Jim Bridenstine leaves Artemis program ‘in good shape’ for Biden’s NASA

Jim Bridenstine officially resigns from his role as NASA administrator at 12:00 ET today. During his time at the agency, the former Oklahoma congressman and Naval pilot used his political chops to lift dual support for the Trump administration’s Artemis program, the agency’s cornerstone initiative to keep people on the moon by 2024 ended up – a deadline that is generally considered almost impossible to meet.

Pending the acceptance of President Joe Biden and the Senate after Democratic rule, Bridenstine, a Republican, spent his last days as administrator administering a final push for the Artemis program, a farewell to withhold the program of possible cancellation. Last week, he met with top Democrats, including Senator Patrick Leahy, who is expected to become the second highest-ranking official in the Senate once Biden takes office.

“We have done everything in our power to build the consensus needed for the long-term sustainable program,” Bridenstine said. The edge in an interview before you leave. “I think just as hard as we have worked for the last three years to build the consensus, I think we are in good shape.”

The $ 1 million Artemis program will face a new administration that focuses on other priorities, including the fight against the coronavirus pandemic and tackling climate change.

Congress has already set aside the idea of ​​a 2024 deadline to land humans on the Moon: of the $ 3.3 billion that NASA said the budget for 2024 should remain on track for next year, the Congress came up with $ 850 million. But Bridenstine still sees it as a victory: during a pandemic, NASA’s budget is billions more than it was when he took office.

The $ 850 million for NASA is the first time Congress has agreed to fund a human lunar lander since the Apollo program. “This is remarkable,” Casey Dreier, senior adviser in space at The Planetary Society, said in an interview. “It did not get that far during the constellation program, the last time we tried to go to the moon.”

But it also shows that NASA “could not successfully present the case to Congress as to why they need the money now and why they needed it for 2024,” Dreier said.

On Wednesday, Bridenstine tweeted one last message as an administrator in a three-minute emotional video, stressing that “eliminating division” is the key to enabling Artemis long-term success and welcoming the next administrator who will inherit the program.

‘With that I say goodbye. And I’ll tell you when you join a new team, they’ll give you all your support. “Because they need it, they deserve it, and of course, what we are trying to do is cross not only multiple administrations, but also multi-decades and multigenerational ones,” he said.

Steve Jurczyk, NASA’s former number two under Bridenstine, took on the role of acting administrator that afternoon when Biden was sworn in.

President Biden is expected to elect a woman to fill the NASA administrative role, which has only been occupied by men since the agency’s inception in 1958. His transition team for NASA, led by the director of the National Air and Space Museum, Ellen Stofan, spent more than a month studying the agencies’ top programs and interviewing agency staff, but it did not disclose any tips on where Biden is not officially going to stand on issues in space.

Bridenstine tells The edge he plans to take a job in his home state of Oklahoma, but does not want to specify what the job will be. Asked if he wanted to run for office again, he said: “Oh no no no. No. I will tell you, I do not want to stand for election.”

‘They say never say never, but it will take something important to get me back into politics. I’ve never been so lucky not to be in politics. ”

In the Twitter video, where he choked on choking by thanking NASA employees, Bridenstine ends with a simple message: ‘Go get them. Go to NASA. Ad astra. ”