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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > May > 04 > Entry
Editorial: NASA can’t blow off Air Force or Dayton
Sweet.
That would have described the situation if Gen. Lester Lyles had stayed in the running to head NASA and had been tapped by President Barack Obama.
Last week, though, Gen. Lyles, who formerly was commander of the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, took his name out of contention.
He said he would take too big of a financial hit to come out of retirement and go back into public service. He was widely reported to be on a short list of possibly just four people being considered. Gen. Lyles has been leading a major study on the country’s future in space.
A board member of DPL Inc., Gen. Lyles knows Wright-Patterson and the Dayton community well. With the Defense Department pushing to move the Air Force more into the realm of space, having someone in the highest place at NASA who is intimately familiar with Wright-Patterson would have been a great connection to have.
Moreover, there’s also this:
NASA is retiring its three space shuttles. Dayton’s National Museum of the U.S. Air Force wants one. How great would it have been to have a former Air Force guy, who had spent time here, running that agency as it decides where those spacecraft will go?
If only the stars had aligned.
The competition to get one of the coveted three-winged space vehicles is intense. A reported 20 museums and educational institutions are making pitches. The Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum in Washington is unquestionably going to get Discovery; that leaves just two.
As appropriate as that decision is, the Air Force is arguing that it’s also a no-brainer to put Atlantis here, because that shuttle carried military payloads.
The competition includes the Museum of Flight in Seattle, the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The shuttles are scheduled to be retired in 2010. Once that happens, NASA wants them moved to places where they’ll be accessible to the public. The hitch is that the receiver institutions must have $42 million to pay for the delivery, decontamination, restoration and so on.
The Air Force Museum thinks the Air Force can get a shuttle to Dayton as cheaply as anyone can move them, and it has the experts who will ultimately be called on to help direct efforts to put the spacecraft on display, wherever they go.
But merit will be only part of the consideration. Politics always counts for something, and members of Congress are going to bat for their communities. (U.S. Rep. Mike Turner has gotten agreement from all of Ohio’s congressional representatives to back the Air Force Museum’s bid.)
Some members of Congress are all over President Obama for not having named a NASA administrator yet (like he hasn’t had other things to do). Fourteen members of the House of Representatives from Florida, Alabama, Texas and California — all of which have NASA facilities — have sent a letter saying the president needs to make a choice.
Florida lawmakers are especially trained on the decision. That state could lose 3,500 jobs associated with the Kennedy Center because of the five-year gap between the shuttle retirement and when the space agency puts up its next generation of manned rockets.
But the attention goes beyond parochialism. NASA is at a crossroads about where it’s going to go and how it will get there. When the shuttles stop flying, for instance, this country will be dependent for five years on Russia for access to the International Space Station.
The point is: The next NASA administrator will have big issues on his or her plate.
That raises the possibility that the most connected people in Congress may need to be appeased on the least weighty matters — say, with a space shuttle.
To assure that it gets what it deserves, the Air Force Museum has to be aggressive in raising money and be creative about how it will pay to get a shuttle on view.
Partnerships — a hallmark of Dayton — are the only way it can do that.
Meanwhile, the politicians have to keep their eye on who’s buttonholing the new person after the NASA administrator is named.
And the Air Force has to keep fighting the fight.
One of the shuttles belongs to that service — and here in Dayton.
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