GAO Investigates NASA Under Sean O'Keefe

[Syrinx]

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- Congress' investigative arm is looking into
Sean O'Keefe's tenure as NASA chief, including whether he misused
government airplanes and went on too many expensive getaways with
underlings, former and current senior NASA officials say.

The focus of the Government Accountability Office investigation is not
fraud, but waste, one of the four NASA officials told The Associated
Press. The four -- two still with NASA, two recently departed -- asked
not to be identified for fear of reprisals. Two said they had been
questioned by the GAO.

A top GAO investigator, George Ogilvie, declined to comment.

O'Keefe is leaving NASA after three years as the space agency's
administrator and will become chancellor of Louisiana State University
on Monday. When they hired him late last year, university officials
showered praise on him for his budget-conscious management skills.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-NASA-OKeefe-Investigation.html

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. How much of NASA's problems really are attributed to Lockheed contracts?

I read somewhere that two screwups on the Mars project in 1999 and a more recent one were attributed to Lockheed programming.

[shraby]

2. Wasn't that Sean O'Keefe mentioned in

connection with Clint Curtis? Seems I read the name when the Curtis stuff was surfacing.

[Quakerfriend]

3. Yup, he's the one ! And,

he made a rather hasty departure right after the Cliff Curtis- Feeney connection was revealed!

[megatherium]

4. NASA has been a waste

for twenty five years. The Shuttle was originally sold as a way to get into space cheaply; they envisioned a program that would have launches every week. Instead, they launch several times a year (except of course they've now had a two year hiatus due to the Columbia disaster). So each launch costs on the order of a billion dollars.

The Shuttle, and worse, the space station, have vacuumed up vast amounts of money with nothing to show for it. We're no closer to genuinely inexpensive access to space, and no science research to speak of is being done on the station. Instead, NASA wants to return to expendible boosters and space capsules, to transport astronauts to the station.

The only thing NASA does well, the only thing NASA does that's of value, is its unmanned program. Probes such as the current Mars rovers, and the Cassini probe at Saturn, are doing tremendous science.

If you want to learn more about this, read Robert Park, Voodoo Science. (He's a physicist at University of Maryland.)

[IndianaGreen]

5. The shuttle, space station, and astronaut program are bleeding...

resources from more valuable scientific robotic missions. We can gain more by the canceled Pluto flyby mission and by the robotic mission to save Hubble than to continue with dangerous and obsolete shuttle missions.