert to the old cost plus model? So those are some of the things that I'm watching. I am, as you can tell, I started out not a big fan of this. I don't like Bill Nelson's instincts. I think a politician would be a good administrator. They would be effective at doing the things that the administration wants to do. And all my question marks are around, what is it that this administration wants to do? I hope we find out over the next couple of weeks. I'm very excited for all of this to be back on our topics list.

And I'm a little bit hopeful. I'll tell you what, I'm a little hopeful. So we'll see how it goes. But for now, that's all I've got. As always, thanks for listening. Thanks for your support at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Hit me up on Twitter at wehavemiko or an email anthonyatmainenginecutoff.com. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon.