NASA Chief Is Resigning After 3 Years, Officials Say

By WARREN E. LEARY

Published: December 13, 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator who guided
the agency through sweeping changes after the Columbia shuttle accident,
will resign and pursue a job as chancellor of Louisiana State
University, agency and university officials said on Sunday.

Mr. O'Keefe, who has led the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration for three years, will announce his resignation this week
and is scheduled to visit the main L.S.U. campus in Baton Rouge on
Wednesday and Thursday for interviews and meetings, they said.

Mr. O'Keefe was out of town and not available to comment, said an agency
spokesman, Glenn Mahone, but the administrator was expected to address
the issue this week, perhaps as early as Monday. Mr. Mahone said he
could not comment on the reports.

However, an official in the agency said Mr. O'Keefe was set to resign
his post "to pursue other opportunities." It was unclear, he said,
whether Mr. O'Keefe would remain with the agency long enough to see the
space shuttle fleet, grounded since the Columbia accident, return to
flight. The first flight is now scheduled for late May 2005.

No successor to Mr. O'Keefe has been chosen, officials at the agency and
on Capitol Hill said, adding that the White House is considering a
half-dozen candidates. Mr. Charles Zewe, spokesman for the L.S.U. Board
of Supervisors, said on Sunday that Mr. O'Keefe had been invited to seek
the job of chancellor and submitted his formal application Friday night.

Dr. William L. Jenkins, the university president, asked Mr. O'Keefe, a
longtime friend, to consider the position and recommended him to the
search committee, Mr. Zewe said.

"Bill Jenkins has long admired Mr. O'Keefe and thinks he would be a
perfect fit as someone with a national reputation to take the university
to a new level," Mr. Zewe said. "We want to promote the university's
academic and research accomplishments and be known for more than having
great sports teams."

President Bush nominated Mr. O'Keefe, then deputy director of the Office
of Management and Budget, for the NASA job in November 2001. Mr.
O'Keefe, who acknowledged his lack of technical credentials,
good-naturedly accepted the criticism that he was a "bean counter" sent
to NASA to put its finances in order.

NASA, plagued with cost overruns on the International Space Station and
other projects, needed to overhaul how it did business, he said.

However, a year after he took the post, on Feb. 1, 2003, Columbia
disintegrated while re-entering the atmosphere from a mission, resulting
in the loss of its seven-person crew. The accident, which investigators
attributed partly to a "damaged safety culture" at NASA and poor
communications within the agency, resulted in a major effort to
transform the space agency that dictated the rest of Mr. O'Keefe's term.

Responding to the recommendations of the Columbia Accident
Investigations Board, Mr. O'Keefe promised to carry out all of the
changes it suggested and to institute other reforms to strengthen the
agency.

"We get it," he said in response to the criticism, and space policy
experts generally gave him good marks for instituting better fiscal
control and starting a reform of the NASA culture.

Mr. O'Keefe helped in formulating a new space policy, which President
Bush announced last January as a pay-as-you-go exploration initiative to
send humans to the Moon and, later, to Mars. With the backing of the
White House, NASA received its full 2005 budget request of $16 billion
to start the program, which includes retiring the shuttle by 2010 and
beginning work on a replacement.

Mr. O'Keefe's departure would be the latest in a series of high-level
changes in the Bush administration as the president heads into his
second term.

There has been speculation that Mr. O'Keefe was ready for a new job
after the election. He is a longtime ally of Vice President Dick Cheney,
having worked for Mr. Cheney at the Defense Department in the early
1990's as a comptroller and briefly as Secretary of the Navy.

Dr. John Logsdon, director of George Washington University's Space
Policy Institute, said in an interview on Sunday that it was generally
believed in Washington that Mr. O'Keefe was hoping for a high position
at the Pentagon in the second Bush administration.

"He got things pointed in the right direction at NASA, which he expected
at the beginning to be a short-term job," Dr. Logsdon said, "When
nothing opened up in Washington on his level, he looked elsewhere. He's
let it be known that he's always enjoyed the academic life."

Mr. O'Keefe, a Louisiana native who graduated from Loyola University in
New Orleans, previously held teaching and administrative positions at
Syracuse University, where he received a master's degree in public
administration, and at Pennsylvania State University.

Florida Today, a newspaper in Melbourne, Fla., reported on Saturday that
Mr. O'Keefe acknowledged in a brief telephone interview that he had been
solicited by L.S.U. and was interested. But the paper said he declined
to discuss if or when he would leave the space agency.

Copyright 2004, The New York Times Company