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She’s braved rough seas and space walks. Can she weather climate change skeptics?
Federal Eye
She’s braved rough seas and space walks. Can she weather climate change skeptics?
By Lisa Rein December 15
@Reinlwapo
Kathryn Sullivan has helped U.S. Navy sailors navigate —literally —through rough seas as an oceanographer in the Navy Reserves. As a NASA astronaut, she’s walked in space, the first American woman to step outside a spacecraft, 140 miles above Earth.
These challenges are a world apart from what she’s now confronting in Washington as she leads an agency of federal scientists in the crosshairs of a powerful member of Congress.
But allies of the embattled chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say Sullivan’s experience as a working scientist exploring the upper atmosphere and the bottom of the sea and a Navy reserve officer for 18 years has prepared her well for the contact sport of Capitol Hill politics. They imprinted a military ethic of looking out for comrades and troops and a scientific one of sticking by the results of your research and never tailoring them to others’ political whims.
“As I learned in the Marine Corps and Kathy learned in the reserves, we have core values,” said NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr., who flew with her on two space missions, including one that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. ... “They’re not challenging a bureaucrat or a traditional political appointee,” Bolden said of Republicans in Congress. “They’re challenging a scientist. They just picked the wrong person.”
She’s braved rough seas and space walks. Can she weather climate change skeptics?
By Lisa Rein December 15
@Reinlwapo
Kathryn Sullivan has helped U.S. Navy sailors navigate —literally —through rough seas as an oceanographer in the Navy Reserves. As a NASA astronaut, she’s walked in space, the first American woman to step outside a spacecraft, 140 miles above Earth.
These challenges are a world apart from what she’s now confronting in Washington as she leads an agency of federal scientists in the crosshairs of a powerful member of Congress.
But allies of the embattled chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say Sullivan’s experience as a working scientist exploring the upper atmosphere and the bottom of the sea and a Navy reserve officer for 18 years has prepared her well for the contact sport of Capitol Hill politics. They imprinted a military ethic of looking out for comrades and troops and a scientific one of sticking by the results of your research and never tailoring them to others’ political whims.
“As I learned in the Marine Corps and Kathy learned in the reserves, we have core values,” said NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr., who flew with her on two space missions, including one that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. ... “They’re not challenging a bureaucrat or a traditional political appointee,” Bolden said of Republicans in Congress. “They’re challenging a scientist. They just picked the wrong person.”
