Biden picks former senator who flew in space to lead NASA
President Joe Biden has chosen a former senator from Florida who flew on the space shuttle just days before the Challenger launch accident to lead NASA.
Biden on Friday announced his intent to nominate Bill Nelson as the space agency’s administrator.
Nelson, 78, grew up near Cape Canaveral and was serving as a Democratic congressman when he launched aboard space shuttle Columbia in January 1986. His commander was Charles Bolden Jr., who later served as NASA administrator under President Barack Obama — at Nelson’s urging.
So this is payback for his support to Obama.
Nelson is 78 years old.
Can we please not have and more senile boomers in our Federal government.
The closest Nelson should be to a NASA facility is in The Villages drinking Metamucil and pretending it’s Tang.
Why are we putting NASA in the liver spotted hands of a career bureaucrat swamp creature who was elected the first time more than a decade before I was born?
Elon Musk wants to build condos on Mars. He should be in charge of NASA. Or at least someone of his age and vision.
Nope, Biden is going to kill NASA too, just to spite the legacy of Trump.
As the socialists slowly destroy America, I would guess that going forward, NASA will become increasingly irrelevant and people like Musk will eventually pull operations out of America completely. He’ll have SpaceX on Mars in a decade, Democrats will have Americans in breadlines.
“Wanted Fan” (from Fallen Angels, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn):
Wanted fan in Luna City, wanted fan on Dune and Down,
Wanted fan at Ophiuchus, wanted fan in Dydeetown.
All across the sky they want me, am I flattered? Yes I am!
If I could just reach orbit, then I’d be a wanted fan.
Wanted fan for mining coal and wanted fan for drilling oil,
I went very fast through Portland, hunted hard like Gully Foyle.
Built reactors in Seattle against every man’s advice,
Couldn’t do that in Alaska, Fonda says it isn’t nice.
Wanted fan for plain sedition, like the singing of this tune.
If NASA hadn’t failed us we’d have cities on the moon.
If it weren’t for f***ing NASA we’d at least have walked on Mars.
And if I can’t make orbit, then I’ll never reach the stars.
Nader’s Raiders want my freedom, OSHA wants my scalp and hair,
If I’m wanted in Wisconsin, be damned sure I won’t be there!
If the E-P-A still wants me, I’ll avoid them if I can.
They’re tearing down the cities, so I’ll be a wanted fan!
Wanted fan on Chthon and Sparta and the Hub’s ten million stars,
Wanted fan for singing silly in a thousand spaceport bars.
If it’s what we really want, we’ll build a starship when we can;
If I could just make orbit then I’d be a wanted fan.
Wanted fan for building spacecraft, wanted fan for dipping air,
Sending microwave transmissions, building habitats up there.
Oh the glacier got us last time, next time we’ll try to land!
And when the Ice is conquered, it’ll be by wanted fans.
And when the stars are conquered, it’ll be by wanted fans!
There may be breadlines but don’t count on any bread.
Nelson is one of the guys behind the enormous fustercluck program called the SLS – Space Launch System. It’s simply a spending program to distribute money to the right political suck-ups and keep jobs going in a few districts.
They actually had a successful test firing yesterday. They may have stumbled into a design for launch vehicle that can sometimes work.
My favorite factoid. It’s a disposable rocket that uses four of the old Space Shuttle Main Engines. These are going to cost $149 million EACH. A bit under $600 million per flight to be thrown away after one use. The Raptor engine that SpaceX is putting on their new, reusable, Starship has 80% of the thrust and costs less than $1 million. The manufacturing cost goal for the SpaceX engines is $250,000. That’s 80% of the performance for 0.7% of the price. At the worst price.
I’m still trying to figure what the fuck Nelson ever did to get the darling reputation he has in certain circles. Okay, he was an astronaut. He and a few hundred others, many of which are probably better human beings (Johnny Kim comes to mind).
He was fucking useless as a senator in Florida outside of making appearances with the stump of a sheriff Demings whenever there was a chance to push for gun control. Elon’s gonna have timeshares built on Olympus Mons before Nelson figures out where his office is. I’m glad one of my childhood heroes (Gene Kranz) is still with us but I’m so sorry that he has to see what his once proud organization has become.
Good grief, I wish I could check my ethics and morals long enough to fail upwards into a few million and then ride off into the sunset never to be heard from again.
He only became an astronaut after blackmailing NASA. So he was basically a useless space tourist, who flew on our dime.
One of the best days for Florida was when Scott replaced him. Heck, it would have been a good day for Florida if Crist had replaced him.
I’m sitting through a course about decision making right now (at work) which had as one of its components a paper about the Columbia shuttle disaster. That’s the one that broke up during re-entry, having been damaged by falling foam during launch.
The level of institutional incompetence revealed in that (short, 30-ish pages) paper is mindboggling, far worse than I had been aware of even having had some understanding of the Challenger disaster. There is a term that’s relevant, “acceptance of deviance” which was done, in wholesale quantities, by NASA at many different levels of management. Not that they are the only one; Boeing is clearly another organization suffering badly from this, and we’ve seen a number of examples of that, some leading to fatal crashes, some leading “merely” to mission failures (their recent launch attempts foiled by timekeeping incompetence) or major non-fatal problems (the 787 battery misdesign).
Keeping NASA and Boeing away from space activities would be a very good thing. As a minimum, away from manned missions; it’s possible that NASA is stil capable of flying the good stuff that JPL puts together.
Perhaps Zhou Bai Den thought he was appointing former astronaut Tony Nelson to head NASA.
Or, perhaps Zhou’s son, Hon Tar Bai Dan, was enamored of Jeannie, and hoped to “get next to” her.
Hey you little fuck. First, most of us boomers ain’t senile you little CSPOS. And second, many of us don’t want anything to do with being in charge of shit at this point except my pool chair, whiskey, cigar, and hot wife….Millie/Wokie.
He said “senile boomer”, not “all boomers are senile”. You should work on your reading comprehension before you insult people. He talked about the person, not the group.
“Can we please not have and more senile boomers in our Federal government.”
Bill Nelson was born in 1942. He is too old to be a boomer.
Not by birth, no – he missed that by 3 years.
But that makes it even worse.
It’s management by fogies such as Nelson that has kept NASA from doing anything more than forgettably playing around in low-earth orbit stuff for the past 40 years.