NASA Transition Team to Recruit New Members
U.S President-elect Donald Trump is planning to add new members to the NASA transition team.
The new members will concentrate on commercial space issue as pushed by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who is also a strong Trump's supporter. Now the billionaire is Trump's advisor and Thiel raised a concern saying the current team focused too much on old-fashioned space projects.
Besides Thiel, Trump's other advisors, Newt Gingrich and Bob Walker (both are former Republican Congress members) are supporting commercial space programs.
On Tuesday, Charles Miller was chosen to lead the so-called NASA landing team. Miller is a former NASA official who advocated commercial space programs for years.
This appointment came as the answer of an ongoing rift in the space agency under Trump's presidency. Those who control the body want to maintain the existing conditions by working with government contractors such as Boeing, Orbital ATK, and Lockheed Martin, as well as focusing on the muxh-criticized Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft.
While commercial space advocates support commercial space projects and the operation of reusable spacecrafts. With Thiel under Trump, the idea of space commercialization will likely come true, Thiel is a close friend of Space X founder Elon Musk and Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. The latter also leads his own space program Blue Origin, as Motherboard reported.
Moreover, transition leaders are likely to appoint Alan Stern, leader of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and also a head scientist for World View, and Alan Lindenmoyer, a former head of NASA's commercial space taxi program, to fill the posts, people familiar with the matter told the media. Those names and some others are still being considered and it is possible to change the lineup. Both Stern and Lindenmoyer have an extensive experience in commercial space companies, as stated by Space news.
All the newly-anticipated nominees are in favor of the type of private-public partnerships as exhibited by Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Founders Fund (one of Thiel's companies), which was an early and influential investor in SpaceX.
Thiel, along with Musk and Bezos already had a meeting with Trump on December 14. Musk himself was included in the advisory group, the President's Strategic and Policy Forum.
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