THE resignation of NASA chief Dan Goldin will leave his as yet unnamed
successor with a budgetary mess dominated by huge cost overruns on the
International Space Station.
Goldin resigned on 17 October after serving as NASA Administrator for more
than nine years, a record period. He earned praise for revitalising a space
agency demoralised by a series of failures including the Challenger explosion
and the flawed mirror in the Hubble Space Telescope. Yet the tighter budgets
that flowed from his “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy for building more
spacecraft at lower cost have created growing frustration.
In 1997, the first…
