Whither the NASA Administrator?

While we wait for the Obama administration to name the next NASA chief (sound of millions of fingertips drumming impatiently on desktops), we might do well to recall that we've been here before. Piers Bizony points out in The Man Who Ran the Moon that the Kennedy administration ran through 17 candidates before James E. Webb took the job, replacing the first NASA head, Keith Glennan, in February 1961. Although Project Mercury was making test flights at the time, no astronauts had flown, and most Washington insiders viewed the NASA administrator position as a career path to obscurity.