Transcript of NASA Press Conference 23 October 2003 (part 1)

3:00 p.m., Eastern Standard Time

Thursday, October 23, 2003

NASA PARTICIPANT: I think we will start. I am going to go through and do a quick roll call and make sure that we have the participants, the briefers, on and will also introduce them.

With us at the NASA Headquarters are Mary Kicza, the associate administrator for the NASA Office of Biological and Physical Research and Mark Uhran, the ISF senior systems integration manager at NASA Headquarters.

Here at JSC, we have Bill Langdoc, chief of the Habitability and Environmental Factors Office in the Space and Live Sciences Directorate here, and Nitza Cintron chief of the Space Medicine and Health Care Systems Office in the Space and Live Sciences Directorate here.

In Moscow, we have Bill Gerstenmeier, the program manager for the International Space Station.

I think we are going to go straight to questions. We will go down a list. I am going to ask you that you keep yourself to one question. If we have time, we will go back and go for follow-ups from everyone, but we will start off with “one additional question,” we have got a lot of people on the line.

So, to start, Kathy Sawyer with The Washington Post, if you have a question, and please try to direct it to the participant that you would like to ask, if you would.

QUESTIONER: To Bill Gerstenmeier. I would like to know your assessment, please, the current ability of flight hardware on the Space Station to maintain itself if it is unoccupied by people.

MR. GERSTENMEIER: We took a look at four, and there is a real advantage of having the crew on orbit to do maintenance for us. If all of the critical spares required just spare systems and having the crew there, they are available to essentially go change up the equipment that breaks.

We have done some analysis, and it shows that we have a fairly high probability that if we have the wrong components fail and there is not a crew on board to change that, we could have station in an degrading manner, but so far, the health of the station has been very good. The hardware failure rates have been very low. So it is difficult to speculate what the risk to station is if there is no crew on board, but there sure is a significant advantage of having the crew on board to change items.

NASA PARTICIPANT: I will ask everybody to mute their microphones and phones because we do hear some chopping, which makes it difficult for everybody to hear. There it is again. So, if you would, and I will go on to the next question.

Mike Schneider [ph] with the Associated Press.

QUESTIONER: I would like to ask Mr. Gerstenmeier, could you just talk specifically what measures are being taken to either replace or repair some of the monitoring devices and equipment that are not functioning properly right now?

MR. GERSTENMEIER: What we are doing, first of all, as we have discussed and I think you have heard from the folks that are working this in detail, we are trying to return some samples on this next Soyuz vehicle. It will help us understand a little bit what is going on in the atmosphere.

We don’t think there is anything wrong in the atmosphere, but we can’t say that with a positive assurance. So we would like to get the samples down to take a look at our water quality, take a look at our air quality, and take a look at the radiation profiles we have seen over the increment.

We don’t suspect anything is wrong, but, again, trying to be diligent, we want to get those samples down and take a look and see if that data is telling us anything that we ought to be concerned about or if we see any issues.

We didn’t see anything in the samples that returned on the previous Soyuz, but we didn’t get quite as much as we wanted in terms of samples. So we are trying to bring a few more samples down. So that is kind of our first strategy.

The problem is, again, the return volume on Soyuz is pretty limited. So it is difficult to get those samples down, but we are working the best we can to get those samples returned. So that is our first step.

The next step is we are looking at flying some additional spares up on the next Progress vehicle. We are looking at flying up an air analyzer, an MCA that measures oxygen and carbon dioxide. We are also looking at potentially flying some other spare equipment up that will help us with the overall atmosphere monitoring. So we have got those pieces of hardware on track.

The MCA, we have to build a little vibration isolation system that fits between it and the Progress vehicle to fly it. That is in work. Those devices are getting ready. They are starting to show up in Houston, and we are getting ready to ship them over here to Moscow for delivery to the launch site to be launched on a Progress in the future.

NASA PARTICIPANT: John Schwartz [ph], New York Times.

QUESTIONER: Thank you. I think this is for Mr. Gerstenmeier as well, but anybody can join in.

I don’t know about these systems. What other critical systems have issues been raised about? What else should we be looking at?

MR. GERSTENMEIER: I don’t think there is any other critical systems on station. You are well aware that we have a control gyro that has failed. It has been failed for a significant period of time. We can tolerate another failure of that system and still provide attitude controls of station, and if a third gyro were to fail — in other words, the one that has already failed, another one fails, and then a third one fails — we can then use the propulsion attitude control from the Russian side. So we are several failures away from that causing us a problem.

