After a long and difficult search for a new NASA administrator, the White House has settled on a veteran management expert and troubleshooter who recently told Congress that the space agency needs a "cultural change."
President Bush announced yesterday that Sean O'Keefe, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, will be nominated to replace Daniel Goldin, who departs Friday after almost 10 years on the job.
If confirmed by the Senate, O'Keefe, a close associate of Vice President Cheney, would take the helm at a particularly difficult moment in the agency's storied history. The agency that sent six spacecraft and a dozen men to the surface of the moon is running out of money as it tries to construct a seven-man space station in low Earth orbit.
O'Keefe's appointment indicates that the White House wants someone to restore discipline to NASA's operation rather than dream up exotic new projects for exploring the universe.
"The Sean O'Keefe selection is interesting because they've clearly decided it's a management job . . . rather than a more technical, scientific job," said Mark Abramson, executive director of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government.
"He's a troubleshooter, and he's got a long track record of loyalty and success with Cheney and Bush. He's their man," said Robert McClure, senior associate dean of Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, where O'Keefe was a professor before joining the Bush administration.
Space enthusiasts greeted O'Keefe's nomination coolly.
"He is probably a good person to sort out the management and accounting situation on the space station, but he doesn't come across as a 'spacer.' He has an interest in the military uses of space, but he's not a space visionary," said Pat Dasch, executive director of the National Space Society.
O'Keefe did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.
The transition from Goldin to O'Keefe will be dramatic. Goldin is famously temperamental, unpredictable and visionary -- a true believer in the Space Age. As administrator, he talked often of the quest to find life on other worlds, and he started a program in "astrobiology." At one point, he asked his engineers to dream up a way to send a spacecraft across 25 trillion miles of space, to Alpha Centauri. As a manager, his mantra was "faster, better, cheaper," but although he increased the number of missions and reduced the size and cost of spacecraft, he is leaving NASA with a budget-busting piece of hardware orbiting the planet.
Since 1984, the U.S. effort to build a permanently manned space station has cost roughly $28 billion, not counting the expense of flying the space shuttle to and from the station. Earlier this year, NASA revealed that the U.S. portion of the international project faced a cost overrun of nearly $5 billion over the next five years. The budget crisis forced NASA to postpone work on several prominent elements of the station, such as a habitation module and a crew return vehicle. As currently configured, the station can usually handle only three astronauts -- which critics say is barely enough to get janitorial work done.
That creates a challenge for O'Keefe, who is reputed to be a tough and pragmatic manager with experience at large, complex government agencies. In the first Bush administration, he served as comptroller and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense -- answering to then-Secretary of Defense Cheney -- and as secretary of the Navy. He previously had served eight years on the Senate Appropriations Committee staff.
NASA has myriad programs, from scrutinizing meteorites to building Mars rovers, to capturing the images of billowing interstellar dust clouds with the Hubble Space Telescope. But human spaceflight -- the space shuttle and the space station programs -- accounts for about half the NASA budget, and that's where the money problems are acute. Earlier this month, an independent review panel chaired by Thomas Young, former president of Martin Marietta Corp., said spending on human spaceflight must be brought under control to make even a three-person space station financially "credible."
O'Keefe backed the Young report in testimony before Congress, and at one point he produced a chart showing that NASA's budget for human spaceflight dwarfs the budget for the National Cancer Institute and other important government research programs. He said the $7 billion-plus spent on human spaceflight is "a huge amount when compared to other science and technology opportunities." At NASA, he said, "cultural change is required."
