Since taking office in December, NASA's new administrator has been making the rounds of the agency's far-flung outposts -- listening a lot, not saying much and spreading a big-time case of the jitters just about everywhere.

Why?

Because Sean O'Keefe is not about space or aeronautics. He is about money -- and specifically, less money.

"I'm a nonscientist, nontechnologist, nonengineer," he told scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California last week.

It's harder to pin down just what O'Keefe is. This much is known: He is a former deputy in the White House budget office, and President Bush's choice to bring to heel the seemingly out-of-control spending on the international space station, now a projected $5-billion over budget.

The once-gilded space agency, O'Keefe said, despite its popularity and accomplishments, "is at a crossroads . . . everything is on the table."

It's that word "everything," that has made a lot of people, not just the agency's 18,000-person work force, very nervous, indeed.

Is he a surgeon or a butcher? What else might he target besides the space station? Programs might be halted. Jobs might be lost. Some of the agency's 10 regional centers might be closed.

What about bold and popular missions already in the pipeline? The planned missions to Mars, for example, or the $488-million trip to Pluto now on the drawing board.

More will be known Monday, when the president unveils his 2003 budget. For now, O'Keefe is offering little reassurance.

"I will love to talk to you Monday," he said. "We'll work it all through in the next few months."

Some tough talk has come from others in the administration, however. Mitch Daniels, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, warned recently that the space station will be highlighted in the 2003 budget as one of the federal government's most inefficient and wasteful programs.

"The space station has been the subject of some of the biggest overruns ever in the federal government," he said. "It certainly will be reported."

The way of the 'Mir'

There's little comfort in O'Keefe's words for Charles Vick, senior space policy analyst for the Federation of American Scientists.

"I just hope he is getting the message of how important all this is," he said. "As a nation we push the basic sciences to push technology, and we push technology for the betterment of us all.

"I know how important national security is to this administration," Vick said, "and national security benefits from technology advances, too. It's crucial to our staying ahead in the world."

O'Keefe only hinted at his intentions during his visit to Pasadena's jet propulsion lab, which manages many of the agency's deep space missions. Afterward he praised the JPL workers and pronounced himself "juiced up."

He warned, however, that he had little interest in "missions that have as their only objective a destination -- with no other purpose in mind except to arrive there. We should expect more than that."

O'Keefe follows Dan Goldin's 10-year occupation of the top office in NASA. In that time, the international space station finally became operational, though not yet complete. It shocked people with its price tag, however.

In 1993, when the current design was adopted, NASA said the station would cost $17.4-billion to build. Last year, estimated total construction costs climbed to about $30-billion, or about $5-billion over the $25-billion limit set by Congress.

Bush responded with the O'Keefe appointment.

Vick, of the Federation of American scientists, said he has "a lot of concerns" about O'Keefe, but added, "I think he will listen. I think he is reachable."

In the next breath, however, he worried: "Do we really want to shelve the shuttle (used to assemble and resupply the space station)? That's what is staring us in the face. The station could go the way of the Mir -- too expensive to operate and too expensive to abandon."

'Don't punish the innocent'

Andrew Cheng wears a wristwatch and marks important dates on his calendar -- just like people who aren't planning a trip to the edge of the solar system.

At work, however, Cheng measures time in larger increments. For more than a decade he and a handful of other scientists around the country have been planning a 3-billion-mile, robotic flight through cold, black space to one of mankind's most distant, mysterious destinations ever: icy Pluto, once known as Planet X.

It takes Pluto almost 250 years to complete a single orbit of the sun, and intercepting the planet on this almost incomprehensible journey will require an estimated 10 years of continuous flight. The mission's projected arrival is 14 or 15 years from now. Some scientists involved in getting a spacecraft to Pluto probably will die of old age before they see the mission completed.

Cheng, now 50, said Pluto "is most of what I will do for the rest of my life.

"I've been involved in the planning since 1990," he said. "There have been lots of good times and lots of bad. We've had our hopes raised and dashed many times. NASA first said we could afford it, then canceled us."

But the mission was popular with the public, so NASA resurrected it and tried a different strategy to fund it. The agency asked several teams of scientists to "bid" on the cheapest, most efficient way to get to Pluto, and selected a team lead by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Cheng is the project manager.

The mission survived because of a groundswell of support from the public, the scientific community and even Congress, Cheng said. "Pluto has a certain drama to it. It's the only planet we've never been to, and it's unique."

Pluto is small and strange. It rotates on a tilted axis, almost on its side. It has its own moon, discovered in 1978, called Charon. Both appear to be covered with frost. In Roman mythology, Pluto is the god of the underworld, and Charon is the ferryman across the river Styx.

"It's small, icy. It's not rocky like Mars, or a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn," said Cheng. "It's just different. We're really not that sure of its makeup."

Despite the difficulties and uncertainties, deep space exploration has enormous scientific value, said Tom Krimigis, Cheng's boss and head of the space department at the Johns Hopkins lab.

And while the space station may need some belt-tightening, he acknowledged, NASA's programs to explore space with unmanned vehicles have been good stewards of the taxpayers' money.

A good example of a cheap, successful program came in February of last year, Krimigis said, when a small spacecraft called NEAR Shoemaker touched down on the barren, rocky surface of 433 Eros, successfully completing history's first landing on an asteroid.

The NEAR mission established "a new paradigm for space exploration," he said. "We did it for $223-million, 30 percent less than the cap set by NASA. It was good science for low cost."

With O'Keefe now at the NASA helm, Krimigis said, he is worried about other unique and ambitious projects long in the works, including the one to Pluto.

"Don't punish the innocent and reward the guilty," he said.

Whatever is decided about the Pluto mission, it will have to be soon.

On its long solar orbit, Pluto already is beginning to move away from the sun. As it does, it gets colder. Eventually, its atmosphere freezes and falls to the surface of the planet. Or so the thinking goes.

"We can't study it (the atmosphere) if it's not there," said Cheng.

So, in order for the mission to work, the spacecraft must be launched in 2006, ensuring a flyby of Pluto in 2016 or 2017.

Congress provided $30-million in fiscal 2002, but 2003 is another matter.

"Don't say I'm anxious about Monday (budget day)," Cheng said. "Just say I am very, very interested."

The Pluto mission is funded through September.

"NASA capped the mission at $500-million, and we came in at $488-million," said Krimigis. "We have a bird in hand with this mission, not one in the bush. We can go to the last unexplored planet in our solar system, at great scientific benefit and for a reasonable cost.

"I just hope we are allowed to do that. I hope that sanity prevails."

-- Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report.

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