We have some intermittent errors that occur on one of our audio centers. We have two audio centers that process the voice on board station to bring the data down to the ground. Audio Center No. 1 has some spurious error bits that it picks up periodically. So, at some point, we would like to change that out, put another device in.

We are in the process now of trying to determine of those are just nuisance error codes or if there is a real functioning problem with that Audio Center, but we are looking at that.

We occasionally pick up some problems with our remote power controllers. Those are electronic circuit breakers on board station. We have a deficiency in our field that affect transistors in those devices. Periodically, they fail, and we have to change that.

You will recall last week on Wednesday, I believe, we changed one of those devices out in the lab. We put another device in its location that didn’t have the failure in the same location as the one that we did. So we are able to kind of work around that by shifting things around.

QUESTIONER: And in terms of these issues, the ones that we are talking about today, other offices besides Health Medical have not filed their own questions about it?

MR. GERSTENMEIER: Say that question to me again, please.

QUESTIONER: In other words, in terms of other divisions, other divisions on critical ISS systems, this is for Health Medical. Are there other offices that have chimed in on these issues?

MR. GERSTENMEIER: No. No other offices have chimed in.

I was just going to add that the two we have been discussing here, the life support systems — again, they are not dramatically changed from where they were before, but we have seen some small degradations in them. The big thing is that we have lost the sampling frequency, and we need to make sure we get the proper samples for sample frequency.

Also, exercise equipment, it is about the same state as it was before the previous increment went up. We have done a lot of maintenance on it due to the increment, and I think the concern is that it just takes a lot of maintenance. It takes a lot of sparing. It takes a lot of planning on our side. We just need to stay in front of that, and there is concern that we may not be able to stay in front of that and we may have to return to crew if we can’t provide the proper exercise.

But, again, we are multiple failures away from those being a situation where we would have to return the crew.

The other thing is we are not an immediate safety-of-flight issue to the crew. This is a long-term issue. We can look at the gross capability of the air support to the crew, and there are no concerns with immediate kinds of things, but we are looking at small trace contaminants that, over an extended period of time, could cause us problems. So there is nothing that is of immediate concern, but more of a long duration kind of thing.

The questions that were brought up were really for us to focus on these items and make sure that we really have thought out what we need to go do, put extra emphasis on how we are prepared to go handle these, make sure we have worked the sample process for return. We have done everything we can, and we have worked with all of the folks. We are really glad they brought these issues up because they have helped us do a better job of making sure that we are getting the right focus on all of these items.

NASA PARTICIPANT: Gina Tredgold [ph], ABC.

QUESTIONER: Mr. Gerstenmeier, does any of this give you concern about the space walk that is coming up in February, your ability to handle that?

MR. GERSTENMEIER: The space walk, we haven’t officially decided we are going to go do that. We have a series of meetings in Moscow that are going to start in the first part of November. We will review those procedures for those space walks. We will take a look at the condition of the Space Station at the time. We will look at what we need to go do. We will look at what supplies are there, and then we will make a decision on whether we are going to go do those space walks or not now.

We looked at them from a cursory standpoint to see if there was anything that would preclude us from doing those space walks, and initially, we determined there was nothing that would say that we would preclude them. So we went ahead and put them in our plans, but we haven’t formally agreed to go execute them, even though they are in our plans.

We are doing all of the preparation. We are doing all of the crew training, but we still got lots of work to do to get the specifics of the procedures understood. We need to look carefully at the condition of Space Station and make sure we are not putting ourselves in any additional risk when we go do those EVAs.

NASA PARTICIPANT: Dan Billow [ph] with WSH TV.

MR. MIRELSON: James, this is Document Mirelson at Headquarters. Sorry to interrupt you. Let me break in for a second, please.

With the time constraints and everything else we have got going here, I would like to take a second here to have Mary Kicza give an update about a little conversation she had with the crew on the station today, and that may add a little bit to the discussion that we are having now.

So let me just interrupt you here and turn it over to Mary for a few seconds.

MS. KICZA: I had the pleasure of joining Sean actually just a few minutes before we started this teleconference to talk with the crew, and they assured us that everything is going just fine. They are feeling great. The systems are handling things just fine, and the measures are in place to adequately deal with contingencies. I think that is what you are hearing in terms of the response you have been getting from Bill Gerstenmeier.

So, from a crew perspective, they are quite comfortable with where things are at right now and how things are going.

QUESTIONER: Thank you. Thank you, James.

NASA PARTICIPANT: We will continue on. Dan Billow, did you ask a question?

QUESTIONER: No, I didn’t. This is for Bill Gerstenmeier.

