David Livingston, Leonard David, and I interviewed Kathy Lueders, the program manager, on Monday. The podcast of it is now up. We basically ignored the talking points put out by PAO, and just asked her questions, some of them philosophical. I suspect it’s probably one of the most in-depth interviews she’s ever had. I gave her a copy of the book afterward.
BTW, I’ll be on The Space Show myself next Friday, to discuss the Kickstarter project.
[Update a while later]
I didn’t post this when it came out, because I was busy with conference stuff and other things over the weekend, but the latest Space Access Society update posits a theory that the commercial crew fight is a heating up of the never-ending war between Huntsville and Houston.
RE Houston versus Huntsville, I’m not sure “theory” is a strong enough word for it. Best fit to the facts we’ve seen so far.
Full piece at http://www.space-access.org/updates/sau147.html – the short version is, once Shuttle program wind-down was set, Huntsville’s ongoing inability to develop any practical replacement (EG, the Ares 1 “shake or bake” booster) went from an expensive eccentricity to being a threat to Houston’s core program, operating Station.
Houston responded with Commercial Cargo then Commercial Crew, whose success Huntsville in turn took as a threat to their core program, developing impractically expensive boosters.
Commercial Cargo slipped through before Huntsville could react, but they’ve been slow-rolling Commercial Crew from the start, reduced-funding-wise and with repeated attempts to add programmatic hobbles.
One side effect of this is prolonged dependency on Soyuz as a single-point Station failure mode. Given that Huntsville’s main hope for extending SLS till they can all collect pensions is an eventual Station shutdown that’d allow refocusing all NASA exploration funding on an SLS-based Mars program, they have every incentive to keep on slow-rolling Commercial Crew for just as long as they can get away with it.
Which is by way of an explanation for all the people we’ve seen who just don’t understand why the Huntsville SLS/Orion coalition seems so irrationally unwilling to live-and-let-live. It’s not irrational. Yes, the results of Crew delays are potentially very bad for the nation (Station represents a national investment well north of a hundred billion dollars) but potentially very good for Huntsville, and nobody’s been calling them on it. At least not till now.
Anyway, I’d describe the response to the piece so far (in some very interesting places) as “thoughful silence.” I gather a lot of people hadn’t looked at the matter this way before.
I listened to the interview with great interest. Thanks Rand for keeping it spontaneous and “off script”. I found her answers to be not only thoughtful but incisive and enlightening (for me).
This interview was the first time in a long time that I went away with hope rather than misgivings for the future of NASA…
Excellent interview. It helps hugely that all the interviewers actually understand the subject…
Yes, I was very glad to hear that Lueders obviously gets it about it being a commercial program for which going full Old-NASA would be fatal.
Interesting point at about 38 minutes in: Lueders says in the event of a sudden Soyuz problem, she’d really like to be able to tell her bosses “we can certify it ready in six months”, but the program isn’t there yet. The good news I see here: They’re obviously thinking about the issue.
The less good news: My takeaway from the way she phrases it (and from her careful avoidance of saying anything about how soon they *could* go in an emergency) is that any shortcutting of full NASA certification before any crew flies is still a very sensitive subject within NASA.
SpaceX’s first uncrewed flight to ISS is scheduled for March 2016, FWIW.
It helps hugely that all the interviewers actually understand the subject…
Yes, that was probably an unusual experience for her.