States bid to host a revamped NASA headquarters

WASHINGTON — More states are lining up in a bid to host NASA’s headquarters, but the prize they seek may turn out to be smaller than they expect.

On April 16, members of the Texas congressional delegation sent a letter to President Trump requesting that he move NASA’s headquarters from its current location in Washington to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“For NASA to return to its core mission of excellence in exploration, its headquarters should be located at a place where NASA’s most critical missions are and where transformational leadership from the ground up can be provided,” the letter, signed by 27 members, stated. “We write to urge you to use this opportunity to reinvigorate our national space agency and move NASA’s headquarters from Washington, D.C. to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas.”

Texas is not alone in efforts to lure NASA’s headquarters. Florida lawmakers have expressed an interest for months in moving the headquarters to the Kennedy Space Center, including a bill introduced in March directing NASA to move its headquarters to the center within a year of enactment. Ohio officials are also lobbying for moving the headquarters to the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

The interest in NASA Headquarters is driven in part by the upcoming end of the lease of its current headquarters building in Washington, set to expire in 2028. NASA started several months ago looking for alternative buildings, but remaining in the greater Washington area.

The new Trump administration and its quest to cut costs has led to new interest in moving the headquarters out of Washington entirely. However, that may not mean moving the entire current headquarters, with a staff of about 2,500, to Florida, Ohio or Texas. Agency sources say NASA is looking at ways to spread out functions currently at headquarters to various field centers.

“One of the executive orders requires us to look at our agency organization and all of its components and see if there’s some optimization or some efficiencies that might be gained by either combining or relocating to more cost-efficient areas,” Janet Petro, NASA’s acting administrator, said in an on-stage fireside chat at the Space Symposium April 8.

She said NASA was looking at how the agency is organized to see what could be moved from Washington. “We’re taking a look at where those functions could be relocated.”

Even if headquarters is reorganized, Petro envisioned that the agency would retain a presence in Washington. “I would always envision that the office of the administrator would always be in D.C.,” she said, “along with some key functions like [legislative] affairs, maybe the general counsel, some communications staff, et cetera. I think that would be beneficial to have that, as a minimum, in D.C.”

Any decision would be made after the expected confirmation of Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator. She noted in a separate interview April 7 that she was preparing a “workforce optimization” plan that would include options for Isaacman to consider once confirmed by the Senate.

“In my mind,” she said at the Space Symposium fireside chat, “it would be a decision where Mr. Isaacman, our political stakeholders, the White House, they would all weigh in. I believe it would be a decision made at that level some time in the future.”

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