O'Keefe to Resign as NASA Administrator 283
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."
Damn! He was the only reason I voted for Bush! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Damn! He was the only reason I voted for Bush! (Score:2)
Re:Damn! He was the only reason I voted for Bush! (Score:3, Funny)
NASA's building a warship capable of going toe to toe w/ a Goa'uld mothership?! o_O
Who's supplying the hyperdrive?
Re:Damn! He was the only reason I voted for Bush! (Score:2)
Re:Damn! He was the only reason I voted for Bush! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm guessing you mean CEV. The CRV (Crew Return Vehicle) was insane and was cancelled. They were going to spend millions and millions to build a new mini Shuttle whose sole reason to exist was to sit on the ISS and serve as a lifeboat in the event of an emergency. Only thing it did was make it possible to get the ISS manning up to 6-7 people so they could actually do research instead of just maintain the bloody mess. Could have been done way cheaper with an extra docking port
Re:Damn! He was the only reason I voted for Bush! (Score:2)
Re:Damn! He was the only reason I voted for Bush! (Score:4, Informative)
MPA stands for Master of Public Administration as O'Keef's biography [nasa.gov] confirms.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Master of Arts.... (Score:2)
Face it, a good administrator knows how to listen to the people he's in charge of, and let them make the decisions about things he's not an expert at. His job is to facilitate their ability to do their job and manage relations between his bosses and his employees in the way causing the least friction, keeping both eggheads and moneymen happy, if he'
The Administrator is leaving (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The Administrator is leaving (Score:3, Funny)
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 inf
Re:The Administrator is leaving (Score:2)
LoL... well timed TOOL reference.
Hrm... Didn't Clint Curtis work at NASA?
Re:The Administrator is leaving (Score:2)
Re:The Administrator is leaving (Score:2)
Re:The Administrator is leaving (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The Administrator is leaving (Score:2, Interesting)
It's refreshing to see someone leave for money... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's refreshing to see someone leave for money. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's refreshing to see someone leave for money. (Score:4, Informative)
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:It's refreshing to see someone leave for money. (Score:3, Funny)
If Rumsfeld drops out, guarantee it's because he had undocumented works on the payroll, and not for any other reason.
AOL keyword: excuse (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's refreshing to see someone leave for money. (Score:2, Funny)
Thank you,
The Whitehouse
Go NASA! (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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...
Re:NASA has competition (Score:2)
Hopefully that'll inspire some money and useful direction for NASA...
Lea
He won't be missed (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:2)
Example: Instead of finding a better way of shielding for reentry, they're introducing more complex ways of checking their flawed reentry system.
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:2)
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
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:2)
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:2)
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:2)
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)?
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:2)
Think of it as open-source space flight: With enough people working on the problem, you'll get it done fast and find more creative ways of doing it.
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:2, Interesting)
Point 2: This point is a little more abstract, so bear with me. I think cost should not
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:But all space missions are expensive (Score:2)
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 costs quite a bit" ?!? (Score:2)
Re:Not many benefits? (Score:2)
Benefit #2 will only realize itself if we first find minerals worth mining and bringing back, and making extensive facilities to mine and export the minerals (you ever se
Re:He won't be missed (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
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)
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
Re:He won't be missed (Score:2)
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
Re:He won't be missed (Score:2)
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)
Slightly off-topic (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny you should mention that. Isn't that the period of time most statesmen around the world is elected for?
Re:Slightly off-topic (Score:2)
Yeah, but technically it's the people doing the electing who are running the show, and they step down only once every generation or so.
Besides, history shows that the longer you leave a statesman in power, the less good comes of it. What this implies about democracies, I'm not sure.
Re:That'll change soon (Score:2)
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/12/20/211923/8
A new NASA director probably can't do a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
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
Re:A new NASA director probably can't do a lot (Score:2)
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)
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:I think you misunderstand NASA's mission (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, this placement turned out to be lucky when Hubble needed an optical adjustment
Re:A new NASA director probably can't do a lot (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
Re:A new NASA director probably can't do a lot (Score:2)
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)
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)
Re:NASA Copout on Prizes (Score:2)
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)
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:Reform doesn't happen (Score:2)
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)
Re:*cough* (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
Re:*cough* (Score:2)
Re:*cough* (Score:2)
Bush names Ted Nugent to head NASA (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Might as well put a guy who actually went to the moon in the top position at NASA.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Meet the New Boss (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Meet the New Boss (Score:2)
Re:Meet the New Boss (Score:2)
Namely
Re:Meet the New Boss (Score:2)
And that's a bad thing? Tell that to this redneck:
News account [aulis.com]
Re:Meet the New Boss (Score:2)
Prometheus? (Score:4, Insightful)
What the heck is an MPA? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:What the heck is an MPA? (Score:3, Informative)
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]:
Re:What the heck is an MPA? (Score:2)
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
Re:What the heck is an MPA? (Score:2)
Thanks for the education. I appreciate it. But the larger comment I made applies, and it doesn't make me an idiot. I was ignorant on this subject. And I accept the education that you gave me.
Denigrating the man, because he has an MPA (or if it had been an MBA), is the kind of reverse snobbery (if they ain't a techie, they ain't shit) that we see too much of on SlashDot.
Yours,
Jordan
O'Keefe interview at LSU (Score:2, Informative)
NASA rocks. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
"let's go to the moon" is nebulous? (Score:2)
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
Geography! (Score:2)
Only a short drive away from Michoud!
Let the conspiracy theorists chew on that one for a while.
what goes up (Score:2)
I say good riddance (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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/d310/041201de
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/delta/d
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)
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)
Quoted [google.co.uk] from the the one and only Henry Spencer (1993)
Save Hubble (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Last Administrator! (Score:2, Funny)
And you are wrong on top of it (Score:4, Insightful)
sPh
Re:And you are wrong on top of it (Score:2)
To have an influence on or effect a change in: Inflation affects the buying power of the dollar.
Reread the quoted statement as:
"[O]n the other hand can we really expect NASA to have an influence on serious changes and find a focused direction with leadership changes every 4 years?"
Still bein' bitchy,
SiO2
Re:And you are wrong on top of it (Score:2)
Use their dictionary search for "effect". It'll come up with a whole bunch of different partial hits. In that box, click on "Effect[2,transitive verb]".
You'll find that "effect" is the right word for the situation, not "affect".
Re:And you are wrong on top of it (Score:2)
Re:And you are wrong on top of it (Score:2)
"can we really expect NASA to effect serious changes"
From your dictionary quote:
"or effect a change in"
The article poster and the dictionary both chose "effect" instead of "affect".
Silly Con, you've just been oxidized.
Re:Great. Now what? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great. Now what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Never has a bean-counter done so much for the
devolution of a government agency. He spent
tens of millions of taxpayer dollars at NASA
on video conferencing equipment, but wouldn't
spend the 1/2 million dollars for an independent
safety study regarding the deblating of shuttle
foam insulation. And so risk averse that he
would rather send an untrained robot to do an
astronaut's job (- repair Hubble Space Telescope)
at the cost of billions directed to defense
contractors.