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O'Keefe to Resign as NASA Administrator 283

Posted by timothy from the after-a-grand-reign-in-the-tax-dollar-playhouse dept.
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."
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O'Keefe to Resign as NASA Administrator More

O'Keefe to Resign as NASA Administrator

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  • 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 (Score:4, Funny)

    by nounderscores ( 246517 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:04PM (#11068962)
    Does that mean that this whole show will now be run by the G-Man?

  • It's refreshing to see someone leave for money... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dj42 ( 765300 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:12PM (#11068990) Journal
    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! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by steveyT ( 664379 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:12PM (#11068995) Homepage
    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.

    • NASA has competition (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm also British. I'm an astrophysicist, and my work revolves around XMM-Newton, an X-ray space telescope satellite made and operated by the European Space Agency [esa.int] which your taxes do pay for (thanks!).

      Of course, science is international so the ESA is usually a collaborator with NASA rather than a competitor. I hope this new administrator does everything possible to keep the spirit of international scientific collaboration alive, rather than playing along with a wild goose chase to Mars...
      • And, of course, there's also the Japanese space agency, as well as the Chinese, and I seem to remember some noise from India about sending people up.

        Hopefully that'll inspire some money and useful direction for NASA...

        Lea

  • He won't be missed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:13PM (#11068997)
    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.

    • But all space missions are expensive (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mind21_98 ( 18647 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:20PM (#11069031) Homepage Journal
      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 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by NardofDoom ( 821951 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @09:14PM (#11069357)
        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

          by drix ( 4602 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @10:59PM (#11069765) Homepage
          Economies of scale [wikipedia.org].

          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.
          • I meant they're not utilizing economies of scale. They're not mass-producing launch vehicles or other systems, and they're not looking for a way to streamline their systems. Indeed, they're looking at slowing the whole thing down.

            Example: Instead of finding a better way of shielding for reentry, they're introducing more complex ways of checking their flawed reentry system.

            • Why does everyone think Nasa is mainly about sending up guys to circle the earth relentlessly? The best we can hope to accomplish by sending up people is to learn how to perfect long duration space flight (preventing bone and muscle mass loss, growing food, etc.).

              While that's not a terrible goal, it's also not a very productive one per dollar in terms of science. How much have we learned from two cheap rovers on Mars? Compare that to the cost of sending up guys. I know, I know there's intangible benefi
          • Not to argue with most of what you have to say but NASA is not the only organization with the ability to put people into Orbit. Especially ironic considering that the only way currently people are regularly getting to orbit is the Russian Soyuz platform. China also recently joined this rather elete brotherhood.
        • Spaceship One is to the Space Shuttle what a kite is to a jet fighter. While an impressive accomplishment, The X-prize took 1 person to 112 km, the Space Shuttle orbits at 185 to 643 km, with 28,800 kg of cargo and up to 10 people (although only 8 have ever gone up). SpaceshipOne was up for 24 minutes, the shuttle up to 17 days. The $25.4 billion for the Apollo was in 1960 dollars, approx. $100 billion today. The overall NASA budget at the time was twice what it is today. I don't doubt that NASA could
        • First off, the requisite Why SpaceShipOne Never Did, Never Will, And None Of Its Direct Descendants Ever Will, Orbit The Earth [daughtersoftiresias.org]

          Now, to address some specific points.

          1) "For 1% of the cost of one shuttle flight": They carried 1/80th of the payload to 1/6th of the delta-V of a minimal orbit and plan to sell this for 1/500th of the cost. Lets just be nice and pretend that costs will scale up at merely an O(N^2) rate (in reality, scaling up an SS1-style design to orbit is all but impossible); that's almost
          • in reality, scaling up an SS1-style design to orbit is all but impossible

            An honest question: What do you think the show-stoppers are? Is it mounting a more powerful rocket (or just having the reentry vehicle as "cargo")? Is it reinforcing the design to deal with the greater mechanical stresses of orbital reentry? Is it improving the thermal protection system (perhaps to something like Buran's)?
      • Point 1: Space exploration is our only chance if we ever hope to get off this rock. Obviously, things like materials synthesis and training of astronauts are costly, but the consolation is that we may hope to come up with a solution for how to continue human life. Call me a cynic, but I consider it pretty unlikely that we humans can survive our technological adulthood while we still struggle with our social pubescence.

        Point 2: This point is a little more abstract, so bear with me. I think cost should not

      • No, fuel is not expensive. Fuel is cheap - depending on the rocket, tens to hundreds of dollars per kilogram of payload. The main cost is in part fabrication for disposable rockets and in maintainance for reusable rockets.

