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

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.

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

[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.

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

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.

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: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.

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.