NASA Administrator Charles Bolden delivered the keynote speech at the Goddard Memorial Symposium on March 20, 2013. Jeff Foust, purveyor of the Space Politics blog, asked if he agreed with the conclusions of the National Research Council that there was no support for the asteroid mission mandated by President Obama and that there was no consensus about what America’s space goals are.
According to a March 21, 2013 post in Space Politics, Bolden’s one word answer to the question was, “No.”
Bolden did acknowledge that the meager budgets that NASA is being given have proved to be a challenge. He stated that the situation would never change, so that the space agency would have to deal with doing much with few resources by “being smarter.”
The National Research Council report also stated that NASA was being asked to do too much with too little and offered a number of options for how to deal with that situation. These included increasing NASA’s budget, cutting the cost of NASA’s programs, soliciting international and commercial partnerships, and scaling back NASA’s programs. Thus far it is unclear that NASA or the Obama administration is prepared to pursue any of the four options.
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