OMB Deputy Director Will Head NASA

Baldrson writes: "UPI reports "President George W. Bush has selected Sean O'Keefe, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, to head NASA." In his prior position, Dr. O'Keefe reviewed and gave testimony before Congress, critical of the budgetary overruns of NASA's International Space Station." (Of course, the ISS isn't all NASA's.)

Comments

Re:At last, someone with financial knowledge

[Fenris2001]

but as a taxpayer fed up with seeing my dollars flushed down NASAs ever increasing budget black hole

Please, I'm tired of hearing this same BS every time /. posts a NASA-related story. NASA's budget request for FY2002 is about 14.5 billion dollars (from NASA's CFO). Compare this with a total federal budget of almost 2 trillion dollars (from the Office of Management and Budget ).

NASA's "budget black hole" is less than one percent of the amount your government spends. We taxpayers spend more money on farm subsidies than space exploration.

Re:At last, someone with financial knowledge

[Man of E]

I seriously doubt someone with financial knowledge is the solution to "disasters like the Hubble distorted lens, and the Mars lander crash".

On the other hand, I think what you refer to as "NASAs ever increasing budget black hole" is a good place for him to make a difference. Every time someone posts a NASA related story on /. there are hordes of replies about the horridly expensive monkey-wrenches and toilet plungers that NASA spends its money on. I don't know how much of that is true, but there's bound to be some grain of truth to it. So it might not necessarily be this guy's financial knowledge that makes a difference, but simply a commonsense money-saving mindset. Perhaps he can learn from team that built the budget satellite that was posted here a few days ago.
Still, don't forget he is a government official.

Re:Well, not ALL of it...

[xyzzy]

Ok, wiseass :-)

Check out the following PDF:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/assembly/com po nent_view.pdf

You will note that there are on the order of 35 modules. All but 8 of them are US or Russian (78%). The 8 remaining are among the smallest physical modules in the station -- two arms, two labs, two "logistics modules" and some miscellaney.

I would be willing to guess that my numbers are largely correct by most any measurement you care to name: percent of work, percent of modules, percent of budget (which is what the article was talking about -- remember, it's only us and the Russians actually sticking that stuff up there).

It's worth noting that the other nations taking part in the ISS are Japan, Brazil, Canada, and the EU and Italy. Since Italy is part of the EU, I'm not sure why the distinction here, but there you go. Japan is the 3rd biggest contributor, at 4 modules.