Opinion: Space Shuttle <i>Endeavor</i> crew members unplugged: Shuttle nostalgia, lost moon, transhumanism and the media’s war on NASA

Tim: You mentioned the Orion program. What are your thoughts on the idea that the shuttle is now an idea whose time has come and gone? It’s almost like we’re back to a capsule model. Barbara Radding Morgan: I don’t think its time has come and gone. I think we’re — to get to the moon and go on to Mars, the Orion-type capsule is the right thing to do. But I think people are, you know, you read a lot in the newspapers about how bad the shuttle is, etc., you know, and I think we are all going to look back with great nostalgia for the shuttle, because it truly is a remarkable flying machine. And I think we can now speak firsthand and tell you what a remarkable flying machine it is. Col. Benjamin Alvin Drew, Jr.: I think that things come and go in cycles, as I’m sure you’ve seen in the press world, where the government focus comes back and forth. In the 1970s the focus was to make sure we got something that was reusable. So like you’d see these — it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars for each rocket, and mostly they’d end up either orbiting the sun or at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. So the goal then was trying to figure out how to build something we could reuse. One thing we found out was that, at least based on that initial concept, that it’s really as expensive to reuse these things as it is to start from scratch. So you’re looking at using something that’s more disposable. Plus, there’s no runway on the moon because there’s no atmosphere, so there’s no sense sending a winged vehicle out to the moon or Mars. That’s what drives the capsule, you know; we’re not going to be reusing these things, at least not sending them back like airliners, which was the initial concept back in the seventies. Barbara: I think there will be some use for winged vehicles on Mars because you’ve got atmosphere. Like Al said, it’s cyclic, and it depends on what your next goal is, what you need to get there.

Paul Thornton: How do all these discussions of safety, because it really seems like all the foam problems are really hard to fix. And you know we’re constantly talking about that, and you see these reports of two engineers giving a mission a no-go, recently. How do your discussions go, how do these resonate in the astronaut corps? Because I mean, you guys are still going up. How do you view these safety concerns? Alvin: It’s a risk. It’s a known risk. The very first day we interviewed, before we were astronauts — this was just to get on the job — John Young stood up in front of us and whips out a bunch statistics about loss of pilots and loss of aircraft during World War II and Vietnam... And then he whips out their model statistics, the probabilities for shuttle losses. The punch line of the whole thing was that the risk in shuttle missions was equivalent to flying 60 missions over Ploesti or Hanoi. And he said, ‘This is real risk. This is not just flying across the Atlantic. Keep that uppermost in your thoughts as you go through your interviews this week. I know you all think this is a dream come true, but you need to remember there’s real danger involved in this...’ So all of us are aware that there are risks, and we are continuing to try to mitigate those risks... Barbara: I think I can speak to that too. I was the backup, in the teacher-in-space program I was Christa [McAuliffe]’s backup, trained with them, trained with the Challenger crew, wanted to be there. Um, and we had the accident. NASA asked me if I wanted to continue on in the role of teacher in space, and fly within the next couple of years. And I said yes, and it wasn’t just that I said yes without thinking, I gave it really, real serious thought. But the thing that kept coming back to me was, there were kids all over the country looking at adults to see what adults do in a bad situation. And I felt it was really important for them to see that we figure out, we go back and figure out what we did wrong, fix it, and we try to make it better... The thing is that space flight, as Al said, is risky, and when you get into the bowels of the orbiter and you look at it and you see how many zillions of wires and how complex all the programs are to make these things work, you almost wonder why we haven’t had more accidents... Tim: Is the country too risk averse? I mean, should we just get used to the idea that if people are going to do this people are going to die, and, and we shouldn’t, you know, stop heaven and earth every time it happens? Al: There’s a balance you have to achieve between... You have to take calculated risks but you don’t want to take unnecessary risks. So I think it’s good that NASA gets this scrutiny every time we do take a risk because it means we don’t take those risks cavalierly. But we do... We’re definitely more risk averse than the generation previous. Uh, from my perspective, those were the people who had gone through World War II, and seen lots of people dying, and had a sense that that was part of the cost of undertaking risks like that. And we haven’t seen anything like that for a generation, so our threshold for what we will accept has gone down a lot. Is that right or wrong? I don’t know that there’s a good answer to that, but we are more risk averse. Tim: Does the lack of an economic and military competitor to the United States make us more risk averse? Al: It’s more than that. Back in the 1960s, we were pretty much in a struggle with the Soviet Union to decide who was going to be the dominant nation on this planet. And at that point the space race was a substitute, I consider, for a world war. The nation marshaled its resources and economy to undertake something that was extremely difficult. It’s the same thing you do in warfare. Who can marshal their forces the fastest. Whoever could demonstrate that was probably going to be the survivor; whoever didn’t was probably going to go away in the following decades, which is what happened. So we had a real sense of urgency about the space race that was much bigger than putting a flag on the moon, whether it was for science or for exploration. Right now we don’t see anybody out there — I mean even if we had a competitor like China, who was a direct threat to us — I mean, you don’t have anybody in China saying ‘We will bury you,’ or having an openly adversarial relationship with the U.S. like it was with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. That sense of fear isn’t there the way it was in 1957 with Sputnik. It’s just not there right now, so we look at that cost-vs.-risk analysis that we go through and it’s just not going to have the same — you’re not going to take the same kind of risk...

