Discovery Channel: NASA at 50

NASA Boon in Times of Bust

2008-10-17T09:29:14-04:00

In the midst of what is being called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, NASA was cleared for a slight pay raise. This week, President George Bush approved a spending plan for NASA that speeds up development of its replacement for the space shuttle and authorizes an extra shuttle flight presumably to deliver a $1.6-billion dark energy experiment to the International Space Station.

“I'm grateful to the president for his signature on the NASA Authorization Act of 2008,” NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement. “The major provisions of this authorization bill affirm Congress' support for the broad goals of the president's space exploration policy.”

It may be the “president’s” policy, but it has fallen upon Congress to take the initiative to fund the proposal. The hard part is still ahead. Spending plans passed by Congress boost NASA’s budget to $20.2 billion -- $2.6 billion more than what the president requested -- but the funds haven’t been appropriated yet.

Still, it hasn’t been a bad year for NASA, considering. While Congress met to weigh options for bailing out the nation’s banks and financial firms, the space agency won a critical battle to keep U.S. astronauts aboard the space station.

The agency battled two formidable foes: Inertia and Outrage. Inertia left NASA in the difficult of position of needing an act of Congress exempting it from a trade ban on Russian space services. Not only do Russian ships serve as the station’s lifeboats, they currently are the only vehicles that will be able to transport people to and from the outpost after the shuttles are retired in two years.

Outrage stemmed from two main issues: Simmering regrets that years of short-sighted policy and a leadership vacuum has left the U.S. in what Griffin has called an “unseemly” position of being dependent on Russia to use its own space station; and outright anger that the U.S. was indeed in the unseemly position of condemning Russian aggression into neighboring Georgia and then turning around and paying Russia for rides to space.

Apparently, this is what it takes to run a space agency in the United States these days -- to divorce yourself from the outside world and carry on as if it were the country’s absolutely top priority. I’ll be thinking about that as I sit in Houston on Nov. 3, the day before the presidential election, not watching the Dow or covering the polls. That’s the day NASA plans to brief the media about outfitting the space station for more crew.

Happy Birthday (Really!)

2008-09-24T23:36:44-04:00

Happy Birthday NASA! While you gathered on Wednesday in celebration of your 50th anniversary, the U.S. House of Representatives prepared a nice little present for you -- permission to shell out precious U.S. tax dollars to the Russians so you can get our astronauts to and from the space station, which is finally nearly finished after decades of work and $100 billion. I know you must be thrilled. You're probably just too exhausted to show it. For despite your best efforts to put on a happy face, more than a few of you took advantage of the birthday bash at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia to mention the obvious: Things ain't that great.

Your quintessential American hero John Glenn was the first to comment on the emperor's lack of clothes, noting that now that America finally has this incredible laboratory in orbit, there's no money to do any research. Glenn even had the ill-manners to point out that the U.S. might have to abandon the outpost after the shuttle is retired in 2010.

“In January 2004 the president directed a new mission for NASA to go to the moon and Mars,” said Glenn. “I thought it was great except for one thing -- the money did not follow.”

Fellow luminary Neil Armstrong, who seldom appears at public events, chose to focus on a higher calling, saying that one of the most important roles of government is to motivate its citizens, especially young people.

"NASA will rank in the top tier of government enterprises in that regard," said Armstrong, who commanded the first mission to land astronauts on the moon. "Our goal – indeed our responsibility – is to develop new options for future generations: options in expanding human knowledge, exploration, human settlements and resource development, outside in the universe around us.

"Our highest and most important hope is that the human race will improve its intelligence, its character, and its wisdom, so that we'll be able to properly evaluate and choose among those options, and the many others we will encounter in the years ahead," Armstrong said.

Agency administrator Michael Griffin then took the stage, filling a role that he has become altogether too familiar with -- the axeman. "As you walk out of this museum, look at the SR-71," he told the crowd. "We do not have one of those anymore. My tie shows an astronaut flying in a MMU (manned maneuvering unit for spacewalking) and an Apollo spacecraft. We do not have those anymore either.

