States Bid To Host A Revamped NASA Headquarters

Reference: Found here

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.

"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.

"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."