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Administrator O’Keefe has set a mandate that consists of three goals: 1) To improve life here; 2) To extend life to there; and 3) To find life beyond.
O’Keefe came to NASA in January of this year from the Office of Management and Budget, where he served as Deputy Director, overseeing the preparation and management of the Federal budget. His previous positions included Secretary of the Navy in 1992, and Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer of the Department of Defense in 1989 under then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.
Recently, NASA Tech Briefs sat down with Administrator O’Keefe to talk about his first ten months in office, including the expected - and unexpected - challenges he’s faced.
NASA Tech Briefs: From a scientific research standpoint, how can NASA and its partner agencies best use the International Space Station?
Sean O’Keefe: The European, Russian, Japanese, and Canadian Space Agencies all have a different way of going about their research objectives. A group of scientists and technical people from all of the different scientific communities represented in biological and physical research, materials research, etc. all emerged to look at the full array of the expectations that the scientific community had expected to be performed on the station, which up until that time, all had equal priority – everyone was number one. What I found amazing was that the Russian and Canadian Space Agencies – and to a little bit different extent, the Japanese Space Agency – all were most enthusiastic about joining us in the proceedings to see what this group came back with.
The European Space Agency said ‘That’s interesting, thank you very much, but we have a procedure we want to follow. We’ve spent the last three years organizing our research and scientific agenda, and while we’re happy to comment on your efforts, we really need to follow our own because this is what we did in order to build consensus with our scientific community in Europe.’
It was a different way that everyone went about doing it and I frankly think in our efforts to be just good stewards and managers about how we organize the science and research efforts and calibrate the expectations of the scientific community - and do what is within the realm of what we can do given the configuration of the station now and in the future - I fully expected it was us just getting our house in order. What I’ve come to find out is that it was viewed as a helpful effort on the part of other partners who said ‘Yes, we’d like to participate in this because it will help us all collectively get some sense of prioritization out of this.’
How we intend to use the station will be informed by this scientific agenda. We now have a priority that begins with number one and moves through the numerical sequence in terms of order and priority of things.
The most telling comment I got was by the head of the German Space Agency, who told me, ‘When you thought about doing this back in March, we thought best of luck, it took us three years to do this. You’ll never get this done in the span of time necessary. I’m frankly astounded that you can came back with a priority set and it is a much more organized scientific agenda than we’ve heretofore seen.’ It didn’t lack for content because every discipline has their own ideas of what’s important. But at least now it has some prioritization set so that the rest of us mere mortals can get on with the task of actually deploying a system or capability that can do what the scientific community anticipated.
This is a capability that’s been in development for the last several years. We’ve got at least two years to go and always had under the schedule through early 2004 before core complete is finished. And that is the configuration you have to have in order to permit any final permutation. If you can’t get to core complete, it’s all over. You can pick whatever version of the design you’d like – you can’t field it without the facilitating node – which is Node 2 – the compartment that permits all the other compartments to be attached. Until we get to that stage, it’s dream world. And the last I checked on the calendar, we’ve got time. We have to work this methodically and make sure we get it done right. I am more confident today than I was a month ago in what we have in place in terms of the resources, the capabilities, and the systems engineering sequence – all of it – in line to accomplish that objective. There’s been a lot of progress in the last few months. I’m really impressed.
NTB: You said in an address earlier this year that NASA is at a crossroads and what the agency needs is a roadmap to continue its work in a more efficient, collaborative manner. What steps have you taken to begin composing that roadmap?
O’Keefe: There are three things involved. The first step in that direction that we’ve tried to concentrate on heavily is to bolster and renew the credibility of the agency. One classic example, one characteristic, extremely signature kind of problem that has compromised that credibility is the Space Station. We are working feverishly to not only do it right and to field an International Space Station – and every other program we’re engaged in – impressively, but to do so in a way that restores our credibility that when we say something, we’re going to do it and we mean it, and you can count on the fact that we intend to do everything possible to deliver on that.
The second step is to vigorously pursue what we’ve talked about a lot as enabling technologies. Those really require the collaboration on the part of several NASA centers and enterprises within this institution in order to accomplish the task. The two most graphic examples of enabling technologies are first and foremost, we’ve got to figure out a way to get anywhere faster than what we do today. At flank speed, the best we can do in getting to the Moon is 25,000 miles per hour.
