What the future holds

We have a budget proposal from the President that expands ISS utilization, invests in building a commercial LEO services-based launch capability, promotes a push to do R&D on exploration-enabling technologies, and, yes, cancels the Constellation program.

We have a Congress that, amongst the members who seem to care, largely doesn’t like this proposal, but is split amongst the various local concerns about what the best response to the budget is.  I have to admit that I share Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s sense of irony at a Democratic White House arguing for increased privatization against Congressional Republicans advocating the continuation of a monolithic government program.

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LAUNCH Water Day 1 Recap

After working on the LAUNCH:Water concept for the past year, we finally kicked it off yesterday — along with our cool new Nike-designed website.

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Heavenly Answers for Earthly Problems

I’m SO excited to share details about NASA’s newest, coolest, never-been-done-before sustainability initiative, LAUNCH:Water.

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Counterpoints to the FUD

There is a lot of FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt – being thrown up in the nascent debate over NASA’s new direction.  Some people are saying that commercial providers aren’t ready to be trusted with America’s astronauts and won’t be for some time.  Others suggest that it calls for the wholesale commercialization of NASA.  Still other sources insinuate that we are facing the elimination of the astronaut corps.  From where I sit, none of it is accurate.

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden has repeatedly reiterated that he believes there will continue to be a role for a professional NASA astronaut corps.  Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said at last week’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference that the “wonderful people working Constellation did not fail,” but that they were not given the resources they needed and that it did not make sense to continue developing a system that would not even be ready to arrive at the ISS until after its planned de-orbit.  There will still be a need for specially-trained scientists and engineers for on-orbit operations, probably even more so as the number of “spaceflight participants” increases.

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Looking forward

I wish more people could be here at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation conference in Crystal City.  The commercial space community is so vibrant and eager to step up to the challenges ahead.

DoD is looking to them to help usher in an era of operationally responsive space access.

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The challenge and the opportunity

“Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac

The new NASA budget is a fundamental challenge to the way we operate in the human spaceflight community.  It asks us to stop expecting Washington or another JFK to tell us what to do and demands that we determine what we can offer the nation and set out to break as many boundaries as we can, while respecting the fiscal realities this country faces.

We can either fight this “paradigm shift,” as some have called it, or we can embrace it and make it our own.  Human space exploration is not going to die because of the cancellation of the Constellation program.  The American human space program itself will only die if we fail to rise to this challenge.  The NASA community has core assets and capabilities, such as the premier ability of JSC’s Mission Operations Directorate to conduct launch, ascent, and reentry of human crews, that must be conserved and shared if we are to succeed.

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The new NASA

The reports on the “death” of America’s manned space program are greatly exaggerated.  Contrary to the opinions of some, I think the new budget proposal for NASA is a much-needed course correction that brings the agency back to a focus on its core strengths – research, development, and exploration.

Yes, the Constellation Program will be canceled. The Ares I and V booster rockets and the Orion crew exploration vehicle are going away. The Space Shuttle will be retired as scheduled.  In their place will be a robust commercial Low Earth Orbit capability built on the premise of multiple providers competing to provide NASA the best offer for services.  NASA will also fund a significant heavy-lift R&D program, likely based out of Marshall Space Flight Center, to develop “game changing” and affordable new rocket technologies.

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Dreading the end of the Space Shuttle Program

Note: The intent of this post is not to express an opinion on the path that should be taken by NASA or its future programs. It is simply an observation from someone experiencing the end of an era.

Have you ever had the feeling of grieving even before a loss?  You see it coming and know there’s nothing you can do. Your senses are heightened to every little intricacy and you want to preserve all the details before it is too late. That is the way I feel about the Space Shuttle Program. I’ve worked at the Kennedy Space Center in various areas for roughly the past eight years. That makes me practically a newbie to most of my co-workers, but it feels like a long time to me. Long enough for KSC to feel like home. It is strange and sad to think that it will all be over in a matter of months.

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Time to Grow Up

So maybe being 35 it might be time for me to start thinking about growing up.

I don’t mean getting stodgy or conservative or saying things like, “because we have always done it that way” but I mean giving up some of the tactics that I honed at a young age to survive the wilds of Junior High that might not be so appropriate anymore.  You see in Junior High I was picked on mercilessly by some of the guys (who my teachers assured me were only doing it because they were threatened by me- fat lot of consolation that was when I would go home crying every day). My survival strategy became to be as cool as possible. Luckily I had an older sister who through osmosis I could learn from and start to take on the ways of the cool rebel kids. I shaved the sides and back of my hair, wore dark lipstick and high top skater shoes.

It has served me well over the years. Although I took all honors and AP classes in high school, I escaped nerdom, played sports, and once I hit 9th grade never got picked on again. In college, I had fun, did what I wanted and took on my career fearlessly. I was not usually intimidated by a room full of senior engineers once I got to NASA because, hey, they were not nearly as cool as me. Heck I even created a whole space holiday around being cool.

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If you could design the ISS website, what would it look like?

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

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