"There is nothing odd about looking at old hardware in museums," he said. "But only in American aerospace can we go to a museum and look at certain artifacts and wish that we could do as well today. That should sober all of us here."

Griffin moved on to note the upcoming launch of China's third manned space mission, one that will put more Chinese in orbit at one time than the current number of Americans (one.)

"Next week, the Chinese will outnumber the number of Americans and Russians in space - separately or together. Good on the Chinese," Griffin said.

"On our 50th anniversary we are not celebrating the 20th anniversary of our first landing on Mars -- but we could have been," he said.

Not that Griffin’s ungrateful for Congress' gift -- quite the contrary. He’s just incredulous that the BEST this country can hope for is to fork over money to the Russians so the U.S. can buy seats to the station that it built.

"This will be a victory because all of the other outcomes are worse. That's the situation we find ourselves, for what the Columbia Accident Investigation Board referred to as a sustained loss of vision for the American space program and what it ought to be," he said.

Still, you people at NASA are such optimists.

Griffin said that at the agency's 100th anniversary -- even with only an inflation-adjusted budget -- NASA could be marking the 20th anniversary of a manned landing on Mars. "It requires that we act with
unusual persistence -- for Americans -- and that we stay the course, and that we stay true to
what it is we believe the proper goals are for our agency into our children's and grandchildren's time."

The Power of Many

2008-06-25T00:19:49-04:00

Scott Parazynski has a life most of us can only imagine: high school abroad, Stanford University and Stanford medical school, trained for the 1988 U.S. Olympics Luge Team, SCUBA diver, mountaineer, private pilot. And then there’s his day job: highly regarded NASA astronaut with five space shuttle missions and seven spacewalks on his resume. All before his 47th birthday.

The highlight of his life? Watching his kids grow up.

“I’m kind of nervous about how quickly the years go by,” he confides.

We’re at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and Parazynski has kindly agreed to an interview even though he’s trying to pack a full week into a couple of days before having to undergo back surgery. It’s humbling to realize that even a lean and healthy ace sportsman like Parazynski has medical issues.

He’s looking a bit thinner than the last time I saw him, probably a result of two months climbing Mt. Everest, Earth’s highest peak. I wonder if wanting to summit Everest is an astronaut’s version of a mid-life crisis.

“It was a defining moment in my life on a number of levels,” Parazynski offers.

He explains the process of acclimating to the increasingly thinning atmosphere by camping for a few days at progressively higher altitudes, then climbing back down again before attempting new heights; how you learn to move as quickly as possible through the slippery, dangerous ice falls because they are unavoidable so the only way to minimize risk is to cut how much time you spend there.

“Every time I went up, it was the hardest workout I’ve ever had in my life. Knowing I could push myself to new levels even at my advanced age of 46, was wonderful,” he says.

The defining moment of the expedition came on Parazynski’s last day of climbing. He awoke that morning at Base Camp Three, located within sight of the mountain’s top, with a stabbing pain in his back. “I thought I had just slept on it wrong, figured it was just a simple back strain probably from years and years of running and being a tall person, which was exacerbated by carrying a pack all the time,” he says.

“I might have pressed on despite the pain but I would have compromised the safety of my fellow climbers and might have ended up in a rescue situation. .You don’t want to be at 26,500 feet and have people try to pull you off the mountain. It’s just a very ugly situation. And so, I made the tough call after 59 days on the mountain and dreaming of standing right there -- I could see it; I could see it and taste being on the summit -- was a tough call personally, but I knew I had to turn around.”

“As a mountaineer, I’m measured not so much by my summits, but by my performance, my behavior all the way up the mountain and all the way down. If you’re lucky enough to have a touch-and-go at the summit, that’s great, but I’ve turned away from several summits over my many years of climbing for weather, running out of water, gear problems, what have you. It is important to keep your wits about you so I take some pride in knowing that I can still do that even with the temptation of the summit,” he says.