Hence, the Nuclear Systems Initiative, which is not necessarily an energy source of absolute preference. In my mind it’s a good one, but there may be better ones out there. It certainly is the most mature, so let’s get on with it. In the process of getting on with it, we’re going to at least triple the in-space propulsion speed that we’re able to accomplish in the next five years. It is on an aggressive course within that five-year span, and I’d like to step that up even faster. We’re looking at what appropriate missions would be demonstrators of this capacity to do within this decade. I think this is highly doable. It’s a technical challenge. You’ve got to worry about things like venting, and launching from a cold versus hot start. These are the kinds of things engineers do well. If you give them a challenge and say you want to be able to accomplish this task in that amount of time, they know how to do it. It’s just a question of conquering those technical obstacles.
But it’s going to liberate us from what has been a continuing challenge in the 44 years of this agency. And more importantly, it will open up a whole new range of technologies that will accomplish that objective even more proficiently. Once you get the ball rolling, we may actually be able to motivate a research and development opportunity that I think will then build on that success to look at a wide range of other energy applications, and at least do as well as three times improvement in speed and/or on-orbit time. The best we can do right now is a fly-by. We’re stuck with the basic laws of physics. If the camera doesn’t work exactly right when you’re in the fly-by, that’s it. It really requires that we have the capacity to maneuver, to operationally adjust to all those things, and the Nuclear Systems Initiative gives us the chance to do that.
 That requires a lot of collaboration. That kind of technology requires that we be seriously focused on leveraging all that we have in order to achieve that objective in pretty quick time. The capabilities at the very beginning, starting out of the blocks, already involve Glenn Research Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. All three have very critical pieces of this task that they’re ready to start with.
As far as other agencies, we’d be dealing with the Department of Energy in two parts of the DOE chain – the NE side, which is the commercial nuclear side or the civil nuclear applications end of it. It is the organizational element that has primarily been the developer as well as operational monitor of all the nuclear capacities on the civil end of the spectrum. The folks we’re looking to for design prowess are the Naval Reactor guys, who are part of the Department of Energy circuit and also have to report back to the Defense Department. But their primary bidding is with the DOE. They have not only design prowess, but extensive operational experience. They are now able to develop and build reactors that go aboard attack submarines that are roughly the size of a trash can and generate enough power to get a nuclear power submarine moving.
We don’t need anything nearly that elaborate. What we need is something the size of a coffee table that generates enough power to propel and keep the lights on on the space probe for an extended period of time. This is easily done without incident. They are building reactors today that last the life of the vessel, which is 40 years. This is a great operational experience; they have lots of design capability. We’ve recruited a number of folks from there to come here and we’ve got a collaborative arrangement with them. We’re working right now in order to leverage that capability rather than duplicate it. We’re very excited about that collaboration.
The other area that requires collaboration is on the human endurance, or human effects, side. The bioastronautics of human endurance in space flight is something we don’t know a lot about. As much as we’ve been doing space exploration for a lot of years, it’s sobering to realize that we just did hit the American record of longest duration in spaceflight at 196 days. It takes longer than that to get to Mars, much less back. We are big fans of round trips. One-way flights are not the thing to do. We have to at least have as much prowess and understanding of what it takes – and here’s where the synergy really pays off. If you can figure out a way to get there faster, than you’ve cut down the amount of human exposure time. But that we’re just learning what the effect is on people as a result of this is really kind of sobering.
The two astronauts who set the American record – their condition when they came back was not insignificant. They are in great physical shape, they exercise for three hours a day, and they had difficulty standing for extended periods of time for the first 72 hours they returned. The muscle mass loss was on the order of 20%. More significantly, the bone content and mass loss was verging on 5 to 10%, which is degenerative to the point of no recovery likely. That’s an incredible experience and it’s not unique. Every one of the missions has had this kind of consequence. We don’t even know what the consequence is, even just in low-Earth orbit, of folks receiving the equivalent of eight chest x-rays every day. If we’re not certain what the human endurance capacity is, we better go figure this out in record time.
In the process of doing so, it will open up a whole range of other opportunities, not only in terms of human spaceflight, but also immediate, near-term challenges. If we can figure out how to arrest bone mass degeneration, and stop it in that accelerated atmosphere, we’re talking about minimizing the likelihood that any of us will suffer from osteoporosis by the time we’re older. It is a technological challenge we’ve got to conquer – speed as well as human endurance.
The third step in setting our course is to concentrate on capabilities to ultimately pursue exploration objectives beyond low-Earth orbit. We don’t know how to do that well right now. The Space Launch Initiative and other plans have all concentrated on how to get there faster. How do you make that 8-1/2 minutes either more economically achievable or quicker or without chemical propulsion? So we cut down the ride from 8-1/2 to 7-1/2 minutes. And we cut the cost. But we’re still in low-Earth orbit. So until we can map out and chart out an approach of how we deal with this, we’re kind of restricted to the same exploration objectives. Part of our strategy is to think in terms of how in phases or stages we can accomplish the exploration objectives of going to any destination out there and laying the groundwork for future follow-on – more elaborate, more complicated, more extensive missions thereafter.
