Go Somewhere!

"Sean is not going to NASA to personally design rockets," House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.) said while introducing O'Keefe at his Senate confirmation hearing last December. "But he knows enough about rockets to know that they burn cash just as assuredly as they burn fuel, and that both propellants are finite. It won't hurt NASA to have someone who can husband the agency's resources."


To be fair, during Goldin's tenure NASA logged many spectacular achievements-all without increasing the agency's budget in recent years. The on-time launch rate for the space shuttle went from 23 percent to 84 percent; 160 of 171 missions were successful; and there were no serious injuries. Unmanned spacecraft have provided unprecedented views of comets, asteroids, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter. The Hubble Space Telescope's studies of black holes, wandering planets, and exploding stars have turned science fiction into science fact. And despite the failures of the Mars probes in 1999, NASA has lost only $550 million worth of hardware out of a total of $23.5 billion launched.


Still, NASA has lost its hold on the public imagination. The agency must reassert its primacy-which shouldn't be hard, given that it's the only government agency with the entire universe as its domain. And it must be willing to take risks. "When NASA has a vision, a compelling vision that all are following, there's nothing it can't do," says Keith Cowing, a former NASA space scientist who runs nasawatch.com.


Administrator O'Keefe joins the agency at an exciting juncture. Here are our recommendations for change.