When Sean O'Keefe took over as head of NASA, his instructions were daunting: Control a runaway budget, restore waning morale, and mount a successful operation or two. Now there's a new mission: Fulfill the president's multibillion-dollar, multiyear plan to explore the moon and Mars. Though dismissed by some as mere politics, the presidential directive had very real consequences, reassigning almost every NASA dollar to the goal. Here's what he has to say about the new race for space.
WIRED: Critics say that NASA needs better management and clearer goals. Are they right?
O'KEEFE: Well, let's wind the tape back just a touch here. It was August 26 of last year when the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report came out. Since that time, the president has developed a strategy, a policy, and a budget to support it. We have begun transforming the agency's management. We have identified technologies we need. Hey, by Washington bureaucratic standards, this is lightning speed.
So what are the goals of the US space program?
The president issued a very specific set of strategic objectives. The goal includes human exploration. It is a return to the moon to understand the potential resources there, the capacity to build the infrastructure to go anywhere beyond that, mounting a potential mission to Mars and, frankly, any other destination. We're trying to develop the technologies to make all that possible, rather than saying, "Here is a destination and a calendar to drive you." That's not how we're doing business here.
Do you feel the private space companies nipping at your heels?
Absolutely not. I think that's the greatest thing going. It's exactly in line with what we want to promote. More power to them.
The SpaceShipOne launch, in the Mojave Desert, was amazing.
Sure. But let's put this in a relative context. Mike Melvill went half the altitude Alan Shepard did, for a fraction of the amount of time, did it 40 years later, and flew in a plastic airplane fueled by laughing gas. From a technical standpoint, this was a modest objective, except for one major point: They did it themselves. It's like a bunch of guys doing this in their garage. If we mounted something like that, even if it was successful, there would be a commission investigation the next day. Everybody would be probing everything under the sun. A publicly accountable organization has a whole different set of standards. The SpaceShipOne flight was a truly amazing achievement, one that we all ought to be ebullient about. It is the American spirit on display.
But they don't have the same oversight as you do. Eventually those guys are going to kill somebody.
I don't mean to suggest that this is something to lament or celebrate. It just is. The public programs for exploration ought to be dedicated to those technical limitations that have yet to be conquered. The private efforts ought to avail themselves of technology that's already been developed - not because we tell them to, but because they want to make it accessible. It's a perfect combination.
You sound like you're hoping to outsource rocket building and satellite launching.
You got it. They have a lot of work to do, but it's within visible range. This could be exactly what everybody has been looking for.
Might a space race with China heat things up again?
They are training engineers and scientists - well, engineers, principally - at five to six times the rate we're doing right now in the US. They're viewing this as the technology horsepower to get them where they want to go as an industrialized nation. Every China expert I've talked to says that's their stated national objective.
So do we cooperate or compete?
We'll see. I don't think it necessarily portends either direction quite yet. There is nothing about China's behavior that suggests at its core anything other than national interest and technology development - and sovereignty. No one is ascribing any specific belligerence to them. If that remains as is, it suggests all kinds of possibilities.
Like what? What do we gain by cooperating?
Look at the string of things we do every day that has roots in the technology developed in the Apollo era. CT scans, cataract detection, highway reflectors, heart pumps. The grooves in the road that you hit when you've gotten too close to the median strip were developed by NASA to drain the excess water off shuttle runway strips. And spiritually, existentially, it is the nature of human beings to want to understand what we don't know. NASA's in the business of just that. If we don't know it, we go find out why. That's our charter and mission.
