Sean O'Keefe
Sean O'Keefe (born 27 January 1956 in Monterey, California, USA) from December 2001 to February 2005, the tenth head of the U.S. space agency NASA.
Life
O'Keefe was born in California but grew up in Louisiana. The youth was spent in various U.S. states, because his father was an officer in the U.S. Navy. After he had finished the Wheeler High School in North Stonington (Connecticut), he studied in New Orleans political science and received in 1977 from Loyola University a bachelor. He moved to New York and acquired the following year by the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, a Masters in Public Administration.
Upon leaving the university O'Keefe has been included in a program, the work should be brought closer in a U.S. government agency with the graduates. In 1980 he was appointed employees in cash and cash Appropriations Committee of the U.S. Senate and, after eight years as chief of staff of the Subcommittee on the allocation of funds for the Department of Defense.
In 1989, O'Keefe to the Ministry of Defence and spent three years working as an accountant, until he was appointed by U.S. President George Bush to Secretary of the Navy. After only three months O'Keefe took his departure in January 1993 and embarked on a career in science. First, he taught economics at the Pennsylvania State University and was dean of the graduate school there. In 1996 he was at his alma mater, the Maxwell School, a professor of business and government policy.
U.S. President George W. Bush appointed O'Keefe in February 2001 as Vice Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House, which controls the federal budget. After only ten months, President Bush had a new job for him: O'Keefe was sworn in on 21 December 2001 for the tenth Administrator of the U.S. space agency - two months after his predecessor, Daniel Goldin, had announced his resignation.
O'Keefe earned during his three- year term reputation as a "bean counter " because he seemed to manage the finances to care more than the space- technical tasks. He was also busy restructuring the management level of the space agency.
The darkest chapter of his service was the crash of the space shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003. Open investigation of the accident and the return of the Space Shuttle to flight operations were him in good stead held. After President Bush announced the new direction of the manned U.S. space flight in January 2004, O'Keefe led the implementation within NASA.
O'Keefe came under renewed criticism when he a few weeks later, canceled in February 2004, another servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Such a shuttle flight was too risky, because in an accident the International Space Station could not be controlled as " saving haven." His successor, Michael Griffin, revised this decision in October 2006.
In December 2004, O'Keefe submitted his resignation. In a letter to President Bush, he cited family and financial reasons for his decision to resign from the post of NASA conductor. O'Keefe resigned in February 2005 from his office. Two months later, Griffin took his place.
From 2005 to 2008, O'Keefe chancellor of Louisiana State University. On 1 November 2009, he assumed the office of Chief Executive Officer of EADS North America.
Plane crash in 2010
Sean O'Keefe and his son were on August 9, 2010 seriously injured in a plane crash in Alaska, when the single-engine propeller plane de Havilland Canada DHC -3 crashed on the way to a fishing trip near Dillingham, with nine people on board. In the accident, there were five deaths, among them the American politician and former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska.