Steve Yurchik
NASA is undergoing personnel and administrative changes – the former head, Jim Bridenstine, has left his post, but a successor has not yet been appointed. This is one of the duties of the newly elected President Biden, but he still has too many other, more urgent things to do. Therefore, the space agency was temporarily headed by Steve Yurchik, who said that he would manage it, in fact, from the basement of his own house.
Steve Yurchik is a very competent administrator, he has been an assistant director of NASA since 2018 and knows his business. Moving the office to the basement is both a forced and partly a demonstration measure. With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, NASA had to close its offices and laboratories, sending some employees on vacation, and transferring others to remote operation. Specialists from the Curiosity rover team coped with the task and controlled the device at a distance of tens of millions of km from their homes. Now it's time for NASA's top management to show that they can work in non-standard conditions – in particular, directly from their own home. By the way, Yurchik is known for progressive views, for example, he prefers to get to work on an environmentally friendly electric train, instead of standing idle on his car in traffic jams.
