O'Keefe to Resign as NASA Administrator

lommer writes "The Globe and Mail is carrying a story that NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe may be set to resign as early as Monday to begin a position as chancellor of Louisiana State University. On the one hand this could mean the indroduction of an administrator with an engineering background (O'Keefe is an MPA), on the other hand can we really expect NASA to effect serious changes and find a focused direction with leadership changes every 4 years?" An anonymous reader adds a link to this Florida Today article (also carried by Space.com) which says that "the retired director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency tops a list of five men that President Bush is considering to take over the space agency."

Comments

He won't be missed

[Ars-Fartsica]

Although he tacitly endorsed Bush's Mars "plan", you could tell he treated the entire thing as an impossible lark, all talk, no action.

Lets see what happened on his watch - Hubbel was left to fend for itself, more money was poured into the money pit of ISS, and the X Prize totally stole the show.

NASA - get a mission people care about that can be realistically funded, or sign over the next twenty years to Burt Rhutan and company.

Re:He won't be missed

[eclectro]

you could tell he treated the entire thing as an impossible lark, all talk, no action.

I did get the feeling when Bush announced his Mars plan that it was all O'Keefe could do to hold back the laughter.

I really wish that he would have said "It would mean more to the American people if we sent missions to the outer planets and Kupiter belt, had larger space telescopes, and more hard science missions like gavity B, and save the trillion dollars mars would take to pay down the debt." But then that would have meant that Nasa would have had a sense of direction too.

But he seems more like a "yes man" leaving a sinking ship, which seems to be the fashionable thing to do in Washington these days.

Slightly off-topic

[halftrack]

[...], on the other hand can we really expect NASA to effect serious changes and find a focused direction with leadership changes every 4 years?

Funny you should mention that. Isn't that the period of time most statesmen around the world is elected for?

A new NASA director probably can't do a lot

[multiplexo]

for our space program.

NASA is a bunch of chairwarming hacks who want to sit around collecting government paychecks until they're able to retire and sit around collecting government pensions. There are exceptions such as the scientific part of NASA that directs unmanned missions but since so much of NASA's funding is commited to the Shuttle and ISS the agency is effectively paralyzed and sclerotic. The fact that no one lost their job over the Columbia disaster is prime evidence that the agency is terminally fucked.

In order to be effective a new administrator would have to make drastic changes, such as immediately cancelling the shuttle program and ISS and closing down some of NASA's research centers and redirecting the money thus freed up into innovative research programs to lower the cost of access to orbit. Unfortunately this isn't going to happen as it would piss off too many congresscritters and the aerospace contractors who fund them.

So, unless the new director has cojones grande a real mandate for real change from Congress and the Administration and carte blanche in managing operations this change is going to be about as significant as spray painting a turd.

Reform doesn't happen

[Toby The Economist]

Changes in leadership don't really make much difference.

Interal reform as such does not occur.

Reform only occurs in the face of an externally imposed crisis.

NASA will be NASA - big, publically funded, inefficient, conventional and hugely discouraging private space travel - until the day it, in one form or another, dies.

--
Toby

Re:*cough*

[Anonymous Coward]

it's so funny how people always say "privatize NASA!" without bothering to realize...wait a second, who designs and builds engines, vehicles, etc? hint: it's not NASA.

NASA does a lot of test and oversight of what contractors do...that's the core of their job...and they take all those tax dollars you say they are wasting...and PAY THE CONTACTORS!

So what you are really asking for is...eliminate the middleman. Let the contractors get their money straight from congress, with no group of scientists and engineers checking their work and gumming things up with red tape.

That's all fine...but...let's make sure we all know what contractors do without tough oversight...steal, deliver late, underperform on specs. etc...

Re:But all space missions are expensive

[drix]

Economies of scale.

Actually, the space industry is subject so considerable economies of scale. Burt Rutan spent ~$20 million in R&D for SpaceShipOne. If you think of his product as "rides into outer space", it certainly ain't gonna cost him another 20 mil. produce another. That was the whole point of the X-Prize: build something reusable that was cheap to fly. Hence, the average price of rides declines with every new one that gets completed: textbook definition of increasing returns to scale.

I guess you could argue that NASA, because of its porky nature and idiot bureaucracy, realizes a lot less returns to scale than it should. But the fact remains that the (hundreds of) billions they've spent in R&D over the past four decades has made it much cheaper for them to do the things they do. Everybody loves to bag on NASA, fine, but don't forget they are freaking parsecs ahead of the nearest US competitor. Literally--they're the only ones to send stuff outside the solar system, visit other planets, hell, even putting someone is orbit is their sole domain and will be for a long time to come. No way in hell a private firm could accomplish even one of those on their own? Why: initial costs several orders of magnitude higher than any quantity of funding they could rustle up.

It can be shown mathematically that a single, monopolistic producer actually generates higher surplus than would a competitive market with increasing to scale. Thus the term "natural monopoly". Think pharmaceuticals, microprocessors, cars--anything that takes of a lot or R&D--or infrastructure, in the case of phone/electrical/sewage/cable TV services--will tend towards monopolization. Space exploration, I'm sorry to admit, fits right with those, which is why this (pardon the pun) nebulous idea many have of a vibrant, competitive market for space travel has always seemed like a quixotic load of economic bollux to me :) Maybe it shouldn't be government run, but one key player is going to dominate this industry for a long time to come. If I could buy stock in NASA I would.