Mar.18 -- Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming, discusses the impact of President Biden's clean agenda on Wyoming, wind energy and infrastructure. She speaks with Bloomberg's David Westin on "Bloomberg: Balance of Power."Tom Williams/GettyPresident Joe Biden is nominating his old friend Bill Nelson to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration , finally settling months of speculation.To some insiders, Nelson is a puzzling choice for a tough job.
. There’s no shortage of good candidates—among them, former space-shuttle pilot Pam Melroy and Ellen Stofan, director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.So it came as an unpleasant surprise to some when the reports rolled in that Biden was tapping Nelson. “I am disappointed that we won’t have more diverse leadership in the role,” Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in Indiana, told The Daily Beast.
did not respond to a request for comment.Setting aside their disappointment over the missed opportunity for female leadership, many space insiders conceded that Nelson should be an adequate administrator. “I’m sure Nelson will do a good job,” Matt Siegler, an astronomer with the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute, told The Daily Beast.Nelson is not a scientist. Rather, he’s a career politician who has consistently advocated for science through his decades in public service.
, ex-senator Nelson undoubtedly loves the space agency. “Nelson has been a longtime ’s riskiest, and arguably most important, initiatives—a long-delayed, massively over-budget effort to develop a huge new rocket booster capable of sending astronauts and their hardware to the moon… and eventually Mars.As a senator, Nelson was one of the main proponents of the Space Launch System, which takes old space-shuttle rockets and refurbishes and upgrades them for future missions.
facility in Mississippi were busy rigging up SLS rockets for a critical ground test.As
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