Call me naive, but I tried to give O'Keefe more credit while interpreting his remarks. I got the impression he's simply asking why we should undertake an expensive and dangerous manned voyage to Mars. It's a legitimate question, isn't it? NASA's portion of my tax dollar is in high demand, with lots of worthy projects hungry for funding. Why manned missions instead of continued robotic exploration, for example? Why Mars and not another of the countless bodies worthy of study and visitation? And if we simplymust put more footprints somewhere, why not return to the moon? I think the operative word in O'Keefe's response was the word why, and I think he's asking the question honestly and in good faith.

As far as O'Keefe being a bean-counter...well, someone's got to do it. NASA's only got so many beans.

It might not sound like it, but I'm as much a fan of pure science as the next guy. And I'd love to see people living on Mars, the moon and in orbit. I'd love to be one of those people. The Goldin-Zubrin "Mars tag-team," bless them, played a serious part in rekindling a passion for all things extraterrestrial for me, but O'Keefe still feels like a (required) breath of fresh air. There seems to be a widely held view that NASA's got to get its house in order (at least in financial terms), and a bean-counter may be the best choice for that particular job.

I don't think anything O'Keefe's said indicate that he's definitely ruled anything out, or that the profit motive is the only consideration that'll shift NASA's inertia. He may not lead the cheering section like Goldin seemed to (nothing wrong with that), but I've got no problem with a more practical approach to deciding NASA's priorities.