Well, the theories for the Jump Drive technology from BattleTech is supposed to be published in 2018.
But we are a bit late. The Crippen space station, which is roughly similar to the ISS in time and design, was meant to be finished in 2007 and have small construction platforms for building spacecraft.
Wow, I wonder if Bob Crippen is cool with the idea that BTech historians thought he would be gone by 2007?
As for a NASA administrator, saying he has to be an astronaut is like saying he has to be an Orbinaut. Flying a space shuttle has zero to do with running a government agency. If anything, it would make it easier for him to get in the way of his underlings and interfere with their work on manned vehicles, and he may have a tendency to fuss over manned spaceflight at the exclusion of the parts of NASA which are not a total waste of money, such as robotic exploration and aeronautical research.
NASA has an astronaut office, and the astronauts themselves are involved in the design and development of manned spaceflight. That's what they're paid for, to be experts in manned spaceflight. If the implication is that a non-astronaut would make dangerous decisions regarding manned flights, there are multiple layers of managment to guide his decisions.