Goldin: I want to thank the OMB and
the administration. They set up a rule I concur with. No money will travel
from anywhere outside the human spaceflight account to solve any of the
problems. Space science, Earth science, aerospace technology are not going
to have any budget decreases for this, because that had been a problem
in the past. The only thing they will do is, if they have any available
NASA engineers, they will provide them to help the program.
And they gave us the flexibility solving
the space station issues from within the human spaceflight account. We
took a look around and said, "Gee whiz. What you’ve got to do in life is
prioritize." People felt their careers would not be successful if they
didn’t work on the advanced stuff, so some of our best people thought,
"Gee, my career is here working on these advanced technologies instead
of going up the middle on station and shuttle." So now we’ve re-prioritized
that. We tell them that they are going to be contributing greatly to the
future of the program by getting these two tasks done in the human spaceflight
account. So we are phasing down those tasks in line with getting the station
done and shuttle operating more efficiently.
Q: When the Aerospace Technology enterprise
lends the space station program 250-500 engineers, how does that not impact
the amount of work that enterprise gets done in a year?
Goldin: Their budgets are not cut.
The money will be reprogrammed and utilized with contractors or university
people. The money does not leave the code. The work will get done.
Q: Are you hoping that the Space Launch
Initiative will solve NASA's transportation needs for the International
Space Station?
Goldin: I haven't been briefed on the
proposals and that won't be announced until the end of April. We had a
wide-open bid process. We encouraged entrepreneurial
companies and mainline companies, until I see what they have.
Q: So your intent is to push ahead
with X-38, but slow down funding of the crew rescue vehicle and then pick
it back up?
Goldin: When we have confidence and
we've retired the technical risk on the crew rescue vehicle. Instead of
bringing the standing army in parallel with risk reduction, we will do
the risk reduction first.
Q: Are personnel costs — head count
— a big part of the projected station overrun?
Goldin: No. We don’t have total cost
accounting on the program. Absolutely not. We’ve never had the cost of
the government employees on the program.
Q: What are the two or three things
really contributing to the projected overrun on the space station program?
Goldin: It’s logistics cost, the integration
costs and software maintenance. It’s enormous. Much bigger than we had
projected.… I think all of America is learning some interesting lessons
about software. Those are all contributors.
Q: Now that you have two years' experience
operating the station, how comfortable are you that you have a good handle
on what station operations will cost down the road?
Goldin: Two years is [a] pretty good
set of numbers. We’ll keep tracking next year and the year after and we
will continually update the numbers.
Q: Do you expect that NASA will have
to revise its operations budget projections upward?
Goldin: I don't know. I feel that two
years is a good amount. I don’t guarantee it will go down, but your initial
operations cost are usually higher than later operations, of course.
Q: But then there will be more space
station to take care of then, won’t there?
Goldin: I think they have that factored
in. All I can say is, we got an early warning signal, we projected forward,
we think we understand it, and we’ve taken action -- and we think we have
some pain to full cost projection.
Q: Does the need to drive down station
development costs give NASA new incentives to open the station to privately
funded initiatives?
Goldin: People talk about all these
possibilities of private operations. If there are people who want to bring
cash -- not daydreamers, not people who want to suck off the federal government
and call it commercialization -- they are welcome any time.
There is this fantasy that if only
the government will get out of the way, people will commercialize space.
Right now we’ve got 30 percent of the space station available for commercial
[uses], but we don’t want people who want to suck off the federal government
and call it commercialization. We want people who have real money, real
proposals, and a demonstrated ability to perform, because in the end, we
are responsible for the lives of those people and the multi-$10 billion
asset in space. I made that offer, if you want to talk about redesign,
in 1993. If they’ve got real money, a real plan and a real approach to
making profits, we’re all there.
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