“I know that there were more than one death on the mountain this year because of people that placed their aspirations above their abilities,” Parazynski adds. “A Korean climber who made the summit but didn’t have enough energy to get down and was rescued, but lost several digits. It’s just not worth it.”

“Knowing that I, even in the hypoxic environment that I was in, could still exercise really good judgment and put team first was a big thing.”

Parazynski says the power of the team is the biggest lesson NASA has learned in its 50 years.

“We talk about space flights and you see crews up on orbit, but each person represents probably 2,000 or 3,000 people behind the scenes designing, building, testing. It’s just an enormous team effort, very similar actually to my Everest expedition,” he says.

“I think that any truly great accomplishment in life it’s never done by a single person. It’s always a team effort.”

Scott blogged about his Everest expedition and kept in touch with NASAWatch’s Keith Cowing who turned the talks into podcasts and weblogs.

How NASA Lost its Snap

2008-06-15T14:44:28-04:00

I have to admit to feeling a bit flummoxed every now and then by a device intended to improve my quality of life -- like the television remote control. I’m looking at a blank screen because when I hit the power button, the TV blinks on, but the content supposedly streaming through the cable in my wall is nowhere to be found.

Being human -- i.e. occasionally stupid and irrational -- I try the on/off button a bunch more times, then punch in a couple of combinations using some colored tabs perched like crown jewels at the top of the remote before giving up. Not worth it, I decide, even if I am curious how NBC followed the devotion of its entire Friday night news broadcast to Tim Russert’s death with coverage Sunday morning on “Meet the Press,” which Russert hosted before his sudden demise on Friday.

Staying on the edge is something I find myself less inclined to be concerned with as I approach 50. (Wasn’t it easier and less stressful to just walk across the room and turn a dial, or am I just being nostalgic? Now when we can’t handle our electronics, we wonder if it’s time to get screened for Alzheimer’s) Yet for NASA, losing snap is the kiss of death.

“I think we made a fundamental mistake of national policy back in the ‘60s as we were doing the moon landings and in the early ‘70s in the Nixon administration when we took NASA out of the exploration business -- not that getting to and from low-Earth orbit isn’t important -- it is -- but it isn’t the only thing that was important," NASA's administrator Mike Griffin tells me.

We're talking about the agency turning 50 and how the experiences of its younger days might prepare it for the challenges ahead. Mike reached the milestone nine years ago this year. My number's coming in a bit more than two.

“I believe that government agencies like NASA, like the National Institute of Health, like the National Science Foundation, belong on the frontier -- their own individual frontier, " he continues. "NASA belongs on the space exploration frontier. Taking us out of lunar exploration, shutting off possibilities for voyages to Mars, confining the agency to low-Earth orbit was a mistake.”

Griffin became NASA’s head three years ago when the agency was just beginning a transition triggered by the 2003 loss of space shuttle Columbia and its crew. The investigation and subsequent report set off a national discussion about the purpose of the U.S. space program. The verdict was to retire the shuttle fleet after it completed construction of the International Space Station and move on to a new spaceship that could travel to the moon and other destinations, as well as operate in low-Earth orbit.

“The shuttle program has been the recipient of a lot of praise and a lot of criticism, both of them probably justified,” Griffin says. “It’s an enormously capable vehicle and yet, it has not lived up to its goals. But that is kind of irrelevant: if the shuttle were a perfect machine, we would still need to move on because the shuttle is inherently limited in terms of its ability to fly to and from low-Earth orbit and do only that.

“NASA’s and the nation’s future in space does not lie in being confined to low-Earth orbit,” he adds. “Given that a government program is not going to have multiple systems -- I mean if I could have a system optimized for low-Earth orbit and another optimized for exploration, that’d be great, but no one’s going to give us that money -- then in my view, it’s a strategic imperative to have a vehicle which can get us out beyond low-Earth orbit. But to have a vehicle like the shuttle, even it it’s a perfectly designed vehicle, even if it operates perfectly, if it cannot take us out beyond low-Earth orbit, then we need to move on.”

