This morning, the White House nominated former US Sen. Bill Nelson to become the next administrator of NASA.
Nelson, who is 78 years old, lost his 2018 bid for reelection to the Senate. He had served six terms as a member of the House of Representatives and three terms in the upper house. He has a close relationship with President Biden and effectively lobbied to gain the appointment. Nelson must still be confirmed by a majority of the US Senate, but this seems likely to happen given early support from some Republicans already.
"Most every piece of space and science law has had his imprint, including passing the landmark NASA bill of 2010 along with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson," the nomination states .
The former senator, who did indeed delve deeply into space policy, would bring plenty of experience and familiarity to the role of NASA administrator. In addition to representing Kennedy Space Center in Congress for decades, he flew as a payload specialist on space shuttle Columbia in January 1986. However, Nelson is far from beloved in the space community , both for the way he became an astronaut and for some of his space policy decisions.
Only senators get to ask questions of nominees at hearings, but if Ars had a seat at the table, here are the top five questions we'd be most interested in hearing Nelson respond to.
1. If commercial space can do a better job, should NASA buy in?
Nelson was initially antagonistic toward commercial spaceflight—particularly efforts to rely on private companies to deliver astronauts to the US space station. For example, during a Senate hearing in 2010, he suggested that the Senate might simply take President Obama's $6 billion request for commercial crew funding and put that money into the Space Launch System rocket.
“What would happen if Congress decided—since the Congress controls the purse strings—that we wanted to take the $6 billion projected by the president over the next five years and use that not for human certification of the commercial vehicles but instead to accelerate the ... heavy-lift vehicle for the Mars program?” Nelson asked during one hearing.
Nelson made similar comments over the course of several years. He ultimately started making more positive comments about commercial crew after Boeing established in 2014 that its facility to process the Starliner crew vehicle would be at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Later, he also began to appreciate that SpaceX would launch dozens of times a year from Florida. This makes clear that Nelson's motivations lie in protecting jobs in Florida—a parochial, if understandable, motivation for a senator from the state.
But a NASA administrator must represent all of NASA, not just stand up for a few states. Today, it's fairly well-established that NASA should buy commercial services from private companies in low Earth orbit. The debate now is whether this public-private partnership model should be extended into deep space for exploration. Doing so would likely save money and accelerate exploration, but it also threatens parochial political interests in Alabama, Florida, and elsewhere. Would Nelson be willing to stand against former friends in the Senate and aerospace industry to accomplish this?
2. Do you still believe politicians should not run NASA?
In 2017, Nelson led the opposition to Jim Bridenstine becoming administrator of NASA. Then serving as the ranking member on the Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, which oversees NASA, Nelson said Bridenstine was too partisan and political to lead NASA. He also accused Bridenstine of not having the expertise to do so. “The head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician,” Nelson said of Bridenstine, then a two-term congressman from Oklahoma.