In other words, there is criticism that the agency becomes lulled into thinking that the shuttle is an "operational" vehicle.
O'Keefe said that it is true that the emphasis at NASA about the shuttle has "moved in a direction of more engineering and operations focus." But treating the shuttle like an R&D asset, he said, is to reach back into NASA history when mishaps were expected.
"Think back 40 plus years ago. Think about what they must have said to John Glenn before he boarded Friendship 7. 'Well, the last few worked. We think this one might work' - that is the best they could say. That's a different mindset than exists today," O'Keefe said.
"You really want to infuse this operational imperativethat everything better line up exactly right or don't go anywhere. An R&D imperative says you don't know until you try."
Trend analysis
O'Keefe said there is a bigger issue being raised by the CAIB, one that he's taken to heart. It represents a pattern that NASA has gotten into, he said.
"We don't do an awful lot of trend analysis -- of how patterns are emerging. Not because people don't want to, it's because it doesnt fit into their operational ethos," O'Keefe explained.
There is a key question that needs answering when trends continue to show uptrends that may not appear often, but often enough.
"The question is why is it happening at all?," O'Keefe said. "When you are looking at something as unique as every one of these three orbiters now are, this point that the board is making is right on," he said.
Fly sooner rather than later
As for predictions when shuttle flight will resume?
"Setting an objective that it could be as early as this calendar year is not an unreasonable proposition," O'Keefe told SPACE.com . "We really have to treat this [Columbia accident] as a probability that what we're looking at here is going to be some combination of hardware and process deficiencies failures," he added.
So far, there does not appear to be any showstopper of a shuttle fix. Rather, it is likely that hardware or process fixes are in order, O'Keefe senses.
"That ought to be implemented in relatively short order," O'Keefe said. And in that regard, NASA is relying on the CAIB issuing its findings and recommendations throughout its investigation, as they have repeatedly said they were going to do.
O'Keefe emphasized that he doesn't want to be sitting around saying: "I'm not going to act on those until I see the whole elephant."
"Be prepared for the possibility that we can fly sooner rather than later," the NASA chief added.
Emotional factor
Beyond technical, programmatic and leadership reasons to move ahead on return to flight, O'Keefe said, there is one emotional factor that is omnipresent.
"From the very beginning of this, there has not been one family member of every one of the Columbia astronauts who hasn't made it a point to say, unsolicited, that you have to get back to doing what they dedicated themselves to doing," O'Keefe related.
"If nothing else that's something that kind of hangs in the back of your mind all the time. It tugs at your emotions regularly and I've taken that to deep, deep heart as part of the imperative to do what we're doing," O'Keefe said.
Orbital Space Plane: no leap of faith
NASA has its sights on developing a new Orbital Space Plane, or OSP for short. It is a vehicle with a straightforward mission, O'Keefe emphasized.
"There are only three things we want to do with this beast. First and foremost, it has got to be an operational asset that carts people to and from the International Space Station, and that's it. If you want to put cargo on, it better fit in a shaving kit."
A second criteria, O'Keefe continued, is a vehicle that exhibits a far greater degree of maneuverability in space than the shuttle. Lastly, an OSP must, in time, have the capacity for flexibility of launch.
"Not launch on demand. But certainly closer than what we can do today, which is really quite cumbersome," O'Keefe said. While labeling the shuttle as "an engineering marvel," he added that the vehicle "is not a responsive asset to immediacy of circumstance," he said.
In developing top requirements for the OSP -- now being wrestled with by aerospace contractors -- O'Keefe is pointedly happy about the fact he personally crafted those criteria to fit on one piece of paper. "There is nothing about the OSP design that we put out on the street that will require a leap of faith or a technology to emerge that we don't know about today," he noted.
O'Keefe's message to those in industry looking to make OSP reality: "This is a case of a very finite number of requirements. If industry can't figure out how to beat those three requirements, you're not as good as you think you are. This is not a leap."
National imperative
For those space-hungry advocates of Moon bases and human footprints on Mars, NASA's O'Keefe said what's missing is an imperative.
"There's plenty of advocates out there for Mars, the Moon, Pluto you've got them all. And the only thing that is common among all those [destinations] is that we can't get to any of them," O'Keefe said.
There are only two or three things, the space agency head contends, that motivates big goals as a national imperative: national security, economics, or expressions of sovereignty.
Nothing on the space horizon is apparent in this regard, O'Keefe added, that might foster a big destination goal.
"So rather than sit, sweat, fret, and argue about which one of those destination objectives everybody could get around focus all that attention, time and effort into all the enabling technologies that would make any of those goals feasible in the future. That's the logic," O'Keefe concluded.
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