Though we like to compare things in terms of money, Griffin says finances are not the relevant factors when it comes to defining NASA’s mission.

“We didn’t save money by taking NASA out of the exploration business. We still spent money on NASA. We spent money on having NASA do the wrong things. Now, if policy-makers of that era had thought more carefully about what they were doing and about its long-term consequences, they probably would have reached different decisions.

“I think it is important for senior government policy makers, agency heads including myself, to remember that part of our role is to look outward to the future,” Griffin says. “Most everything that government is involved with deals with today’s problems and today’s issues and that’s as it should be, just as in your own private personal portfolio, most of the money you make is associated with just living. But you have to set aside some money and some time to look toward your future. And government has to set aside some money -- the amount of money NASA gets is almost trivial from a government perspective … half of one-percent (of the federal budget) -- so it’s not so much about the money. It’s about the focus of attention by policy-makers on looking toward the future.”

In its early years, the United States had a clear-cut vision of what it wanted to do in space: land people on the moon. It wasn’t easy and it had never been done before. It was on the edge, pushing the frontier of possibility. Now after decades of idling, NASA is eager to show that 50-year-olds still have snap.

Caption: Mike Griffin with his wife Rebecca, being sworn in as the 11th administrator of NASA by Vice President Dick Cheney on June 28, 2005. White House photo by David Bohrer.

Out of the Abyss

2008-06-08T02:36:44-04:00

"This is going to sound strange," Mike Leinbach warns me. It’s two days before Discovery’s launch on the 123rd space shuttle mission. That means there are just 10 flights left before the program ends. Leinbach, the shuttle launch director, is in his office at the Kenendy Space Center, looking out at the seaside launch pads.

Despite the cavet, Leinbach doesn’t mince words when he tells me what he thinks has been NASA’s greatest accomplishment during his 24-year tenure.

“I hate to relate to accidents in a positive way because they obviously aren’t … weren’t,” Leinbach begins. “I remember Challenger. I was standing out there on the mobile launch platform. I had pretty much just hired in so I didn’t understand the flight regime, but then for Columbia, I was launch director for Columbia.

“To see the agency and the astronaut corps bounce back from those catastrophes I think is probably the highlight,” he says. “That we were able to rebound from them because it was so devastating, as you know. It was just so devastating.”

Like many 50-somethings, Leinbach’s affinity for space dates back to NASA’s earliest years. He remembers being on a car trip with his family at age 8 and his dad pulled off the road and turned on the radio. “We’re going to hear history be made today,” Leinbach recalls his dad saying. It was May 5, 1961, and Alan Shepard was blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the first American in space.

“At the time, I didn’t think anything of it, other than ‘That’s kind of cool,’ but when I look back on it, I firmly believe that’s what got me hooked into the space business -- at the age of 8,” Leinbach says. “My love of the agency goes back a long, long way.”

It’s a relationship that has preserved in good times and bad. “There were some really dark times,” Leinbach recalls. After the 1986 Challenger accident, for example, NASA just wanted to press ahead, not look at what had gone wrong, literally bury the issue -- and the wreckage.

When tragedy struck again in 2003 with the loss of Columbia, Leinbach, now a senior manager, recognized an opportunity. He spearheaded a program to make salvaged hardware from Columbia available to researchers.

“I don’t know whether it was a result of a shift in the country’s attitudes or a conscious decision on NASA management’s part to get out in front of the public with the facts of the accident as best we knew them,” Leinbach said. “It was much more open: ‘Here’s what we did wrong; Here’s what we did right’ as opposed to ‘We’re going to forget about that and move on.’ ”

“We’re always kind of held up as these stodgy engineers who have no emotion,” he added. “We do. We have emotion.”

I ask him if NASA is ready to take on more daunting risks, like going to the moon.

“Absolutely, 100 percent,” he assures me.

“Even if it means lose of life?”

“Yes, yes -- as terrible as that sounds,” he says.

“There’s no question that we are America’s explorers. There are other explorers across the country too, but as a government agency, we are the explorers. I really firmly truly in my heart believe that the country wants us to explore. I just wish we did a better job of telling what we do and why we do it.”

