Will Trump pick an “agent of change” or an insider to lead NASA?

Ars Technica » Scientific Method 2016-11-18

Enlarge / Vice President-elect Mike Pence arrives at Trump Tower on November 15, 2016. He will likely have the final say on Trump's space policy decisions. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States a little more than a week ago, and in that time, a mad scramble has ensued within the US aerospace community to identify candidates to become the next NASA administrator. What might those picks mean for the future of the nation's civil space policy and human spaceflight program? This parlor game has become doubly difficult in the wake of news Wednesday that Vice President-elect Mike Pence gutted the existing transition teams and removed lobbyists from those positions.

After multiple discussions with insiders, here's the state of play as best as Ars can understand it as of Thursday morning. Following the lobbyist purge, Trump's space policy team is being led by Mark Albrecht, a long-time Republican space policy adviser and former executive secretary of the National Space Council, which last existed in 1992. This influential council served as a bridge between the nation's civil and military space activities, and one of Trump's clearly defined goals is to reinstate the council, which Pence would likely head.

Aside from Pence and Albrecht, the other key player in Trump's transition team with regard to space policy is one of its six vice chairs, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who would likely seek to shake things up at the space agency. Perhaps the biggest question facing NASA and space policy, then, is whether Trump will go for an outsider's space policy in the mode of Gingrich, which seems consistent with the stated desire to "drain the swamp," or whether he will accede to the pressures of big business and inertia.

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