Ron Dittemore Going Home Soon

Having made plans shortly after he reached the 25-year milestone in NASA employ, Ron Dittemore, who now has 26 years at the agency, announced that he's ready to go fishing, as soon as NASA can get a new shuttle program chief.

He's leaving that position after four years, as the shuttle program again faces stiff criticism; but the decision to retire was made long before the Columbia mission took off. Dittemore told reporters, "My decision to leave the space shuttle program has been a very difficult one but is a decision I began struggling with long before the tragedy of the Columbia accident... The timing of my departure is based on when I believe will allow for the smoothest management transition possible as the pace of work to return the shuttle to flight begins to ramp out."

Always a class act, Dittemore was set to announce his retirement plans when Columbia came apart February 1 at the end of STS-107; but he held off. NASA already had enough problems. Even though his bosses knew he was planning retirement, "all personal plans had to take a back seat," he said yesterday morning.

Dittemore gave a human face to NASA in the early days of February, as he frankly answered reporters' questions, and discussed theories, out in the open. That act, surprising for a NASA official, helped the country deal with the tragedy; it also irked some in the traditionally-secretive NASA hierarchy, according to an AP report.

Nevertheless, and perhaps pointing to a new direction in NASA's PR mindset, the relatively new Administrator, Sean O'Keefe, praised Dittemore's "amazing job" at handling the crushing public information demands this late winter.

His bio says Dittemore joined NASA's shuttle program as a propulsion systems engineer in 1977. He later (1985) was selected to be a flight director, and supervised 11 missions. He became shuttle program director in 1999.

FMI: www.nasa.gov