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

Damn! He was the only reason I voted for Bush!

[tjstork]

I thought O'Keefe's aggressive reinstatement of the Prometheus project, his commitment to the CRV, were all right on the money.

The Administrator is leaving

[nounderscores]

Does that mean that this whole show will now be run by the G-Man?

Re:The Administrator is leaving

[Anonymous Coward]

I, I don't have a whole lot of time. Um, OK, I'm a former employee of NASA. I, I was let go on a medical discharge about a week ago and, and... I've kind of been running across the country, I don't know where to start, they're, they're gonna, um, they'll triangulate on this position really soon.

OK, um, um, OK, what we're thinking of as, as aliens, they're extradimensional beings, that, an earlier precursor of the, um, space program they made contact with. They are not what they claim to be. Uh, they've infiltrated a, a lot of aspects of, of, of the federal establishment, particularly NASA.

The disasters that are coming, they, the military, I'm sorry, the government knows about them. And there's a lot of safe areas in this world that they could begin moving the population to now. They are not. They want those major population centers wiped out so that the few that are left will be more easily controllable.

It's refreshing to see someone leave for money...

[dj42]

I was getting tired of all these people using the old tired "for family reasons" after being pushed out and/or not desiring to be under the recently re-elected Bush regime.

Go NASA!

[steveyT]

I'm English so my taxes don't contribute to NASA, however I'm a big supported of the work they do. Personally I think it's really important to be conducting research and experimentation. I think it's a shame that it has basically come down to America to lead the world in this field, as competition often leads to better results.

I really hope this isn't going to be a backward step for NASA, but instead a positive move.

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.

Re:He won't be missed

[eclectro]

If the U.S. put the money it wastes on world domination in to mars and moon missions or an Apollo class push on fusion energy there would be potential huge benefits in many areas.

I have heard more than one commentator opine that "Sept 11" is a good crisis wasted. Meaning at that moment in history with a nation circling it's wagons there should have been a major appollo type push to get us off the foreign oil drug. Because when you look at it, decrease oil consumption and you take away the money the sheiks have to give to alquaeda under the table. Not to mention the world of good it would do for our trade deficit.

Instead, we take out a ten-cent dictator. We really did not get our money's worth here. Yes Saddam was a very bad person. But the world is filled with bad tin-horn dictators.

I'm somebody who believes in taking care of their own before extending myself to others. With the money spent in Iraq they could have covered the health expenses of all the uninsured Americans (I just joined the ranks) quite easily with change (lots) to spare.

I don't believe that mars is the best goal for this nation. But by time we are done with Iraq, I bet we will have spent 500 billion on it, which would have gone a long way towards a mars mission, and we would have gotten a lot more out of it. As it is we have a large number of people in the middle east who just flat out want to see every one of us Americans die, preferably by a bomb.

So it is truly discouraging. Bush got re-elected so that at the end of the next four years can see how horribly wrong they were and that the Iraq war was a bad idea. Expensive lesson.

And that goes for the other millions of adults who didn't vote too.

At least they won't be able to play "blame Clinton" anymore as the Republicans have everything under their thumbs.

Our national priority right now should be to standardize a transparent voting machine process and make sure all the machines work by 2008.

But I'm not holding my breath.

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?

But all space missions are expensive

[mind21_98]

All space missions are quite expensive. NASA has to determine whether a mission will provide more benefits than costs. Fuel costs quite a bit, as well as the training and the parts needed to build a rocket capable of going to Mars. Any benefits? Not many. That's probably why not much has been done.

Re:But all space missions are expensive

[NardofDoom]

And why is space expensive? Because there aren't economies of scale. Because we don't have competition driving the price down. Because NASA has let us believe that space is expensive.

The Ansari X-Prize showed that, for 1% of the cost of one shuttle flight, you could develop, build, test and fly a system capable of reaching space. I'd wager that for $100 million you could send three people to orbit. Hell, Apollo only cost us $50 billion, and we actually went somewhere. Half a dozen times.

So is space expensive because it's hard, or is space expensive because we're used to going through a massive government bureaucracy to get there?

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.

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.

Re:A new NASA director probably can't do a lot

[ToshiroOC]

The ISS has a political significance totally separate from whatever minimal scientific value may be claimed for it, and the shuttle program is an extension of this political program. The ISS is there soley to foster cooperation with the Russians; we have NASA engineers working in the same room as Russian engineers in Moscow controlling the ISS, and as long as that is happening, we keep pouring in money and we keep cooperating. The ISS could fail to do anything but continue to exist, and we will continue the program, because failing to do so would be a catastrophic collapse of US-Russian relations. That said, we're starting a new space race with China and India; China wants men on the moon soon and are already sending manned flights into orbit, and India is taking a different track in similar directions. What do we do to outdo China on the moon? Americans on Mars! Right? Guys? ...Guys? A new director would have to figure out a way to balance these sorts of international relations issues with getting real science done, and I think NASA does a decent job of it now by keeping unmanned science moving forward with JIMO/Prometheus and manned politics in the right place with ISS. If NASA is supposed blow off the Russians and focus on science, then their current strategy isn't the right one, but the fact remains that NASA cooperative projects remain a cornerstone of international politics (not to get into pork barrel considerations) and will remain such for the forseeable future.

NASA Copout on Prizes

[Baldrson]

The stories that NASA wants to pursue prize awards in a big way but just can't because of Congressional resistance is a copout.

Every single time NASA puts out a request for proposals it sets the criteria for awarding the contracts. It can set the criteria for awarding the contracts to be objective criteria such as "2 manned launches with the same vehicle within the same week" or whatever.