Would you talk a little bit about the certification of flight readiness process and whether the Russians weigh in and whether the two parties who declined to sign the certification of flight readiness have withdrawn their objections?

MR. GERSTENMEIER: I will just start the process, and then I will turn it over to both Nitza and Bill.

The process we go through is we first have on the station side a stage ops readiness review, and that occurred around September 24th, but in preparation for that, each one of the organizations that support me and the station program, they go through and they review all of their systems and get all their experts together. They look at essentially the safety of the station, if there is anything to be concerned about, are the manifests set correctly, are all the procedures in place, are the flight control teams fully trained, are we all ready go to execute what we are going to go do in this next stage. So they actually start that process fairly early in the system, and they do that detailed internal review. That is where the real work is done by the technical experts.

That started back around the 1st of September. Then that comes to me in the stage ops readiness review around September 24th, and at that point — in fact, actually at the beginning of this process, when the Space and Live Sciences Directorate folks had their concerns, they immediately came to the program, even before the stage ops readiness review and voiced their concerns to me. We started a dialogue about what the concerns were. We were trying to understand what they were, were there things we could do to mitigate them, were there things we ought to be doing better, what kinds of things we needed to do to help ensure the safety and health of the crew and health of the station. So we started working those with them immediately even before the stage ops readiness review.

We came to the stage ops readiness review. They still had their concerns. They brought forward their issues to us. They carried forward a statement in that review saying that they had concerns with station, and I will let them address exactly what their concerns were at that point.

I think it was really good they brought those forward. I think it was a very good discussion for us overall of the stage readiness review to make sure we are ready to go fly.

After that, we go to a flight readiness review. That is with Headquarters. We did that review, and, again, the same issues were all discussed as well as everything associated with the flight.

It was a fairly detailed review, lengthy, probably about a half-day review, about 6 hours or so, and we came out of that review that we were okay for flight.

We then continued working the process and working systems. You know we had agreed to return some samples. We had some other equipment on station, the MCA, the major constituent analyzer, go into kind of an intermittent operation mode during that time frame.

So, after this flight readiness review, we had some things that kind of changed. Where the program was actually working and putting some plans in place, we were kind of planning as we were executing. So I felt it was appropriate to pull the team together again in a unique review just before launch just to make sure we were all on the same page, we were all communicating, there was nothing that we were planning on doing that somebody else had a problem with.

I wanted to kind of lay out all of our plans and processes for the increment, so everybody could take a look at them and solicit their comments and see if there is anything we ought to be doing from a deviation of the plans or the things that we put together. So it was kind of a big communication session where we laid everything out. We brought everybody in. We looked at it again to see if anything had changed, if there is anything we wanted to do differently from a planning standpoint, and at that review, we didn’t find anything that was different or needed to be changed.

We might have made some minor changes to some plans, but nothing significant came out of that.

At this point, I will turn it over to Bill and Nitza and let them talk to you about what their statement said.

MS. CINTRON: Thank you, Bill.

This is Nitza Cintron in Houston.

As Mr. Gerstenmeier just mentioned, this is a relatively long process for us, and about 2 months ago, we began our own internal review from a health and safety, medical, environmental, and countermeasure standpoint, our readiness for flight.

At that point, internally, we were concerned about degradation of the three subsystems, health support, crew health, and that started off a communication with the program, communication with engineering, communication with the crew office, and it lasted for about 2 months where we learned of the different payloads and subsystems, functioning of the life support systems, also approached the mitigation of certain operations and certain elements that might potentially cause some environmental hazards and mitigated those.

So we have gone through the process, added knowledge to what we knew, communicated much better, and as Mr. Gerstenmeier said, at the end, the program is doing, in its ops nominal circumstances, the maximum it can do to mitigate the concerns we raised. To this day, we continue being part of that team that continues to address not just for this expedition, but for those to come.

MR. LANGDOC: This is Bill Langdoc.

I certainly agree with what both Bill Gerstenmeier and Nitza Cintron has said.

Readiness for us is a fairly long process. It is not just a single discrete event, and this took place over a couple of months, starting early September and culminating up at just before the crew did launch.

At the time we went through our initial internal review and looking at the status of all of our systems and what I viewed I was being asked to do was to certify that we not only could launch, but that we could sustain this greater-than-6-month expedition.

The concerns were such that did not feel that could go and do that certification, and so we raised the issue. Yes, we did have a recommendation that said we don’t think we’ll go to flight, but having done that, the program has taken those on. They have worked very diligently. We have been involved in the whole process to go through and understand what their mediations are that are being proposed.