        I agree with you about Mars, though. We need to improve the tech first. Going to Mars with today's tech would be like Genghis Khan making it a priority to reach the North Pole. Yes, eventually you need to "just go" - however, we really need to reduce costs first (and to all the Zubri
      • "Any benefits? Not many."

        True of a stupid round trip stunt like Apollo was. The benefits of establishing a permanent colony on Mars would be enormous. It would be opening a whole new biosphere and Earth is getting so crowded it needs a new biosphere and frontier, create a lifeboat in the event of a cataclysm on Earth(runway greenhouse effect, asteroid strike, nuclear war, or pandemic), and push mankind to start tapping resources other than the dwindling ones on Earth. Chances are high it would push big
      • Fuel is an insignificant item on the total cost of a space mission - typically less than 1%. The biggest recurring cost is payroll for the standing army of technicians (and their managers). This number is particularly high because it's divided by a pretty small number of launches per year. Another huge cost (if you care to count it) is the development cost, amortized over a small number of launches.

    • Re:He won't be missed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eclectro ( 227083 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:57PM (#11069275)
      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.
      • "the trillion dollars mars would take"

        When every anyone carps about the cost of big science and engineering endeavors you only need to point out that the U.S. has squandered nearly $200 billion on the war in Iraq so far and there is no end in sight. The U.S. has also killed 1200 Americans and countless thousands of Iraqi's so losing a few volunteer astronauts in a dangerous space mission seems pretty trivial by comparison. Its unobvious what exactly was accomplished by Iraq either.

        If the U.S. put the mone

        • Re:He won't be missed (Score:3, Interesting)

          by eclectro ( 227083 )
          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
      • 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."

        Heinlein used to remark of Carl Sagan "every time he convinces someone manned space projects don't make any sense we lose a supporter of the space program." NASA's in a tough spot - if they do the thing that makes the most sen

    • Even the most optimistic planning doesn't have a manned Mars mission even slated for launch over next 4 years. It's a little harsh to judge the man a tacit traitor to his department just because one of the front-page headlines in the last few years wasn't "Man On Mars".

      Does anyone who was paying more attention to NASA have a summary of what they've been doing towards a manned mission to Mars? The most significant things I can think of are the Mars Rovers and the Scramjet research. But again, that's just

    • Re:He won't be missed (Score:3, Insightful)

      by solive1 ( 799249 )
      Am I the only one who thinks the Mars plan is a good idea? NASA was at its best when they had a concrete mission (the moon). If they focused on going to Mars, perhaps we would see NASA return to glory.

  • Slightly off-topic (Score:5, Insightful)

    by halftrack ( 454203 ) <jonkje@gmailLION.com minus cat> on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:13PM (#11068999) Homepage
    [...], 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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by multiplexo ( 27356 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:21PM (#11069033) Journal
    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.

    • no-one lost their job over columbia because it really was an accident, or are you one of those people who believes that firing someone makes any bad situation better>
      as for what nasa is, I happen to know a few people who work for nasa and they tend to be scientists with a thirst for knowledge earning somewhat crappy government paychecks but doing the research that they live for.
      Nasa has been an amazing boon to scientific progress in the time it has been around and if it isnt doing the job that it cou
    • I don't believe it can be done - there's no political will for any of the needed changes. The system has entered the kind of sclerotic stasis that can only be altered by something earthshaking - perhaps a major economic collapse can do it. Manned space flight in the USA is essentially dead once they've retired the shuttle. The Mars mission is a silly unfunded dream.

      The interesting question now is who's going to take up the torch. Private enterprise out of the USA is a possibility. China, over th

    • I think you misunderstand NASA's mission (Score:5, Interesting)

      by casuist99 ( 263701 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:37PM (#11069143) Homepage Journal
      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:A new NASA director probably can't do a lot (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      and redirecting the money thus freed up into innovative research programs to lower the cost of access to orbit.

      Every "innovative research program to lower the cost of access to orbit" since the early 80s has turned into an exorbantly-expensive, generally ineffective boondoggle that serves to extract billions of dollars from NASA into aerospace contractors with little or no benefit. Most of NASA's problems in the 90s came because all the agency's research money was tied up in the X12 project, leaving the g

    • Re:A new NASA director probably can't do a lot (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ToshiroOC ( 805867 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @09:05PM (#11069314)
      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.
      • Besides, some interesting things have been learned from the ISS. Just an example: ISS has been having to adjust its angular momentum far too often - the gyros were getting maxed out way more than expected.

