O'Keefe Departure Views

26 December 2004: NASA’s Chief Bails Out

“Sean O’Keefe had the extreme bad luck to take the helm of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration less than 14 months before the shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the skies over Texas, throwing the agency into disarray. Through no great fault of his own, Mr. O’Keefe is leaving the space program in worse shape than he found it.”

26 December 2004: O’Keefe’s life goal was just to teach, The Adocate

“President Bush recruited him back to Washington to be NASA administrator in 1991 at a time when the agency was reeling with space station cost overruns. “You don’t want an engineer to fix a budget problem, you need a financial manager,” said Howard McCurdy, an American University public administration professor who has tracked NASA for the past two decades. “He agreed to do it, and he actually did it.”