President Obama’s plan to refocus NASA has a lot of people seeing red, not least of whom is retired NASA engineer Homer Hickam, author of the memoir “Rocket Boys” that was the subject of the film October Sky.
Last week, he wrote directly to NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and OSTP Director John Holdren demanding that they resign. He repeated the demand in a letter to Bart Gordon, Chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology.
“Garver and Holdren are political activists and gadflys who have no business making serious space policy. They should leave,” he wrote.
The letter to Gordon, which you can read on Hickam’s blog, states that although he supports the development of commercial spaceflight, he’s opposes the shutdown of the Constellation program, which is aimed at returning humans to the moon.
“The manner in which the end of Constellation was announced represents a failure of basic Management 101 principles. A good manager never shuts down a large program without having a sound plan on what to do next. Instead, what we got from Mrs. Garver and Dr. Holdren was whimsical, airy drivel without any worthy NASA goal,” he wrote.
Apparently, Garver and Holdren should resign because they are principal architects of the plan. He did not call for the resignation of NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.
Hickam has also posted a short story on his blog set in the near future in which China has a moon base and the United States has lagged behind.