        The culprit? Noone had ever built such a large space station before. The Russian space suits being used while doing work on some of the station's extremities vented their exhaust gasses in one direction. While it was such a tiny force that it wouldn't be noticed on most stations, they had great torque

  • NASA Copout on Prizes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:22PM (#11069042) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:NASA Copout on Prizes (Score:2, Insightful)

      by RSwan ( 69788 )
      Apparently, you have never heard of FAR. No not the Federal Aviation Regulations, the Federal Acquisition Regulations. These regs set up how the government buys things. From multimillion dollar jets to paperclips, if you work for the government you got to follow those rules. And if it ain't in the regs, you can't do it unless you get a waiver. Who decides who gets a waiver depends upon how much money gets spent. The more money is spent, the higher up the food chain you got to go to get the waiver. An
      • Apparently, you have never heard of FAR.

        Having consulted with SAIC for 15 years and worked on its software process committee I guess I must have missed that. Or maybe it was that defense acquisition priority 1 project I worked on when several of us were called in to solve a problem that had halted the oil tankers in the Persian gulf, and the Joint Chiefs were giving us daily reviews -- a "pig fuck" I believe the crew was calling it...

        Look, genius -- NASA managed to figure out how to violate President R

  • Reform doesn't happen (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Toby The Economist ( 811138 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:23PM (#11069047)
    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
    • "Reform only occurs in the face of an externally imposed crisis."

      Exactly what do you call the Challenger and Columbia disasters. They were both spectacular failures and both devastated the manned space program. The Shuttle was hobbled after the first and is largely useless thanks to the constraints placed on it after the second.

      I agree with your post but you seem to suggest reform would occur if there was an externally imposed crisis and that is obviously not true in the case of NASA. It appears NOTHIN

  • *cough* (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 4-D4Y ( 825020 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:27PM (#11069066)
    Privatize. *cough* Give incentives out instead of doing it in-house. *ahem* Replace NASA slowly...

    • Re:*cough* (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:42PM (#11069184)
      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:*cough* (Score:2, Funny)

        by 4-D4Y ( 825020 )
        You're right, you'd be a fool to just jump in some contractor's shuttle. Congress would be foolish to just provide funding up front as well. Let some group of people design, build, and test their own equipment. If they get this far, have them apply to Congress for government incentives. I'd say the key is to let the contractors take the financial risks so that once a sound design materializes, Congress can step in and support that instead of paying for R&D right away. Both Congress and the contractors s
      • Dead on! I used to work for Rockwell-Collins. We had really strict time reporting requirements while I worked there. Why? They had previously had one of the contracts developing components for the shuttle. They abused it to death. Any project that didn't have enough hours, they assigned workers on that project to the shuttle. NASA caught them, and the government imposed big sanctions on the company.
      • How are they going to steal, deliver late, and underperform to win a government-funded prize?

  • Bush names Ted Nugent to head NASA (Score:4, Funny)

    by leftie ( 667677 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:32PM (#11069107)
    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.

  • John Young, NASA Administrator! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Big Sean O ( 317186 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:34PM (#11069124)
    They were just waiting for his replacement [usatoday.com].

    Might as well put a guy who actually went to the moon in the top position at NASA.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:46PM (#11069205)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Meet the New Boss (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Shihar ( 153932 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @08:50PM (#11069223)
    I would like to be excited and think that things will change in NASA, but I can't help but be a little more the skeptical. NASA is utterly obsessed with safety and conservatism. What they don't seem to realize that there are plenty of people more then happy to throw safety to the wind and risk their life, and that obsessive conservative (not conservative in the political sense) policies lead to people getting bored and not bothering to shill out money. X-Prize like adventures is what leads to breakthroughs and advancement. Just imagine the sort of things that would have been accomplished if one of the X-Prize teams had been handed a billion dollars. It would be a lot more interesting then a handful of grounded behemoths and a massive bureaucracy shaking at the knees at the prospect that someone might have to risk their life to move forward.

    I hope something changes, but I have a feeling that Russian saying is more likely to offer a better explanation of what is to come:
    Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
    • There are plenty of people willing to take the risks, but the American people will not stand for killing astronauts. The Columbia disaster came dangerously close to shutting down the entire shuttle program. Despite being so risk averse, we have still had many deaths, and many close calls. If we throw caution to the wind, we can expect to lose many more. Public opinion is not gonna stand for a bunch of dead astronauts on TV every couple years. Then even if there is an overall cost savings, people are go
      • Tell that to all the people who'd drop everything and go up in an instant if offered the chance. We would love to go, really. The people who are really afraid are the ones who think we don't, so they hold everything back.

        Namely ... bureaucrats.
    • "NASA is utterly obsessed with safety and conservatism."

      And that's a bad thing? Tell that to this redneck:

      ..."We heard a rumbling sound. We thought it was a tornado and then - wham! - something hit the trailer," Bradley, Pinkston's father, said after another small piece of debris bounced off the roof of his mobile home, punching a hole in its outer shell about three inches (13 cm) across.

