Waiting pays off. Some time ago I abandoned the prediction game naming the new NASA administrator, and yet it turns out one of the first names to appear ended up topping the pile. General Charlie Bolden, fighter pilot, astronaut, agreed to add another distinguishing mark to his already impressive career. And this one's a doozy, no less than pulling the American space program out of the steep-pitched dive it's currently taking towards catastrophic implosion. At his side Prospective Deputy Administrator Lori Garver offers to bring a fresh look under the hood when lots of hood-looking is exactly what is needed. Godspeed to both of them.

Maybe two better candidates could have been found (Wil Wheaton and Phil Plait?) but hopefully these two are sufficiently credentialed to get things moving. We've been rudderless for almost five months with important, difficult decisions demanding attention. Old ideas need to be shaken, new directions need to be taken, all that stuff (and right now Commodore Stone, right now). The confirmation process is lining up to be a donnybrook of economics and politics presented in bold extremes of space exploration.

Bolden and Garver will either mend NASA or watch it expire (another prediction) and the political media will be quick to ferret out details about immediate issues (ISS and shuttle extension) and longer-term issues (like Ares and Constellation), all probed in anticipation of testimony during the hearings. The afterglow of the successful flight of Atlantis to repair the Hubble Space Telescope should pay off during that process given properly timed images. If I can see the advantages of such a public relations coup, certainly the rocket scientists can. Of course should some Murphian uh-oh render the exercise ridiculous that would be an entirely different set of confirmation hearings, and not those I would like to see.

Meanwhile on the other end of the rockets, at long last a time to celebrate approaches! The second half of Expedition 20 has lifted off for their tour aboard a fully manned International Space Station. Flight Engineers Roman Romanenko, Frank De Winne and Robert Thirsk launched in their Soyuz TMA-15 early this morning to begin a six-month mission. This marks the beginning of six-person crew operations aboard ISS, and in a convenient if not gently coerced coincidence for the first time all five international partners (NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency) will orbit their common world at the same time. That was worth waiting for.


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