O'Keefe Leaves NASA Wondering "Which Way is Up?"

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe resigned after three rather rough years at the space agency. The loss of a shuttle not quite two years ago and the inability of the agency to get its flagship white elephant back into orbit have combined to make his time less-than-satisfactory. However, his was a mission without a hope of success. Not only does NASA have a "broken safety culture," but also a broken scientific culture as well. The new man, or woman, probably won't be able to fix it.

As a measure of just how bad things in space are, consider that the two men in orbit on the International Space Station have started rationing their food because resupply is a problem without the space shuttle. Russia's Soyuz craft is the only bird on the wing at the moment, and it doesn't have the shuttle's cargo capacity. The next flight is due to dock at the ISS on December 26. No word what the plan is should there be a problem with the launch.

There was a time when a complaint would begin with "We can put a man on the moon but we can't [do something very simple by comparison]." Now, NASA isn't even sure if it can fix the Hubble Space Telescope. It was supposed to be serviced by astronauts arriving by shuttle. Something may be tried with robots, but since the ISS isn't in a convenient orbit, people can't do it with current launch capacity.

Yet, the president and congress have approved all $16.2 billion of NASA's proposed budget for next year. People in Washington are talking about manned expeditions to Mars and yet they are straight-jacket-free. Feeding a crew 100 million miles away is much harder than the task of feeding a crew on the ISS 100 miles up, but never mind.

Space exploration is vital to astronomy and cosmology, and by extension to philosophy and spirituality. The problem at NASA hasn't been Mr. O'Keefe, or a loss of talent relative to the 1960s (although that could be true as well). The problem has been trying to find things for Buck Rogers to do with the taxpayers bucks. And there just isn't a good case for much of manned space flight if the idea is to do decent science. Until the culture changes from emphasizing the wishes of astronauts to the fulfilling the desires of astronomers, a new captain at the helm won't help.

© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.

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