To wit, what we’re doing on Mars right now. We spent the last two years mapping it, understanding the climate conditions, the topography, where the optimum landing sites are. Step two is sending the rovers, starting with Explorers next May and June, which will arrive in January and February – it’s still seven months, and we can’t change that law of physics until we figure out how to go faster. We’re still stuck with that. It will be a while before we get the answers back from those. Over the course of that period of time, we will get much greater information, and that will then inform the successive missions. And maybe one of these days, we may be able to get humans there, or any place they want to go.
NTB: In talking about space exploration, how big a priority is it to go back to the Moon?
O’Keefe: I’ve been intrigued by the latest National Academy of Sciences priority report on looking at missions as inexpensive, medium expense, and high expense. I had no idea they had cost actuators and estimators. If I’d known that I’d have been rushing to the Academy long ago to recruit all of these people to tell us what things cost around here. They describe this as a near-term and medium-range expense mission, and I don’t understand why. It looks interesting, but it looks like it’s something they’re trying to build a case for in their own minds and I look forward to further illumination.
 There are many reasons why the Moon may be a very useful destination for longer-term objectives. If that becomes a cog, an individual element or interval, in the process of having a means to conduct operations and other space exploration objectives from there and demonstrably of value in that regard, then you’ve got something. So far, that case is not made.
If the science and research objectives will take you to somewhere, and in that intervening step, you need to be at the Moon for staging in order to accomplish that task, then that seems like a perfectly plausible view, but I haven’t seen that demonstrated yet. I don’t know that there is a science or research objective that has been defined as to why we’d want to go back. Therefore, it ought to have a logistical value in order to go back. If it has neither, why would you want to go back? The National Academy of Sciences, in all fairness, did attempt to mount an argument as to why the scientific and research objectives would be compelling to do so. It didn’t resonate with me as to why we’d want to rush right back.
NTB: One of your mandates is “to improve life here.” How has that changed since last September 11, and how can NASA’s capabilities be used to support the nation’s security and defense?
O’Keefe: In the immediate aftermath of September 11, we stepped up a serious technology research and development effort that had been underway in a nascent form to look at how we employ the technical or operational means to control commercial aircraft beyond a certain point. What the people at Langley Research Center have developed is a capability that’s been operationally tested that would provide ample warning to pilots – that’s all-weather capable – whenever they’re approaching inanimate objects: mountains, buildings, etc. At the point at which there is no longer an indicator that the pilot is receiving the warning, and after ample efforts at trying to do so, there is a technology for the capability to automatically assume and divert without human interference.
That could be very useful for a lot of reasons, and it certainly would be useful for the purpose of attempting to negate the prospect that anyone would ever seek to use a commercial airliner as a weapon again. That’s a pretty decent contribution all by itself. But if we can perfect this, work it through, and deal with the operational consequences of this, this could be a very substantial contribution. That’s part of the aviation security and aviation safety initiative that we’ve juiced up in a big way since September 11. What you’ll see in the coming year is even more aggressively implementing that aerospace/aeronautics kind of technology for safety and security purposes.
In the Earth Sciences area, we have Earth-observing satellites, which provide extraordinary all-access, all-source availability of geological, geographic, and topographical terrain condition, as well as analysis of weather patterns. That proved to be pretty handy stuff during the Afghanistan campaign. There is no state secret behind that – it’s publicly available information and the national security apparatus used it to great effect. What we thought was a nice way to map and chart climate change alternatives proved to be a pretty useful instrument. It’s just a matter of focusing your attention in the direction of utilizing that asset or consciously making it available.
NTB: How can NASA, in turn, help the airline industry out of its current crisis and instill confidence in the American public that it’s safe to fly?
O’Keefe: The best way we can help on that front is to exert some creativity in our role as the FAA’s research and development house and try to put a serious dent in the challenge of air traffic management problems. That’s a real plague on most of the airlines, particularly since September 11. The efficiencies are unbelievable. There’s not a day you don’t read the business section of any paper that says there isn’t a profitable airline out there. What we can do from an air traffic safety standpoint is to improve our management of the traffic system by participating and being as creative as we know how to with the FAA in trying to provide the technology to do that. We have efforts underway at Ames Research Center in air traffic management systems.