Tim: What are we learning from a space station that’s inside the Van Allen Belt, where you’re not really exposed to the full horror of space that, even the guys on Apollo got really fried in those couple of days... Alvin: What we’re actually learning is how to build large, complex structures in space. You’re not going to go up in a Boeing 787 unless you start out with a small plane and work your way up. Until the space station the largest structure we had put up in space had been things like space shuttles, telescopes. If we’re going to go up to places like Mars and get beyond the Van Allen belt and out to the solar system we’re going to need large structures, lots of storage, lots of life support equipment, things that can house us for a very long voyage, kind of like ocean-going vessels. And we don’t have a big learning set for that right now; the Russians have put up a few versions of space stations, we had Skylab. And none of those things are going to get us to Mars and back. And so, yes, we’re trying to do science in the space station; it’s a worthy goal. But I think that one thing, the big lesson we’re going to take back from this is that we’ve put that together so we see what works and what doesn’t work. Barbara: I totally agree. It’s all about how, I mean, as much as large structures it’s about things like how, how do you have a healthy environment in a can that’s off this planet Earth? You know, that also ties in with how do you have a healthy environment right here on Earth. Also, uh, one of the things I’ve been most impressed with during my time at NASA is the international aspect to all this. And I really, that was a big surprise to me. When I was a kid we were always scared of the Russians. You know, we were the kids that had to have the exercises of diving under the tables. I’m probably a little older than most of you here, so you probably didn’t dive under the table when you were a kid in third or fourth grade... Paul: Except for earthquakes... Barbara: ...I can tell you the first time that, this was probably about, um, 12 or 15 years ago, getting into one of the elevators at the Johnson Space Center, and everybody in that elevator but me was speaking Russian. And uh, I looked around and thought, boy this is a lot different than when I was in third grade... Sam Whitefield: If the ISS isn’t completed by 2010 when the shuttle stops flying — I mean, right now, your main goal is to complete it, but if it isn’t — what will you feel that you have actually accomplished? Barbara: Interesting question. Alvin: That is pretty good. Barbara: He needs to be running NASA. In fact if Mike Griffin heard him he’d say, ‘Come work for us.’ Alvin: On the space station right now, we’ve got a running orbital laboratory. We’ve got about a half acre of, actually about three-quarters of an acre of solar cells up there right now. Barbara: That’s really cool. Alvin: By the end of next year we’ll have added a European laboratory, a Japanese laboratory, we’ll put up that last quarter-acre of solar arrays on the space station, and that will be, we’ll have an operable space stations. The Russians will be doing a few things. At that point all we’ll be doing that way is bringing up more experiments and bring logistics up, like food, water and air to do logistical support on the space station. So, you know, we’ll probably lose a few parts if we stop before 2010, but even if we stopped today we’d still have an operable, usable space station to go up and get lots of the science we need to go out through the solar system...

Tim: What role is genetic engineering, and modification of human beings, going to have in longer-term space travel? Alvin: The first thing is that you’re going to have the ability to foresee any problems in a mission, so we can tailor what kind of medical preparations we’ll need. We can take up the proper cocktail of prescriptions on a mission. So if somebody, if your genetic code is prone to diabetes, you might bring up what you’d need to deal with that. So that will really help us out, in terms of scoping out; right now we take a huge pharmacy of drugs up and it’s only for a two-week mission, because you have to cover for everything. Imagine if you can tailor that to what the real risks are. Barbara: Some of that research is going on now. One of the experiments we did on our mission had to do with bone loss, and testing a pharmaceutical they’re looking at to help mitigate the bone loss.

