FLORIDA TODAY: Some of these things, including waivers of engineering requirements and modules not meeting the orbital-debris requirements, those date to before Columbia. Do you have concerns about the number of requirements that have been waived given that the reason often includes avoiding cost increases and delaying launches.
O'Keefe: The practical reality is, you find a way to work around some of the challenges or you abandon station. Abandoning station poses a whole new set of problems that may be insurmountable. There is no means to do on-the-spot troubleshooting. You've got to balance that carefully.
When you get down to it, those are engineering standards that you would like to adhere to and that would like to occur, but . . . does this pose a safety risk significant enough to say let's go ahead and abandon station rather than maintain the troubleshooting mode that the two-person crew can accomplish right now?
That's a daily thing. It's something we've got to monitor all the time. You make those determinations on a regular basis, knowing with confidence that if there ever is a problem, you've got two guys who are going to strap into the Soyuz . . . and be home within a matter of four hours.
That said, the engineering standards call into question the kinds of revisions that we are going to need to think about relative to this expeditionary mission experience as well as education we are going to get from all of this.
FT: NASA studies show a 1 in 2 probability of losing the station in a one-year period without a crew. So how difficult a decision would it be to evacuate?
O'Keefe: In the early evaluation after Columbia, we looked seriously at a lights-dimmed kind of option in which the station was de-crewed and determined that the capacity to actually to respond to a set of challenges without a crew aboard would be relatively limited.
That said, the determination was also made that if there is anything that compromises the safety of the crew, there is positively clear instruction to hop aboard the Soyuz and come on home. I don't find that to be a tough call at all.
FT: Accident investigators criticized NASA for setting aside requirements because of cost and schedule, and that same trend appears in the space station program. Do you see that culture, and is that bothering you?
O'Keefe: I don't want to speak to the question of what may have occurred prior to my watch and my term here, and what the culture was at the first element launch or first increment or whatever else . . .
What I've seen in the time I've been here is a strong commitment to delaying schedules if need be every time there is any reason to think there is a safety of flight consideration.
In the course of my time here, there has not been one flight that ever took off on exactly the day it was intended to be. Not one.
Every time an issue came up, we promptly stopped action and factored in the issues . . .
The same is true in the support requirements on station. We made accommodations necessary to do that -- independent of the cost and schedule and all that."
FT: The station program is applying the findings of the Columbia investigation and they're off studying every waiver and deviation, aren't they?
O'Keefe: They've done a real top-to-bottom review . . . Let's understand every factor we're looking at here and find out what is the basis of every assumption. That's a sign of a major cultural shift.
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