Sean O'Keefe's New Gigs
Sean O’Keefe Joins CSIS as Distinguished Senior Adviser, Center for Strategic and International Studies
“CSIS has developed a stellar reputation as an important, objective catalyst to shape the public policy debate on a wide range of global security issues,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “I am delighted to have the privilege to participate in the debate with the added benefit of drawing on the partnership expertise of my colleagues at the Syracuse University Maxwell School.”
Sean O’Keefe Appointed University Professor, Phanstiel Chair, Syracuse University
“O’Keefe has also been named the Howard G. and S. Louise Phanstiel Chair in Strategic Management and Leadership at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.”
Can someone ejumacate me on what all this means? Strategic this, strategic that, strategy strategy everywhere and next to nothing gets done.
Mr. O’Keefe has an impressive resume which may warrant this appointment. However it doesn’t seem likely to me that his service as a NASA Administrator was a contributing factor. He has little interest in space and aviation. He was ostensibly appointed to put NASA finances in order, yet he oversaw the initiation of the Constellation program, the antithesis of effective financial planning.
He oversaw the initiation of the ‘Vision For Space Exploration’ with it’s ‘spiral’ of technology and vehicle development, not CXP. Constellation was Mike Griffin’s baby.
..yet he oversaw the initiation of the Constellation program, the antithesis of effective financial planning……
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No he did not. The Constellation program is 100% the creature of Dr. Mike Griffin. When Dr. Griffin came in as administrator he dismantled the Human and Robotic Technology Program (H&RT), and so completely ignored the Concept Exploration and Development Program (CE&R) that he did not even send any senior officials to the final contract debriefings.
Today you cannot even find the CE&R reports on any NASA website. Very few of the CE&R reports had heavy lift as the central element of an exploration architecture. That came from the 60 day ESAS report, which was a somewhat modified version of a paper that Griffin and Owen Garriott had published with the Planetary Society.
Constellation was Griffon’s. Under O’Keefe, VSE was supposed to stick to existing launchers and EOR/LOR, with commercial space to fill any gaps and take over the LEO grunt work.
I’d be interested in any references you have that support that view. There were of course some people who favored use of existing ELVs at the time (I was one) but TMK no official policy mandating the use of only existing launchers for the VSE ever existed prior to the obviously biased ESAS report, nor did OKeefe do anything to provide realistic estimates of the cost of VSE or effective controls on cost growth.
http://spaceksc.blogspot.co…
Even in 2004 something grossly similar to SLS and just as expensive was being proposed – see pg 9 in this Boeing presentation: https://web.archive.org/web…
No refs. From what I understand, the ESMD/ESD proposal under O’Keefe was to have a “fly off” of two competing CEV designs on EELV launchers. There was no suggestion of developing new launchers until after Griffin took the post, cancelled the prior plans and commissioned the ESAS “review”. Griffin immediately dropped the fly-off and went to a traditional single contractor approach, then ESAS declared that the capsule would be too heavy for EELV and by amazing coincidence only the plan previously developed by Griffin would suffice. That plan was Constellation.
[Edit: That Smith article was written much latter, in 2010, and Smith badly jumbled up events under O’Keefe and Griffin. I’d hardly think that a 2004 Senate committee meeting just 2 weeks after VSE was first announced would be discussing Ares I.]
The slides that you presented from the Boeing initial concepts for the CE&R showed a range of vehicles, including an upgraded Delta IV, the Shuttle C, and a 100 ton vehicle. This was considerably pared back for the final briefings.
The CE&R process was left unconsummated in that the funded studies were not complete, which, along with the outputs of the H&RT and other internal work, was going to form the basis of the plan going forward.
The NASA process during the O’Keefe era was starkly different than the Griffin era. The O’Keefe team was open, collaborative (almost too much) and sought to build consensus in the community for the path forward.
The Bush VSE speech was taken almost as bible for the process and it was headed in the right direction to come to a consensus and move forward. All of this came to a screeching halt when he left and Griffin came to power. There was never any O’Keefe plan other than the CEV or the JIMO project as the CE&R output was to form the primary input to the plan going forward. The CE&R final briefings happened in the first month of Griffin’s tenure and he was completely uninterested in what came out of that.
“NASA had planned to have a suborbital or an Earth orbit fly-off called Flight Application of Spacecraft Technologies (FAST) between two teams’ CEV designs before September 1, 2008. However, in order to permit an earlier date for the start of CEV operations, Administrator Michael D. Griffin had indicated that NASA would select one contractor for the CEV in 2006. From his perspective, this would both help eliminate the currently planned four-year gap between the retirement of the Shuttle in 2010 and the first manned flight of the CEV in 2014 (by allowing the CEV to fly earlier), and save over $1 billion for use in CEV development”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
moved
I wish Mr. O’Keefe well. In retrospect he was one of the best of the post Webb Administrators. Its to his credit that he got NASA planning beyond Shuttle. It was unfortunate that Griffin and his ilk set NASA back with Constellation and Orion.
