Nasa: breach of ethical protocols led to executive’s resignation – report
In May, against the excitement of America’s imminent return to human spaceflight, the abrupt resignation of a senior Nasa executive was barely a sideshow.
Doug Loverro’s decision to stand down after fewer than seven months as the US space agency’s head of human spaceflight raised eyebrows, but ultimately had no impact on the resumption of crewed flights after a nine-year hiatus, via a SpaceX launch.
Now, the consequence of the “mistake” Loverro admitted at the time, which led to his resignation but which he did not describe, have been revealed.
The respected former Pentagon official breached ethical and procedural protocols by conducting private discussions with Boeing while the beleaguered aerospace giant was bidding for a lucrative Nasa contract to build spacecraft capable of returning humans to the moon.
According to the Washington Post, following Loverro’s unauthorised contact with company officials, Boeing attempted to amend its proposal for a human-rated lunar lander after the deadline for submission.
That raised suspicion among Nasa management, the newspaper said, and prompted an investigation by the agency’s office of the inspector general.
In the end, managers of Nasa’s Artemis programme, charged with fulfilling Donald Trump’s ambitious timetable for a first human moon landing since 1972, were unimpressed by
Boeing’s proposal.
They awarded contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Elon Musk’s SpaceX; Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; and Dynetics, an Alabama company developing Nasa’s next-generation heavy-lift space launch system (SLS) in partnership with Boeing.
Although the matter is reportedly considered closed at Nasa, it has the potential to cause more trouble for Boeing as it attempts to get its crewed spaceflight ambitions back on track after the failed test flight of its Starliner capsule in December.
Investigators are looking to see if any federal regulations were broken, the Post said.
Jim Bridenstine, the Nasa administrator, named Kathy Lueders, a 28year agency veteran, as Loverro’s successor as head of its human exploration and operations directorate.
The first woman to fill the role spent five years in charge of Nasa’s commercial crew programme, which oversaw the rival SpaceX and Boeing private contracts.
“Kathy gives us the extraordinary experience and passion we need to continue to move forward with Artemis and our goal of landing the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024,” Bridenstine said.
Trump has shown confused thinking about Nasa’s planned return to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era, which he touted strongly in March 2019.
By June of last year the president was tweeting at Nasa a claim that the moon was part of Mars and berating the space agency for talking about returning there. But in February of this year he proposed increasing Nasa’s budget by 12%, to enable a lunar mission.