The only reason NASA doesn't do so is it would take power out of the hands of the people doing the contract awards and put the power in the hands of mother nature and those who know best how to coax her to perform as desired.

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:It's refreshing to see someone leave for money.

[Lord Omlette]

I was getting tired of all these people using the old tired "for family reasons" after being pushed out and/or not desiring to be under the recently re-elected Bush regime.

If you've been following Bernard Kerik's aborted appointment to head DHS, you'd see that the "nanny excuse" is gaining traction...

*cough*

[4-D4Y]

Privatize. *cough* Give incentives out instead of doing it in-house. *ahem* Replace NASA slowly...

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...

Bush names Ted Nugent to head NASA

[leftie]

Continuing his pattern of selections of highly qualified individuals to important positions in the Bush cabinet.

Bush sited Nugent's detailed technical work on Double Live Gonzo as proof Nugent was qualified for the position.

I think you misunderstand NASA's mission

[casuist99]

I think you misunderstand - NASA is responsible for a large portion of research dollars in aerospace, materials, and other engineering and science disciplines. NASA should not be about how to get most easily to earth orbit at the cost of research.

Let's put it this way - we've already been in orbit for 20+ years on regular shuttle flights. What did it get us? We were doing reasearch for PERFUME companies. (ok, we were also doing surveillance satellite deployment, repair, and collection, but ignore that for a moment). The reasearch in earth orbit doesn't justify orbital flights.

Of course, despite my opinion, it is part of NASA's mission to get to space and do "stuff" there. Advances in materials and aerospace science and engineering will lead to easier access to orbit. You only get there with research funding, not by cutting research budgets.

What worries me most is that the new director could be the man in charge of the "missile defense" system. It's unsuccessful, unverified, way over budget, and fails most tests until the test criteria are re-written to make a failure a success. This is not the sort of person you want running a civilian research and scientific space agency.

And you are wrong on top of it

[sphealey]

"effect" is correct in the sense used.

sPh

Prometheus?

[Mukaikubo]

From all reports, O'Keefe was a MAJOR backer of Nuclear Space Initiatives. I only hope that continues under a successor, because I hate to break it to you people, but nuclear- either nuclear-thermal or nuclear/RTG powered ion- is the best solution for in-space propulsion.

Re:It's refreshing to see someone leave for money.

[ZiakII]

don't think thats exactly completally true when the same thing has happend with Clinton copied strait from cnn.com

The immigration status of household help employed by prospective high-level government officials has been an issue in the past decade, beginning in 1993 when former President Bill Clinton's first pick for attorney general, Zoe Baird, was forced to withdraw after admitting she employed two undocumented workers and did not pay required employee taxes for them.

Re:Damn! He was the only reason I voted for Bush!

[Malfourmed]

don't know what O'Keefe has to do with MPA

MPA stands for Master of Public Administration as O'Keef's biography confirms.

NASA rocks.

[standards]

I worked on the ISS program. My dad worked in the space program since Gemini. We both worked for large aerospace companies.

The Shuttle and ISS are amazing pieces of technology, and much has been learned by designing them and operating them. I don't think those facts are debatable.

HOWEVER, the ISS and the Shuttle are qualified failures. Desite their amazing abilities, they are grossly inefficient in terms of dollars. The money could be better spent.

Flying to the moon and Mars is a great, super-fabulous endeavor. Hanging out in a space station for a year is amazing. But there is no point in doing it as a rah-rah feel-good exercise. Honest scientific, commercial, and military goals should be set first, and only in the light of these goals should we see if it makes sense to pursue these manned missions.

The people of NASA aren't the problem - it's the mission that Congress has given them. With nebulous goals like "let's go to the moon", congress is forcing NASA to squander the tax payer's money.

AOL keyword: excuse

[infinite jester]

True, except that in the case of Zoe Baird, her nanny problem was the actual reason for her withdrawal from consideration. For Kerik, it's a smokescreen. His real problems involve shady business dealings, a 1998 arrest warrant , and mob ties , among other things.

Re:Great. Now what?

[xSauronx]

guys, im the candidate. I barely finished high school and i only punctuate and capitalize sometimes...

I say good riddance

[Javanista]

A classic bean counter. Did he ever believe in space exploration? Shouldn't NASA have a leader that believes in its mission?

People should consider not only that space exploration generates a lot of valuable discoveries (useful on Earth as well as in space), but also that every dollar spent on NASA recycles through the US economy many times over.

The immediate focus of NASA should be on cheap, reliable transit to orbit followed closely by on-orbit construction of nuclear-powered space exploration vehicles. Let's hope the next administrator can get focused on these goals.

Delta IV Heavy

[Artifakt]

The Delta Four launch scheduled for Saturday had to be postponed. The good news is the next window isn't 2 months away, it's Tues. afternoon (the 21st) if they decide to go for it. The D4 Heavy version is the first version of the D4 to use three main booster rockets, forming a booster theoretically capable of servicing the ISS at much less cost to orbit than the shuttle. While the "multi-barrel" design is just becoming operational, regular Delta IVs with the same engine have entered successful service in 2003.
The Delta IV Heavy is staged from Nasa's pad 37B, which last saw service as the launchpad for the Saturn 1B Apollo missions.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/delta/d310/041201del ta4heavy.html/

http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/delta/de lta4/delta4.htm/

The Delta 4 Heavy supports payloads of up to about 50,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit (i.e. the International Space Station). It can put about 29,000 pounds into Geosyncronous orbit 22,300 miles above the planet, or 22,000 pounds to the moon, or about 17,500 pounds to Mars.

The IV Heavy's possible successors, clustering more first stage rockets, include a 7 tube design with MORE lift than the Saturn 5.