O’Keefe Succeeds Goldin

In mid-October, Goldin announced he would be leaving NASA in November after his record-setting nine-and-a-half-year tenure. While departing with con­troversy over the space station’s $4.8 billion overrun swirling above his head, Goldin won plaudits from friends of space science. He had seemed personally to favor space science over human spaceflight (Space Shuttle, ISS), and that fact showed up in the increased percentage of NASA’s budget that went to space science under his leadership. Wesley Huntress, Goldin’s former science chief, commented that working under Goldin could be “brutal,” but praised him for raising the position of space science in the agency.10

No administrator in NASA’s history had been more passionate about Mars than Goldin. He had prioritized the robotic program and given it close atten­tion. He could leave believing that the 1999 problems of the Mars effort were being alleviated in 2000 and 2001. As Odyssey sped into the orbit NASA had planned for it, Goldin left NASA. Meanwhile, Congress completed work on the NASA budget, raising the overall level to $14.8 billion. Mars did well, and some of the missions Bush had tried to kill, particularly the Pluto project, were back in the NASA program.11 The process of adoption for the new MEP was complete.

Bush announced that Sean O’Keefe would become NASA Administrator. O’Keefe got the job principally because the White House believed that NASA’s major issue was to get the ISS budget under control. As deputy director of OMB, O’Keefe was already deeply enmeshed in ISS issues. O’Keefe had also been supportive of Mars interests, as indicated by OMB’s actions.

O’Keefe, age 45, came aboard at the beginning of January 2002 and brought a consolidating and incremental-innovating style to NASA. He was seen as a competent, nontechnical manager, not a space enthusiast. While not visionary like Goldin, he brought political connections Goldin lacked to the Bush White House and was especially close to the powerful vice president Dick Cheney. As expected, he concentrated on the space station in his first year, bringing NASA’s major project under better financial control. Weiler found he had much more autonomy under O’Keefe than Goldin to set space science policy.12

The Bush budget proposal announced in February emphasized priorities as­sociated with changes in national policy following the terrorist attack of “9/11,” 2001. NASA was a modest winner among domestic agencies, and its budget reflected O’Keefe’s desire for continuity, with a few, targeted changes. NASA got a 1.4% raise, elevating its budget to $15 billion. The most striking change was $125 million for a nuclear systems initiative—nuclear electric propulsion systems and nuclear electric power generation systems. Seizing the opportunity O’Keefe’s personal interest provided, Weiler contended that nuclear systems were the best choice for long-term missions to Mars and beyond, allowing for greater use of a more complex array of instruments. Weiler was thinking well beyond Mars—that is, the outer planets. However, the major immediate impact of this new stance was on MSL. What had been discussed and planned among scientists and engineers now became NASA and national policy. MSL would be powered by nuclear batteries, thereby allowing it to operate continuously. But the launch of MSL would necessarily be postponed from 2007 to 2009 in part to take advantage of new nuclear power systems and other technical improvements now foreseen for it.13

Aside from augmenting MSL, O’Keefe generally maintained the Mars pro­gram he inherited. The White House’s interest in the search for life triggered by the Mars meteorite in 1996 had led to a relatively stable and politically sustain­able MEP costing more than $500 million annually. “Biocentric arguments had tended to do well,” commented Steve Isakowitz. As a part of the Mars-friendly continuity in the Clinton-Bush transition, Isakowitz stood out. His influence soon became even more obvious when O’Keefe brought him to NASA to work with him as comptroller.14 For O’Keefe, policymaking and budgeting went hand in hand, and Isakowitz and O’Keefe were on the same wavelength when it came to decision making.

The continuity between the Clinton administration and the Bush admin­istration, seen generally in Mars policy, extended to support of astrobiology.

Ironically, the new astrobiology program NASA had launched under Goldin, and which O’Keefe inherited, ran into resistance from various scientists. Science magazine reported that astrobiology got “little respect from many traditional planetary scientists.” They saw it “more as a creation of Washington politicians than as a legitimate research area.” Bruce Jakosky, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, gave an astrobiology briefing to a Na­tional Research Council panel in November 2002. He likened the experience to “teaching freshman geology.” He complained that as he spoke, panel members leafed through newspapers or chatted quietly with other participants. Weiler’s response to such academic snobbery was, “It’s really scary when OMB may have more vision than scientists.”15

On April 12, O’Keefe traveled to his alma mater, the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. There he gave his own “Vision” address. He declared that NASA’s mission was “to improve life here, to extend life to there, and to find life beyond.” In doing so, he said NASA would not be destination driven. Instead, science would drive NASA, and NASA would invest in technologies (like nuclear propulsion) to better enable science to advance.16 The O’Keefe strategy facilitated what the Science Mission Directorate and Mars program wanted to do.