Longest-Serving NASA Chief to Quit

Daniel S. Goldin, who left controversy in his wake as he streamlined the nation’s space program, announced Wednesday that he will step down next month as NASA administrator.

Goldin, 61, supervised NASA’s transition from the agency responsible for the space race with the former Soviet Union to the construction, with Russian help, of the international space station.

No successor has been announced for Goldin, a mechanical engineer. Former aerospace executive A. Thomas Young and Joseph H. Rothenberg, associate administrator in charge of NASA’s staffed spaceflights, are among several names that have been mentioned for the job.

Goldin, who was appointed by former President Bush in 1992, was NASA’s longest-serving administrator. A registered Democrat and one of the few Clinton administration officials kept on by President Bush, he will become a senior fellow at the Council on Competitiveness, a private research group in Washington.

Goldin pushed to focus NASA, which sent men to the moon in the 1960s, on smaller projects with less potential for huge cost overruns. He campaigned for more scientific expeditions and privatized portions of the space shuttle’s maintenance.

When he joined the agency, he worked to restore morale at NASA, which was still reeling from the 1986 Challenger rocket explosion that killed seven astronauts.

Goldin battled both congressional overseers and big aerospace contractors in trying to fulfill a political mandate to operate a U.S. space program “faster, better, cheaper.”

Congress threatened at least 15 times to trim or eliminate a NASA-backed space station. And scaling back big U.S. space explorations enraged aerospace executives and NASA employees alike.

“Goldin had an antagonistic relationship with the aerospace industry, which he felt wasn’t delivering value for money,” said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “But I think he fixed large elements of NASA, which [when he joined] seemed to be waiting for another Apollo” space program.

Goldin has noted that the average spacecraft cost $600 million and took eight years to build when he first arrived at NASA. Now, he says, one can be developed in five years for $200 million.

But the hard-charging engineer repelled some NASA employees with his brash style and cost-cutting ethic. Critics say Goldin has left the U.S. aerospace industry lagging behind Europe in the space launch business and feeling tremendous new competitive pressure in the commercial aircraft market.

Goldin’s efforts to reinvigorate NASA had checkered results.

In 1999, NASA lost two probes worth $280 million as they neared the surface of Mars. And cost overruns with the international space station have reached an estimated $4 billion, threatening scheduled safety upgrades for the U.S. space shuttle fleet.

“He was a great administrator and worked to establish a post-Cold War role for NASA in terms of cooperating with the Russians and developing better relations with the commercial space sector,” said John Pike, a space and defense analyst with Globalsecurity.org., a research group based in suburban Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, Pike added, Goldin took on “an immensely unappealing job to head an agency that was a low priority for the administration, with horrible cost overruns.”

Anyone thinking about following Goldin’s footsteps, he said, should be prepared for a job that “is all pain and no gain.”