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Kathy Leuders Selected to Head Human Spaceflight at NASA

#1
Yazata Offline
And it's hard to imagine anyone who deserved the position more, after leading the Commercial Crew program from little more than an idea all the way to the DM-2 Crew Dragon's successful flight to the Space Station. Jim Bridenstine made an excellent choice in my opinion. Now Kathy's positioned to help lead NASA's return to the Moon and on to Mars.

It's likely good news for SpaceX too, since Kathy is very familiar with company and what it can do, and clearly favors NASA taking advantage of private initiative in spaceflight.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/kathy...ght-office
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#3
Yazata Offline
Big shakeup at nasa

HEOMD, the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate is being divided in two. One half will be an Operations Missions Directorate in charge of all the routine stuff like the ISS and commercial crew flights to low earth orbit. The other sexier half will be the Exploration Missions Directorate in charge of missions to the Moon and Mars and similar places.

Kathy Leuders is being shunted to off to head the Operations Directorate. This is widely interpreted as pay-back for her choosing SpaceX for the Human Landing System contract. This move takes her off Artemis entirely. This despite the fact that her whole background was guiding COTS (the commercial space station cargo flights) and Commercial Crew. She's all about development, not operations and scheduling. There's nobody at nasa who knows more than she does about working with private industry to develop new capabilities. But she's apparently perceived as too friendly with SpaceX and too supportive of Starship, which threatens to make SLS and Orion obsolete before they ever fly. Potentially dangerous to powers-that-be.

So it's widely believed that this is a politically motivated blow by the Biden administration (which hates Tesla and SpaceX not least because they are non-union), the old-space contractors and by the old guard at nasa, perhaps allied with Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin, to ensure that Kathy is taken out of the loop so that she doesn't have any more input into the Artemis Moon project. 

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-...for-future

https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1...7735740417

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/...t-program/

This move looks to me to be likely to ensure Artemis continues to be years behind schedule, tens of billions over budget, and built out of obsolescent technology. This move is seemingly designed to prevent nasa from pulling out of the slow-lane and doing anything exciting for many years to come.

It isn't a popular move in the space-nut community. It's unknown what impact this will have on the Artemis going forward, on the HLS award to SpaceX or to Blue's lawsuit against nasa. But it almost certainly won't be good.
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#4
Yazata Offline
More big news:

This is still unconfirmed, but CNBC is reporting that Kathy Lueders has been hired by SpaceX!

She will reportedly be working as "General Manager" for Starship at Starbase in Texas. She will report directly to Gwynne (SpaceX President and COO), who has been handling more of the day-to-day operations at SpaceX while Elon's attention is divided with Tesla, Twitter and Neuralink. Besides, Elon says he doesn't really enjoy management and sees himself more as an engineering visionary and big-picture guy. His official title at SpaceX is Chief Engineer (and company owner, of course). Elon is good at attracting and hiring top people and then delegating.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/15/elon-mus...eders.html

Kathy knows SpaceX inside and out, from her previous position heading up NASA's Commercial Crew Program. She was NASA's point person during the development of the Crew Dragon capsules and the man-rating of the Falcon 9 boosters.

Then Kathy was promoted to be NASA's Associate Administrator for HEOMD, the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. We know that this Directorate followed Starship development very closely and Kathy was ultimately the person who made the decision to award SpaceX the HLS contract.

That decision was very controversial in some quarters and Kathy faced a lot of push-back. When HEOMD was split into two new directorates, human exploration and operations, Kathy was taken off Artemis and given charge of the new Operations Directorate in charge of supply and crew-rotation flights to the ISS. That was widely perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a demotion.

Then Kathy retired from NASA. (Perhaps not for that reason, but just because it was time after 31 years there.) But she isn't out of the game and has followed the path to SpaceX blazed by the preceeding HEOMD Associate Administrator before her, Bill Gerstenmeier. (Who is now SpaceX VP for Build and Flight Reliability.)

Putting Kathy high up in the Starship management structure makes Starship leadership more of a known quantity in Washington DC and lends it credibility and gravitas. NASA and the whole human spaceflight community already knows Kathy.

Eric Berger says:

"SpaceX's hiring of Kathy Lueders to run Starbase will give government customers comfort and confidence that Starship is going to be a *real thing* around which they can base future plans and operations. It's a big deal. Big for future human spaceflight on Starship too."

https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1...8239656962

Along with Bill Gerstenmeier, Kathy Lueders' addition means that some of the biggest names in NASA have "trusted the force", crossed over and are now at SpaceX.
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