"There are lots of NASA administrators who have come from other areas without a background in space," he said. "You want a guy who is a leader and can manage a large organization."
Wow, guess this lends weight to talk of Obama merging the DoD and NASA space programs. Still seems like a strange choice, though. Maybe the idea to bring in someone from outside NASA's internal politics, someone who doesn't have any pet projects and might actually be able to take an unbiased look at the system?
(Of course, the cynical side of me leaps immediately to doing a friend a favor where he "can't do much harm", but I tend not to listen to him anyway.)
I just hope he remembers the classic Airforce project management system, what the Airforce developed for Blue Gemini, MOL and Dynasoar. This one is still taught here as best practise, though even the Airforce got politically forced to drop it.