Biden picks 78-year-old politician and former astronaut to take the reins at NASA

Joe Biden has chosen a veteran professional politician and occasional former astronaut, who will be 79 in September, to head the world's largest and most important space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. 

Bill Nelson, former senator and former Democratic congressman from Florida, who in 1986 became the second American politician to fly into space, is the person the new president has chosen to define and execute the strategic lines of the new space policy that the Biden Administration intends to follow. 

Previous decisions made by Biden suggested that he was going to place a woman at the head of NASA. The transition team he has appointed to carry out the changeover is headed by Ellen Stofan, former head of science at the Agency and current director of the prestigious Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. She is joined by seven others, four of whom are women with extensive experience and prestige in the field.

In the end, however, the president has decided on Bill Nelson, someone he knows from his many years as a senator on Capitol Hill. The two have been close friends since the early 2000s, when they both served in the Senate as Democrats and Nelson was on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and chairman of the Subcommittee on Space. 

The official nomination is now in the hands of the Senate, which must approve the President's proposal, having heard and analysed Bill Nelson's approach to running NASA. Confirmation for the post is not at risk, because Democrats and Republicans are tied in seats and Nelson enjoys great favour among his former colleagues in both parties.

He has the backing of, for example, the influential Republican senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, who has said he is "the best man to lead NASA ... because he understands the need to win the space race in the 21st century". Bill Nelson is considered one of the most knowledgeable and passionate supporters of NASA's programmes. Ten years ago he was the first to oppose Obama's decision to cancel the development of the Ares family of launchers for the Constellation project approved in 2004 by George W. Bush.

As he was unable to stop the drastic measure, he was the driving force behind the NASA bill of 2010, which succeeded in replacing the development of the Ares rockets with the so-called Space Launch System, or SLS, which is still awaiting its maiden flight. He is also a strong advocate of returning astronauts to the Moon, continuing robotic exploration of Mars, increasing programmes to clear outer space of space debris and monitoring the Earth's environment from orbit.

Of course, he is also in favour of continuing the initiative to develop SpaceX's privately managed Dragon 2, Boeing's CST-100 and other manned space capsules. In the very near future, both should be able to carry astronauts into space from US soil on a regular basis, an indispensable step for NASA to end its dependence on Russian spacecraft.

Born in 1942, Bill Nelson is a lawyer who has been in politics since 1972 when he was elected to the Florida House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party. His aspirations took him to the national stage seven years later when he won a seat in the U.S. Congress and in 2001 he jumped to the Senate as a representative of the state of Florida, a post he left in 2019.

On 12 January 1986, he became the second congressman to fly into space. It was on the STS-61-C mission of the space shuttle Columbia, one of whose seven crew members was Marine Corps fighter pilot Charles Bolden, who became his friend. Nelson had to go through several phases of the astronaut course to serve as a payload specialist and help deploy a satellite into orbit. Columbia returned to Earth on 18 January, just ten days before the Challenger shuttle disaster during its ascent flight, an accident that killed all seven astronauts in its cockpit.

Nelson was one of the politicians who most influenced then newly elected President Barack Obama in 2009 to choose retired Marine general, former astronaut and friend Charles Bolden as NASA administrator. He succeeded, and in July of that year Bolden became the first man of colour to head the organisation. He held the post uninterruptedly during Obama's two terms in office, both of which ended in January 2017.

With the arrival of Donald Trump to power in early 2017, Nelson was strongly opposed to Charles Bolden's replacement being Jim Bridenstine, a 42-year-old Republican congressman from Oklahoma. The main argument for opposing the appointment was that the candidate did not have sufficient experience to lead the agency because the head of NASA "should not be a politician" but a "consummate space professional, technically and scientifically competent". 

But he did not get his way, and the majority of the Senate supported the appointment of Bridenstine, who during his time at the helm of the agency has earned industry-wide acclaim. Despite Nelson's opposition, the new NASA chief considered him for a seat on the National Space Council, which was revitalised by Donald Trump. Bridenstine, moreover, has made it public that Nelson is an "excellent choice" because "he will be influential in getting solid budgets for NASA and, when needed, he can count on the help of his friend, President Joe Biden". NASA's fiscal year 2021 budget is $23.3 billion.

As NASA's second most important figure as deputy administrator, there is speculation that Pamela Melroy, 59, one of two female former space shuttle commanders who has already been chosen by Joe Biden to be part of the transition team for the Agency's transition.

Pamela Melroy joined NASA in 1995 and left in 2009 after accumulating 38 days in orbit after flying into space three times - in 2000, 2002 and 2007 - on missions to move structures for the construction of the International Space Station.

A retired Air Force Colonel and transport aircraft pilot, he has 6,000 hours of flight time in numerous aircraft, many of them in around 200 combat missions in the Iraq war. He has been a test pilot for the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, the most advanced and important US military heavy transport quad-jet. In civilian life, he has worked for the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation and the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).