Major General Jonathan S. Gration may become the new head of NASA

This story just came out today and you can see there's already a great deal of discussion below the article on Space.com. This new administrator would have no close personal ties to the White House, unlike a number of others. Spaceref.com has the following:

The last time NASA had an Administrator with close personal ties to the White House, (Sean O'Keefe), NASA got the Vision for Space Exploration. O'Keefe's successor had zero White House credentials or political savvy and NASA's accumulated political capital began to evaporate - and with it support for the resources and attention that the agency needed. If indeed Gen. Gration does turn out to be the nominee, and the next NASA Administrator is a close confidant of the President.

I still don't know anything about him besides his resume here, but in general Obama has made some pretty stellar picks for his administration (besides Sanjay Gupta) so I'm going to assume this is a good pick until shown otherwise. On the space.com thread some are opposed to the idea of a person from the military heading NASA but I haven't seen anything yet that just screams bad choice.

Here's a video from September with a speech by Gration:



Hm, the first words he spoke were Swahili. Interesting.