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S. Goldin, the hard-driving bureaucrat who saved America's space
program, announced Wednesday that he would resign as NASA administrator.
First appointed in the spring of 1992 under George H. W. Bush, Goldin
served longer than any other high-ranking federal official currently
in office.
As the longest-serving
NASA administrator in history, Goldin compiled an impressive record
at the space agency's helm. Under his leadership NASA tripled the
number of scientific spacecraft in orbit around the earth, produced
the best-yet maps of Mars, the Moon, and Venus, returned scads of
data about Jupiter and its moons, launched an ambitious mission
to Saturn, vastly expanded our knowledge of asteroids, and began
construction on a long-delayed space station. The agency also scored
a number of public-relations coups: It arranged a Mars landing for
July 4th, sent John Glenn back into space, and won geopolitical
brownie points by sending American astronauts to Russia's creaky,
dangerous Mir station. As the first NASA administrator from a background
in private-sector space development — he headed TRW's space
division before taking the helm at NASA — Goldin made the space
agency run more like a business. He handed over space-shuttle operations
to a private-sector consortium, cut $40 billion from the NASA budget
and axed about a third of the space agency's bureaucrats while still
carrying out more missions. He also knew when to get out of the
way: NASA stopped much of its corporate-welfare work and thus helped
to expand the commercial space industry. Goldin even grudgingly
allowed billionaire Dennis Tito to usher in the age of space tourism
by hitching a very costly ride on a Russian space capsule. For an
agency that failed to execute any planetary missions between 1978
and 1989 and had a manned space program so aimless many wanted to
abolish it, Goldin's time at the helm represents a stunning success.
Goldin's tenure,
however, saw plenty of failures. Efforts to do more science with
less money — the "cheaper, faster, better" approach
as Goldin called it — resulted in the loss of two Mars probes.
While nearly everyone can agree that some science is better than
none, scientists privately grouse about the dated instruments Goldin's
low budgets forced them to use. The space station, plagued by delays,
cost overruns and Russian foot-dragging, will achieve very modest
science objectives at immense cost. Goldin's personal style, likewise,
proved so hard driving and autocratic and even his own PR flacks
sometimes complained about it. Surviving for ten years in a high-profile
job required a willingness to play political games: Goldin helped
insure the space station's survival by finding contractors in all
435 House districts and spent millions of dollars to realize Al
Gore's mad-scientist dream of launching a TV camera into space to
transmit a continuous image of earth over the Internet. (One can
easily imagine Gore hugging a computer monitor with an image of
the earth and shouting "Mine! Mine! All mine!")
Goldin never
succeeded in remaking the agency altogether. The space shuttle,
intended as a cheap, safe way to bring people, has turned out to
be costly and dangerous and, after spending over $1 billion, Goldin
scraped plans to replace it. Although president H. W. Bush wanted
to send people to Mars, a manned mission to the fourth planet doesn't
seem any closer than it was when Goldin took over. While NASA has
become a well-run government bureaucracy, its modest Goldin-era
goals of building an orbiting lab, bringing mars rocks to earth
and scouring comets and asteroids for clues about the solar system's
origins hardly stir the heart.
During his
time at the helm, Goldin gave NASA some sense of purpose during
what history will recall as an introspective era of when missing
interns and illiterate wife-killing football players made the biggest
headlines. Today, America needs more than that. The Apollo program
demonstrated that a liberal, capitalist society could do just as
well as a totalitarian Communist one when it came to achieving vast
national goals. Today, a commitment to space exploration highlights
the most important differences between the United States and the
terrorists who seek to destroy it. Islamic terrorists believe that
their narrow teachings provide answers to all questions and seek
to annihilate anyone who disagrees. They despise frontiers of all
kinds as much as they hate freedom itself. Communists, while contemptuous
of liberal freedoms, at least shared an ideological commitment to
human progress. Space offers an immense frontier: successful exploration
will yield immense mineral wealth, spur enormous advances in technology
and, in time, unlock the secret of mankind's origin. Space exploration
demonstrates the difference between the future Americans envision
and the one its enemies seek to impose.
Goldin provided
clearheaded, competent management but did little to produce dramatic
change or set major objectives. While Congress would do well to
fund some modest budget increases — particularly for hard science
— nobody suggests that NASA go back to the free-flowing money
spigot of the mid-1960s. President Bush and his next NASA administrator
should select one difficult-but-not-impossible goal and commit both
the space agency and nation to realizing it. Bush should find a
new NASA administrator with Dan Goldin's bureaucratic acumen and
a compelling vision that will awaken Americans' frontier spirit.
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