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...