Tim: What’s the future of manned, excuse me, of private space travel: the various Burt Rutan efforts and all these people who complain that NASA isn’t doing enough to help develop a private industry? Cmdr. Scott J. Kelly: One of the things is that NASA has never had a mandate from Congress to develop a private spaceflight system. I mean, Congress gives NASA money and says ‘Here’s what we want you to do with this money.’ Never have they ever said, ‘We want you to develop a system to put people in space for vacation, or, uh, you know, personal purposes, you know. With that said, I think the whole private spaceflight thing is great. I think where the uh, I think the real money will be made, and the real industry eventually will not be in putting people on this elliptical, or parabolic, flight for, you know, seven minutes of looking at the horizon and a few minutes of microgravity. Nor will it be putting someone in a hotel in space. It will be putting them around the Earth for several orbits, you know, being able to, long enough to get to experience the view, get to appreciate floating in microgravity, but not be like an expedition-type experience where, you know, living in space for a couple of weeks is, I think that’s where the industry will eventually develop to, someday. So you know, I’m excited about it. I think it’s great... Alvin: Think about the 1930s in aviation, where you had barnstorming going on, you had the Bendix trophy and all these races going on. The industry moved by leaps and bounds because you had a lot of people thinking about the subject. And I think this is the case, where you’ve got lots of rich guys from Silicon Valley thinking about the subject... Scott: Getting back to the question you asked about, you know, NASA has never developed this, you know, a way for the non-professional astronaut to get into space. Do you think that’s something that NASA was supposed to do? I mean, you read in the newspaper, that’s a common perception... Tim: Well there was some Reagan-era initiative*, wasn’t there, about doing more to support development of a private space industry? Scott: I don’t recall anything. Tim: Well yeah, I do think that is something NASA should be doing. You know, if, uh... You mentioned aviation: If, 40 years into the history of air travel it had been only a government game, it would, that wouldn’t... Scott: Shouldn’t that be something that Congress should be doing then, and not NASA? I mean, NASA, it’s against the law for NASA to start... Jim Newton: I don’t think he was proposing that NASA should be doing something that’s against the law but whether Congress ought to authorize NASA to... Scott: So really the question is... Tim: Well your question was: Is that something NASA should be doing, and I would answer yes. Whether Congress needs to authorize it, or... Scott: So the American public really has to vote in, you know, members that have this particular position, and then they appropriate the funds. They’re required to do that. I mean that’s how our government works. And there’s all these people saying, well NASA hasn’t done enough, you know, in this particular area. NASA can’t do anything that they’re not directed to do...

Tim: What’s the payoff for going back to the moon? Alvin: I think the payoff is that we spent, a generation has gone now. John Young has just retired; that’s our last lunar astronaut, gone. So if we’ve got to go and get a sense of instincts, not just the knowledge that’s in the books but the direct experience, we’ve got to go back and reconquer that now. I think if we had kept going on to Mars in the wake of the moon missions in the seventies we wouldn’t need to be going back to the moon now, but here it is 40 years later, and we need to go back and learn some of those things again. Two days away in a can of beans so you can make your mistakes in your own backyard, rather than go out and get halfway to Mars and discover something we could have learned in lunar orbit.

Tim: We’re in this period where there have been, I know the whole drinking-before-spaceflight story fell apart, but there was the kidnap-astronaut story. Where are we now in terms of the reputation of astronauts, you know, kids looking up to astronauts, all that sort of thing? Scott: You know, there was a lot of media attention on that particular case, and if you read the report, and looked at some of the articles and watched some of the television news programs that were dedicated to this report, it was clear that some of the people didn’t even read the report that were putting these very, very brazen headlines about, you know: Shuttle pilots flying drunk. I thought it was very, very irresponsible. And if you actually dug into the details of this, this was apparently one person giving — and it’s kind of questionable whether this was one person’s account to one member of this board or one person’s account to three members of the board, but it was an account, this whole astronaut-drinking thing was an account of one person’s opinion, basically, unsubstantiated. There was no evidence that this ever occurred, there was no... And you know the board was critical of the fact that when NASA went back and did their own investigation, it wasn’t really an anonymous thing, an anonymous system to raise this issue. We have had in place an anonymous reporting system for years. Many, many years. And there’s never been one case of even one person mentioning anything like this. You’d think if someone would have had this concern it would have been raised in either, you know, a public manner, or in an anonymous manner. It never was, and I think there’s a big story in how the press in this particular case has been, you know, just gone right for the headlines that would attract the most attention without doing any of the investigative reporting. Tim: Isn’t part of that story that if this had happened in 1967 instead of 2007 the press wouldn’t have done that, that there’s actually, that the mystique of astronauts isn’t what it used to be? Scott: I didn’t read any story that mentioned that. That mentioned this kind of comparison between now and then. Tim: No, I just mentioned it... Scott: Yeah. You said part of this story was this comparison. I didn’t... Tim: You said the story is that the press screwed it up. I’m saying part of the issue is that press is less deferential, maybe to everybody... Scott: And maybe even to the truth.