      News account [aulis.com]

  • Prometheus? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mukaikubo ( 724906 ) <gtg430b@NosPaM.prism.gatech.edu> on Sunday December 12, 2004 @09:26PM (#11069415) Journal
    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.

  • What the heck is an MPA? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jordandeamattson ( 261036 ) <jordandmNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday December 12, 2004 @09:30PM (#11069431) Homepage
    What the heck is an MPA? I think you mean that O'Keefe is an MBA.

    Just because someone is a professional manager, doesn't mean that they can't manage a technical or scientific organization

    Remember that the Manhatten Project was lead to success by General Leslie R. Groves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Groves [wikipedia.org], who while also an engineer, who was the moral equivalent of an MBA. Yes, they wouldn't have gotten their without the techies like Feyman, Fermi, or Oppenheimer, but they also wouldn't have gotten their without Groves.

    As an engineering manager who can hack a compiler as well as I can hack an operating plan or rolling four quarter outlook, I am distressed by the number of techies who can't (and don't care they can't) understand the difference between an operating and capital expenses (and why I can't spend 10K this month on a contractor, but I can spend 120K on a new server setup that has an expected life of 36 months).

    You might not like it, but finance and accounting are the way score is kept and things are communicated in the world of business. An engineer or engineering manager who can't speak this language is at as big a disadvantage as the techie who can't program.

    Yours,

    Jordan

    • What the heck is an MPA? I think you mean that O'Keefe is an MBA.

      No, MPA is correct -- "Master of Public Administration". It's what many undergraduate poli sci majors get when they grow up (if they are not seduced by the siren song of a JD).

      From O'Keefe's bio [nasa.gov]:

      Sean O'Keefe earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1977 from Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and his Master of Public Administration degree in 1978 from The Maxwell School.

    • The only reason you can't spend $10K on a contractor vs $120K on a server is budgeting, which you don't really control. You ask for your budget, but others determine your budget for you.

      Now what is fun when those others decide that they need to raid most of your budget areas for their own pet projects...

      Capital projects can be preferred, because they depreciate (except for property), which can usually have other positive tax implications for the company, compared to hiring contractors or employees.

      Maybe

  • O'Keefe interview at LSU (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Note: A local news station [wafb.com] is reporting that O'Keefe will be interviewed on Thursday by LSU for the chancellor's position.

  • NASA rocks. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by standards ( 461431 ) on Sunday December 12, 2004 @10:10PM (#11069579)
    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.
    • Sounds pretty concrete to me. Who've you been listening to?

      Compared to "inspire the next generation of explorers", that's nebulous? (current NASA mission statement). NASA's 1958 mission statement had some reasonably concrete content, referring to science and technology transfer, and "To explore, use, and enable the development of space for human enterprise." But "go to the moon" seems significantly less nebulous than any of those - you can't do it by just sitting around on this planet and thinking about it
  • "to begin a position as chancellor of Louisiana State University"

    Only a short drive away from Michoud!

    Let the conspiracy theorists chew on that one for a while.
  • Missile Defense? Finally someone heading NASA with experience in nearly blowing up spacecraft!

  • I say good riddance (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Javanista ( 834415 ) on Monday December 13, 2004 @12:52AM (#11070194)

    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Artifakt ( 700173 ) on Monday December 13, 2004 @01:12AM (#11070259)
    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/ [spaceflightnow.com]

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

    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.

  • conspiracy angle (Score:3, Interesting)

    by beaverfever ( 584714 ) on Monday December 13, 2004 @01:35AM (#11070334) Homepage
    "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."

    How does this fit in with the supposed parallel goals of Bush's long-term space-defence plans and his statements regarding putting a man on Mars?

  • Engineering background required? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by XNormal ( 8617 ) on Monday December 13, 2004 @02:42AM (#11070527) Homepage
    "Well, do bear in mind that NASA Administrator is basically a political job. Jim Webb didn't know diddly about the technical issues, but he was still probably the best Administrator NASA ever had, because he knew where the bodies were buried in Washington."

    Quoted [google.co.uk] from the the one and only Henry Spencer (1993)

  • Save Hubble (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scharkalvin ( 72228 ) on Monday December 13, 2004 @08:57AM (#11071448) Homepage
    Maybe the new director won't have his head up his rectum and will see the sense in saving the Hubble telescope. The robotic mission isn't a sure thing and would only extend Hubble's life by a few years if it worked since it would render future servicing impossible. The risk to the astronauts in servicing Hubble isn't much greater than in going to the ISS, and even the ISS isn't safe (what with air leaks and roaches eating all the food!). Face it space ISN'T 100% safe and the astronauts know the risks and accept them (much the same as fighter pilots, ground force troops, policemen, mine workers, etc). SAVE HUBBLE!

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