September 22, 2008
President Córdova pays tribute to former NASA administrator Goldin
Good morning. We are about to unveil an extraordinary portrait. Let me rephrase that: We are about to unveil the portrait of an extraordinary man. In truth, it's some of both, because the artist has worked closely with the subject to capture a life, a passion - a strategic plan on canvas - with mission, vision, and goals - it's all there, history and the future - captured in Alan Chinchar's portrait of NASA's ninth administrator Dan Goldin.And what a history! Dan Goldin recruited me to NASA as his chief scientist on the eve of one of his earliest - and most consequential - decisions: to launch a Shuttle mission to attempt to fix the impaired optics of the Hubble Space Telescope. That mission, in December of 1993, is a milestone in the history of knowledge because with new optics the telescope returned images of cosmic phenomena with unprecedented clarity, images that ultimately contributed to new revelations about the origins of galaxies, the birth and death of stars, and the mass-energy content of the universe.
Dan was (is) captivated by science. He asked me to bring scientists to NASA HQ to visit with him so that he could hear about what was important to understand, to investigate. Many Nobel Prize winners and national academy members and leaders in the space science communities visited, and Dan engaged with them and enjoyed their passion. It was during one of those meetings that he reached for a photo on his wall of the Earth taken from one of the Apollo spacecraft, placed it in front of the group, and said that NASA's goal should be to image a life-sustaining planet orbiting another Sun with a similar clarity. He said that image would change our understanding of the evolution of planets and life.
Dan started a lecture series that I organized for him. It brought luminous thinkers to NASA from all fields of knowledge to identify the fundamental questions that NASA could hope to address through its mission of exploration. This series, which often involved two or three people on the podium arguing various perspectives on these fundamental questions, brought to NASA HQ people like Roger Penrose talking about the definition of consciousness, and Leslie Orgel talking about the definition of life and how we might recognize it remotely.
The theme "follow the water" grew from one of these venues: a group of scientists described how the search for life elsewhere meant following the lifeline - water. Look for water elsewhere in the solar system to find a possibility for life.
We learned firsthand about new discoveries of exotic life in extreme locations on Earth and could appreciate that life could exist elsewhere in extreme conditions. From this and many discussions with scientists about where the state of the art was in detecting extrasolar planets and the chemical signatures of life, Dan evolved a commitment to astrobiology - a field that posed the fundamental question: Does life exist beyond Earth? We finally had the technical tools to attempt to address this seriously. Dan nourished practitioners in this field with his personal enthusiasm. The field blossomed with infusion of federal funding and establishment of new university centers of activity and proposals for funding ways to address this challenge.
Dan championed science in every facet of the agency's activities. He asked Jack Daly to head up a strategic planning process for the five main areas of NASA; science was an integrating thread across this plan. Dan wanted to maximize the scientific return of the Space Station and asked me to coordinate an all-agency program to utilize the Station most effectively for science. He wanted science to be peer-reviewed for maximum quality. He enthusiastically supported science from the Earth observing satellites, and tried to extract maximum science efficiently from the planetary probes, especially the Mars probes. He advocated smaller, faster missions for a higher rate of scientific return.
Dan believed that science should be the driver for NASA's missions, and he was in the driver's seat: It was Dan who was both administrator and chief scientist.
In an era of global mistrust, Dan saw the assets of potential international partners clearly and involved them to leverage the return from space missions. It wasn't just about dollars, but about marrying distinctive strengths and achieving more through partnership than the U.S. could do alone.
Dan had a mantra: he said, "We will search for life, single cell or higher, carbon-based or other." Dan himself is, arguably, not carbon-based. Otherwise, how could he have served three presidential administrations? Looking back, Dan, we can only marvel at your energy, your clear-sightedness, and your persistence of vision. You have all of our admiration for your leadership of NASA for nearly a decade.
I count my experience working for you at NASA as one of the most important in my development as a carbon-based being. I - all of us - are grateful to you for inspiring a nation to reach for the stars!
To the News Service home page