New NASA Head

The White House has nominated Michael Griffin, head of the space department of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, to be NASA’s 11th administrator. If confirmed, he will succeed Sean O’Keefe, who stepped down in February.

Griffin was NASA’s chief engineer and associate administrator of exploration under former President George H. W. Bush. Later he moved to Orbital Sciences Corp in Virginia, and then was president of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s nonprofit foundation that invests in companies developing technologies with national security applications (see Physics Today, January 2004, page 25 ).

Griffin appears to have bipartisan support and is expected to fly through his congressional confirmation hearings. Last year, he gave evidence to Congress in favor of the president’s Moon/Mars vision, but he questioned support for the International Space Station and the space shuttle. “Circling endlessly in lower Earth orbit does not qualify as a theme” for human space flight, he said.

Initial reactions from scientists are also positive—not least because Griffin comes from their ranks. He has a bachelor’s in physics, a PhD in aerospace engineering, and five master’s degrees. Louis Lanzerotti of Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs, who recently chaired a National Research Council committee on servicing the Hubble Space Telescope , says Griffin “is an ideal choice for NASA administrator at this critical juncture in the space agency’s life. He will not shirk from applying tough and thorough technical analyses to the knotty technical, organizational, and money problems of the agency and will, I firmly believe, support a vigorous science research program.”