Part of the problem, Leinbach explains, is that NASA has gotten out of the exploration business by operating the space shuttles in low-Earth orbit since 1981.

“The shuttle program has done some tremendous things but we’re getting old, a ‘been-there, done-that’ kind of attitude on the public’s part and rightfully so, in part,” he says. “We need to do a better job as an agency of explaining why we’re going back to the moon and on to Mars.”

I take that as an invitation. “And why is that?”

“It’s the human spirit," Leinbach says. "It’s the spirit of adventure and discovery and moving on, moving beyond what you have, wanting more and getting more, whether it’s tangible or philosophical or emotional, just wanting more out of life."

“You know the Mars lander up there now?” Leinbach says. He’s referring to the Phoenix probe, which touched down on the northern polar region of Mars on May 25 to sample the planet’s water and determine if it was ever suitable to support life.

“Just imagine what’s going to happen if we find the evidence of life, past or present,” Leinbach says. “Good lord. That’s what it’s all about. And then one day to send men up there it’d be just outstanding. I hope I’m around to see it.”

The Come-Back Kid

2008-05-30T14:42:20-04:00

Back at the helm of NASA’s space sciences division is Ed Weiler, a Chicago boy who went to Northwestern to get a degree in astrophysics. He’s a familiar face around the agency, back at a job he held a decade ago. In between, he oversaw NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where all kinds of astronomical machines are created. Before that, Weiler was lead scientist for the Hubble observatory.

It was in that role that Weiler first came into prominence, a blue-eyed, sandy-haired straight-talker explaining to folks how the cornerstone of NASA’s Great Observatories program came to be launched with a misshaped main mirror.

“Now I talk to people from generation Y or X who don’t remember Hubble had a problem,” says Weiler. “We’ve gone far enough now that people forget.”

Once nice thing about leaving some tread on the road is you know where you’ve been and, if you’re lucky, you have a pretty good idea of where you’re going.

We’re sitting outside on an unseasonably cool day at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “The cold doesn’t bother me,” Weiler offers as I steer him away from the noise and distractions of the JPL newsroom. “I grew up in Chicago.”

It’s almost a brag, how Windy City winters prepare you to stare cold in the face. Even in southern California, where the temperature was 85-plus a few days ago. Now it’s in the 50s, just like NASA, just like Ed and just like I’ll be someday in the not too-distant future. In our culture it’s easy to forget that getting older is what we hope for.

It’s hopping around here today, the day before Phoenix lands on Mars. It’ll be the first time water from another planet is sampled -- if it works. Weiler was in charge when the last lander failed and he’s been talking up the grim Mars stats ever since he’s back in the limelight as NASA’s top space science guy.

Weiler likes a good come-back story, like Hubble’s. For you young-bloods, the telescope was outfitted with corrective optics by a space shuttle crew and went on to deliver paradigm-shifting insights into the nature of the universe, such as the fact that it’s growing even faster now than it was in its youth. I feel like that’s true in life as well.

At 59 and with 30 years of government service on his resume, Weiler could have retired by now. Except for one thing: He feels the best days are yet to come.

“I got excited by the moon program and by the Mercury and Gemini flights because I had this dream as a kid that NASA would be going to Mars and to the stars someday. I still believe that humans will travel in space. It’s our nature to explore and I still think that’s in our future. I think it’s going to be more spread out with other countries involved, but that’s still in front of us.

“I’m also convinced that it will be in this century , the 21st century -- and I’m absolutely convinced of this, maybe not while I’m still alive, or you perhaps, but sometime in this century -- we will have the technology to build and launch a telescope (perhaps humans will have to construct it in space because it’s very large) that has the ability to search the atmospheres of other planets around other stars and to find those telltale traces of life around another planet: methane, carbon dioxide , the oxygen ,the water vapor. We find those elements in an atmosphere and we’ve proven that we are not alone. There’s life out there. That only happens once in human history -- once -- to answer that age-old question. That will have profound philosophical effects on the human race. And we will have that technology in this century.