We have got a set of things that are being pursued, and when we get those samples back, we will get the insight into the atmosphere or the air and the water that we need.

The concerns have been not so much that we have identified any specific imminent threat. There is nothing like that. It is what we don’t know. It is the unknown that is the concern, and those are being worked. At this point in time, we have got a plan that ought to lead to getting us to the data, so that we can be fully comfortable.

NASA PARTICIPANT: Mark Roe [ph], Houston Chronicle, do you have a question?

QUESTIONER: Yes. It is for the medical specialist. Could you talk about the potential trace contaminants in air and water that you could be concerned about, and what is the concern they raised? What health issue could they start?

MS. CINTRON: This is Nitza Cintron from the Space Medicine Group.

We actually worked as a team with Bill Langdoc’s group from the environmental, and I will defer to him on the environmental issue of trace contaminants.

MR. LANGDOC: Well, we are in a closed-up environment. So there is a potential for lots of things to be introduced into the environment or to be created from interactions between chemicals that are there.

The consequences of those run the gamut from being just irritants to having health hazards. We have, in the past, seen some things that are off nominal. There is nothing specific that we are looking at, but we don’t have that insight either on board with real-time instrumentation for those kinds of trace things now, and we have limited ability to return samples for on-the-ground analysis. That is the crux of what the concern is.

QUESTIONER: I’m sorry. On that, can you monitor those real time when the equipment is working and now you rely on this temporary sampling as it comes to the ground? Is there Russian backup to sample this? I’m sorry. I am unclear what has been inhibited.

MR. LANGDOC: Well, there is a mixture. Major constituents of the atmosphere is an example. It can be monitored. We know whether we have got oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide. Those major things are monitored regularly.

We had had an ability to monitor some compounds on orbit with a device that quit working in July. The primary means all along has been gathering samples and returning to the ground for analysis, and there is a number of chemicals that are looked for in that.

The frequency and the quantity of those things we can now return is less than what we had before, and that just contributes to a lack of in-depth insight that we would like to have.
NASA PARTICIPANT: Chris Krydler [ph], Florida Today.

QUESTIONER: Yes, thanks.

How quickly do you get results back from the solid sorbent air sampler if, indeed, it will fit in the Soyuz, which apparently could be a problem? Is that correct?

MR. LANGDOC: This is Bill Langdoc.

Yes. They are still assessing whether or not they will be able to get it in.

Assuming that it comes down, the Russians’ process is such that it will be returned from the landing site to Moscow, and that takes some days to a week to go do that. We will then get that sample.

The intent now is to hand-carry it back to this country, and to do that most likely with the return of the crew itself. So that could be several weeks after it has landed.

Once we get it here, it takes us about 10 days to 2 weeks to go and run the analysis, to double-check everything, to verify the quality of what we have. So we are anticipating that we would have this set of data to be looked at sometime in early December.

QUESTIONER: Thanks. Just quickly, if all the NASA folks could spell their names and repeat their titles, I think it would be very helpful. Thank you.

NASA PARTICIPANT: Chris, you can call our news room, and we will do that for you as soon as this is over with. Okay? But we will keep the time here for questions.

Let’s move on with Bruce Nichols [ph], Dallas Morning News.

QUESTIONER: No questions, James.

NASA PARTICIPANT: Okay. Brad Liston, Reuters, or Debbie Zebarenko, Reuters?

QUESTIONER: Hi. This is Debbie.

For Bill Langdoc and Nitza, just a very bare-bones question. What is your comfort level about the safety of the increment that has just gone up there?

MS. CINTRON: This is Nitza Cintron.

Again, as we have repeatedly said, there is no evidence of any imminent danger or anything that we can identify, and we cannot point to anything where there would be danger.

At the current time, we are addressing the three subsystems that we are responsible for. Bill Langdoc and Mr. Gerstenmeier have described the environmental portion. We are on the manifest for Progress for replacement for the exercise, and in the health maintenance portion, we have an update of medicines and I.V. fluids and other issues that are being addressed. So those subsystems, although degraded, are providing sufficient care for the astronauts so that they can perform at the level that they are required for the mission.

So there are still concerns out there. We are working them, but they do not pose an imminent danger on the crew, and we would certainly state so if we thought so.

QUESTIONER: How about Bill Langdoc?

MR. LANGDOC: Yes. This is Bill Langdoc.

I have no specific safety threat that I am aware of for the crew right now, and the concerns we have are not over some specific item. It is the lack of knowledge in certain long-term ability associated with trace contaminants in air and water.

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