I do find it amusing that so many people are so excited about the launch of the prototype kluge of the Orion command module in a few weeks.
Probably the greatest lesson Shuttle had to offer was to build within you capabilities, both technical and financial. My guess is that since we cannot afford to fly Orion, because its design was never optimized for any mission, because the then and still largely existing management of Gerstenmaier and Geyer did such a poor job of vetting the requirements, because of this I am pretty convinced we will see Orion canceled within a couple years and I am also convinced that the end of human space flight for a generation will be the result.
Yes, in retrospect O’Keefe knew the proper priorities. He was a true leader. He guided the program. The current Administrator mainly worried about Muslims and taking care of his astronaut buddies. The program since O’Keefe has been disappointing.
I wish him well (and I’m glad he fully recovered from that awful crash). But, with all due respect, he was a bean counter, not a leader, and did exactly what he was told to do by the Bush administration (in part, that was to pay little attention, I would even say to ignore, NASA’s extensive Earth Science capabilities, satellites, and mission).
Even if you considered those priorities to be correct (I did not then, and I do not now), following a line that was clearly drawn for him does not constitute leadership.
From a standpoint of human space flight, the Administration, I think orchestrated by O’Keefe, opened up the options for NASA to do anything it wanted. Prior to O’Keefe we could not even talk about moon or Mars missions.
NASA Still had to define and design the missions and put together a reasonable plan for accomplishing the mission, including a reasonable budget. That was what NASA was working on when O’Keefe left.
Then O’Keefe left, replacing Shuttle was no longer a NASA priority; building an oversized overweight Orion that would be launched on an uncapable Ares….and the mission was not even considered. It all became about going somewhere, anywhere. Everybody was in a rush but where they were going did not even matter. Subsequently it became about going to an asteroid, but that was only because what they had designed had no other capability.
In another 5 or 10 years we will find that Orion meets few requirements and yet is so expensive that we cannot afford to fly it.
OK, let me put it this way. An administrator that completely ignores one part of his agency’s mission to concentrate solely on another is no leader.
All you have to do is take one look at his inane comment at the launch of Aura, one of this country’s major Earth observing satellites, to see how little interest he (or, again, I should say Bush) had in NASA’s Earth observation role (see the fifth paragraph of NASA’s press release:
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hq…
All he cared about was how Aura furthered our understanding of “the Moon, Mars, and beyond?”
You’ve got to be kidding me….
> in retrospect O’Keefe knew the proper priorities.
I remember when he was appointed, many were saying “he’s just a bean counter! We need a engineer for Administrator.” Looking back shows it should be the other way around and most certain O’Keefe knew how to work The Hill in terms of politics and budget, and have deputies work the technical issues.
Ask folks in Louisiana how they feel about the esteemed. Mr. O’Keefe.
Or the X-38 team.
Good to see him getting on since the crash.
The definitive statement of Mr. O’Keefe’s position on Constellation is the one he makes himself. The Senate hearing is tedious but I hope those who are interested in his legacy will take the time to watch the whole thing before you jump to conclusions.
http://spaceksc.blogspot.co…
Mr. O’Keefe himself uses the terms “Constellation” and “Constellation Crew Exploration Vehicle” multiple times, so this program was clearly initiated on his watch. He does not mention any plans for a competition or flyoff for the Constellation CEV. He says at one point that the CEV will be heavier and may require greater lift than the OSP but provides no details. Griffin’s plan had already been published, including his detailed plans for the Ares I and Orion capsule, and O’Keefe says nothing to indicate he is unaware of it or disagrees with it in any way. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lun…
O’Keefe presents this budget chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik… Note that this is the 2004 budget and that the last year in which the ISS is funded is 2016. At least three senators repeatedly question O’Keefe on the budget, noting that he is asking for only $1B total (an increment of $200M in the NASA budget that remains for 5 years) followed by a NASA budget that increases only with inflation. The senators repeatedly point out that the VSE budget is unrealistically low and likely to grow, that O’Keefe’s plan to fund almost all of it by internal reprogramming of funds is not realistic, and that given the deficit there is little prospect for an increase in total NASA appropriations. O’Keefe repeatedly assures them that he has the budget totally under control. The senators question the reliance on only Russian access to ISS after Shuttle termination in 2010. He assures them that it will be no problem.
The change in NASA administrators between O’Keefe and Griffin was not seen at the time as a change in policy of any significance. Nothing in O’Keefe’s presentation suggested that he was unaware of Griffin’s plans or disagreed in any way.