Jim Bridenstine is leaving NASA. How should we assess his 30-month tenure?

Enlarge / NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine testifies before a US Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee on September 30, 2020. (credit: Nicholas Kamm-Pool/Getty Images)

The first thing to know about James Frederick Bridenstine, who has served as NASA's administrator for a little more than 30 months, is that he was not staying on as the space agency's leader regardless of the presidential election results.

Not that he wants out of the job. Bridenstine has relished the challenge of leading NASA through troubling times and overcoming initial concerns about his partisanship to lead NASA-all of NASA-through the turbulent years of the Trump administration. Nor is it because he has failed. Bridenstine has largely succeeded in pushing the agency forward and will leave it better than he found it.

But the reality is that a Democratic president was never going to keep Bridenstine, who has a political rather than a technical background, on as administrator. And he knew this. He said as much this week, telling Aviation Week that a new president would probably want someone else, someone fully trusted. After all, he had previously introduced legislation to remove Earth science from NASA's mission statement, and he criticized same-sex marriages. Bridenstine will resign his position on January 20.

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