“So yeah, I there’s a future out there,” he says. And with dramatic flair, drops the clincher: “Will we have the will to grasp it?”

Getting Unstuck: 30 Years in Low-Earth Orbit

2008-05-19T13:03:40-04:00

When you hit the moon at age 11, the rest of your life isn’t going to be easy. Like a child prodigy, you’ve got that record to uphold, an achievement removed from the ordinary flow of time and displayed like a photograph at your mom’s house. It’d be perfectly understandable if you were in full crisis mode at mid-life: getting divorced, pining new cars, contemplating the meaning of life.

“At 50, you’re probably more than halfway done,” says NASA’s Wayne Hale, an even-keeled senior manager who recently left his job as shuttle program manager to help plot the agency’s course out of low-Earth orbit.

NASA plans to finish building the International Space Station in two years, retire the space shuttle fleet and develop new spaceships that can travel back to the moon and beyond.

“I think one of the things that motivates you is you think, ‘I probably have less runway ahead of me than behind, so now’s the time to really take stock of things: Do I want to drive in the NASCAR race or climb Mt. Ranier? You name it: What is your list of things you want to do before you’re done?

“People I think get reflective sometime in their late ‘40s or early ‘50s about what they want to do with life. You’ve got plenty of time ahead of you to make a significant change, but on the other hand you know there’s a limit there.

“I think the thing that really brings that home is that you look at your parents … many of us at this stage in our life our parents are getting to the age where they can’t do a lot of things that they would like to do. And you say, ‘You know, someday I’m going to be there, so I’m going to take advantage of what time I have before I get to that point.’ That motivates a lot of people and if that’s not in your thoughts when you’re late forties, early fifties, then you’re not paying attention.”

Caption: That's Wayne Hale on the right, with NASA administrator Mike Griffin on the left and press secretary David Mould between them scanning the skies above Kennedy Space Center hoping for a glimpse of the returning space shuttle Discovery last November.

Agencies aren’t human beings, of course, but they do have lifespans and life cycles, aspirations and reputations.

What bothers Hale about NASA’s turning 50 is the aging of its workforce.

“The average age of our employees is too high. We need young people, the excitement and the innovation they bring. We need more young people involved in the space program. That’s just all there is to it.

“If you look back at the glory days of what is generally Apollo, those guys were kids compared with where we are now. Yeah there were a few older and wiser folks around to keep them off some of the rocks, but basically we took some very young and energetic and excited people and gave them a large job and then stood back and watched them work. The agency needs to get back to that, I think, if we’re going to be successful.”

Fifty: The new 30

“In terms of an agency,” Hale continues, “We’re fairly young. Look at any of the other agencies in the government and they’re a lot older … the Department of the Interior and certainly the whole Defense establishment. A lot of the federal government expansion took place in the ‘30s and so as a federal agency coming into being in ’58 makes us one of the younger ones. From an institutional standpoint, you go through a period of growth and change, I’m sure, but it’s not the same as with human beings because the time scale is different and the capabilities are different.

“I would compare an agency at 50 to maybe someone in their late 20s, about to turn 30, who has just kind of gotten their feet wet in the work environment, figured out how to make things happen.

“I’m just excited to part of the agency as we get ready to go back to the moon. When I came to work for this agency many years ago, I thought we were going to do the shuttle and station thing for a couple of years and then the rest of my career would be go back to the moon and on to Mars and do other things that we’re going to do with human beings in space.

“Even though you suppress it after a while, it is a little disappointing that we spent 30 years in low-Earth orbit without sending human beings further out. That’s what inspired me as a teen-ager, the moon landings. That’s what I think will inspire teen-agers today. Not that what we’re doing isn’t important on the space station and the space shuttle -- I think it is extraordinarily important -- but the exploration vision is really motivational to me.”

The Discovery Channel’s high-definition NASA anniversary series When We Left Earth, premiers June 8. You can watch a preview here.