Beyond that, some aeronautic designs and capabilities that could be there are mostly on the safety side of the equation. We are the NTSB’s (National Transportation Safety Board) forensic house for diagnostics on what prompted failures in a number of different settings. Most notable was the American Airlines crash in New York in November of last year. We’ve been working through the analyses and forensics of the composites on those aircraft to ascertain not only what structural changes ought to be made by the airlines, but also what operational changes ought to be considered by our own air traffic management system on the takeoff and landing of aircraft. At least a portion of the story appears to have been, from what I gather, the traffic patterns and the operational conduct of takeoff and landing conditions that existed at JFK that day.
NTB: Our readers are design engineers who directly benefit from NASA’s technology transfer program. How essential is this program to your vision for NASA?
O’Keefe: I am a died-in-the-wool economist and I am of the mind that the market has to drive technology transfer efforts. And we are singularly inadequate in the public sector in this agency – however remarkable, storied, and amazing an institution as NASA is – at forecasting market changes that are driven by commercial demand. We’re not great at that, nor should we expect to be. We aren’t good at that, and if we waste a lot of time and a lot of the public’s resources to do that, it means we’ve figured out how to be industrial policy advocates, which we have proven ourselves to be poor at doing. Trying to find ways to get titanium toasters out there is just not my idea of a good thing.
At the same time, what we do have an obligation to do is make the information we have, the technologies we have, the technical breakthroughs we have experienced, as widely available as possible, short of export control limitations. Our obligation is to make it accessible, available, and understood as widely as it possibly can be. The things Langley has done on the tech transfer effort are precisely the kind of passive approach I’m talking about. Develop it, get going, use it for all the purposes we have in mind, what the objectives of the technology development would be, and then make it as broadly available as you possibly can. You do that not only by open access policies, but also proactively, participating in all kinds of different areas where folks from lots of different of market disciplines that you never imagined come rolling through and say, ‘We’ve been looking for just that thing.’
It stuns me to this day that guys like the legendary Dr. Michael DeBakey came up with the heart pump valve improvement in the last year from a NASA engineer with whom he had a casual conversation. No amount of tech transfer program could have possibly created that opportunity. It’s got to be a certain level of serendipitous event. We must do our best proactively to permit those serendipitous events to happen as widely and broadly as we possibly can without searching around for market opportunities.
NTB: What inspires you about NASA, and what has surprised you in your ten months as Administrator?
O’Keefe: There isn’t anybody in this country who has looked at what this agency does with disdain. This has always been a very energetic, extremely inspirational kind of agenda that the agency has had. If there is a limitation, it’s that it harbors and is the vessel for everybody’s fondest hopes, dreams, and expectations of what it is we think we ought to be capable of as human beings. We’re never going to succeed in all those expectations. But that sure is a wide-open portfolio. And if that doesn’t get you juiced up and alert enough to wake up in the morning and say, ‘This is going to be fun stuff,’ nothing will. It really is an absolutely fantastic portfolio, and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t see something absolutely amazing that really is worth pursuing.
What surprised me most, and maybe it shouldn’t have, is that there is absolute, raw enthusiasm in this agency, no matter where you go – what center, what enterprise, what dimension of what we do in this agency. And I don’t need to go around having morale-building sessions. Every discussion I’ve had with folks at centers as well as at Headquarters, they have a very constructive agenda where we’re talking about issues, talking about challenges. We’re not sitting around talking about what to do to get the morale built up. This is not an agency where everybody’s in the doldrums.
NTB: How are you leveraging that enthusiasm in your education initiative?
O’Keefe: That’s easy. Because among the three goals we’ve set for ourselves, inspiring the next generation of explorers – you’ve got to do that. The best part of inspiring the next generation of explorers – the education initiative – is that it’s ready-made. The information is right here. You don’t need to go out and create anything. It’s just a matter of how you package it and find a different way of making it readily, easily accessible to everybody from the principal investigator at the most high-end university engineering school you can imagine, to the third-grade teacher who can press a button and say, ‘Let me show 20 kids what is going to get them juiced up to want to do this when they grow up.’ It’s easy. It just takes imagination and innovation. It’s a joy to recruit people who come into this operation as educators or as folks who understand the nature of pedagogy in a way that really can excite kids, to bring them in and say, ‘How’d you like to work here at NASA?’ and see their eyes light up because it’s all ready-made material. It’s the proverbial kid in the candy store.
Resources:
- Contact Michael Braukus, Office of Public Affairs, NASA Headquarters, at mbraukus@hq.nasa.gov for more information.
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