Transcript of Press Conference with Bill Parsons and Mike Kostelnik at NASA Headquarters (Part 2)

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QUESTIONER: Can you talk more about your Shuttle program [inaudible]?

MR. PARSON: When I started with NASA — well, prior to NASA, I was a contractor and I did Shuttle payload processing. Those were the DOD missions which I worked on the other side of the river on the Air Force side, but all those missions were geared towards flying payloads on the Shuttle.

I then came over on the Shuttle side and worked as a launch site support manager, and that was integrating those payloads into the Shuttle, but I worked directly for the Shuttle program.

Later, I worked as a direct report to the Shuttle launch and landing director at the Kennedy Space Center, and then afterwards, I was a shuttle flow director for OB-103. And that was during OMDP, orbiter maintenance down period. That is what it was called back then. So I was out in Palmdale a lot.

I then went on to work for the International Space Station, hardware integration office. So some of that had correlations to the Shuttle program because what we were really trying to do is get the International Space Station hardware down to the Kennedy Space Center, process it and get ready to integrate it with the Shuttle.

You know, since that time in different leadership roles as the deputy center director at the Johnson Space Center and as the center director at the Stennis Space Center, I have been involved as a board member of the Flight Readiness Review Panel.

QUESTIONER: Gwenith [inaudible], Orlando Sentinel.

Sean O’Keefe said if there are going to be personnel changes, they will be made, but during this transition period with you and Mr. Dittemore, who will make those decisions? Will you make [inaudible] in concert with him because he has a longer working relationship with the people, or will you be the one to make those?

MR. PARSON: I think Ron and I will consult. I think I will listen to his recommendations. I think I will work with General Kostelnik and the Shuttle program team to figure out what are the right things to do. So it is a little early to say right now, but I think Ron and I will work very closely together.

We have known each other for quite some time, and I believe that it will be very easy to make that transition as we discuss things and see what needs to be done.

QUESTIONER: General Kostelnik, you had said earlier that you would take suggestions from Ron Dittemore for his replacement. Can you comment on that? Was Mr. Parson a top choice of his?

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: I won’t be specific as to saying what names he recommended. He did make some recommendations, and those were considered along with other recommendations that we got from actually all the center directors in human space flight.

QUESTIONER: How long have you been working on this?

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: Just about a week before we rolled out Mr. Dittemore’s announcement, that is when we started the process.

QUESTIONER: I know we asked this question of you when we had Mr. Dittemore here, but I am assuming that [inaudible].

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: Yes.

QUESTIONER: [Inaudible.]

MR. PARSON: No, not now.

I need to go down and talk with Ron, sit down and figure out what that date will be. I think it will be determined by us talking about it and then getting back to General Kostelnik and picking the proper date, but it is still kind of open right now.

QUESTIONER: Bill, who is taking your place?

MR. PARSON: Right now, Mike Rudolphi is my deputy center director. He will be the interim acting director at the Stennis Space Center, and then I am sure Bill Ready and Mr. O’Keefe will work with all the folks they need to work with to see who will be the permanent replacement.

QUESTIONER: He is not the permanent replacement, Mr. Rudolphi?

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: No.

MR. PARSON: No. He is interim acting director right now.

QUESTIONER: And who will make that decision?

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: Mr. Ready will make that decision.

Again, they are starting to search for — that is another important job, and we will go through the same — it will be the same process.

QUESTIONER: Larry Wheeler, Gannett News Service.

I don’t want to show my ignorance, but I will just go ahead. Could you reflect a little bit on the difference between being a center director and a program director?

I think my editor might ask me later today [inaudible] down. What is your budget at Stennis, how many people, what is your budget at Shuttle [inaudible]?

MR. PARSON: Well, I guess some people might view it as a step down. My budget at Stennis is probably about $220 million. I have about 300 civil servants and about 1,400, 1,500 contractors, members that work there, but in addition to that, it is also a Federal city. So it has 30 other Federal agencies located there with a total population of about 5,500 people overall.

The program has about a $3.5-billion budget. I don’t know the exact numbers of people, but I think it is probably in the 15- to 20,000 if you counted everyone that is involved in the Shuttle program. So it is a pretty big job.

From a leadership standpoint, you know, there could be folks that might think that there is a difference in the status of. I don’t look at things that way. I look at things that I’m a — I am proud to be a member of this agency. I am proud to be able to serve this agency, and I will — I look forward to being asked to do this, and I look forward to being given this challenge and have the opportunity to help this program get back to flying.

MODERATOR: We are going to get done early today. Any others?

QUESTIONER: Are there any mistakes that you judge that you want to avoid that have been made in the past within the Shuttle program?

MR. PARSON: Well, I mean, easily to say, I would prefer to avoid any kind of future tragedy like we have already had, but, you know, we are going to do that through very meticulously going through our processes and doing this right. And that is what I look forward to.

QUESTIONER: [Inaudible] New York Times.

When you take a new job, they tell you what they want to do, you tell them what you would like to do. Did you put anything on the table, things that you might want to do differently or certain things that you have before you took that job?

MR. PARSON: No. No. General Kostelnik and I will work through some of those details as we move on.

I really need to get to know the Shuttle program a little bit more in depth than I do right now. So I am going to go talk with Ron. We are going to spend some time together. We will make some recommendations to General Kostelnik, and then we will just take it from there.

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: The discussion both in print and out of print regarding return-to-flight dates has been all over the calendar, from the end of this year all the way into late next summer. Do you have a working date towards which you are anticipating a return to flight?

QUESTIONER: Well, I think as you recall, in our return-to-flight planning goals, we focused on this fault. We have an important customer that is going to need some resupply as to the International Space Station. I think as we talked about, our resources in the international partnership to resupply in particular is limited, and so there is a strong requirements pool to return to space flight as soon as we can.

As far as the planning date, internal to the program, as we get preliminary recommendations from the Gehman Board — and we have got two to date — then those are folded into the process, return-to-flight planning to see what it would take to respond to those, how would we do that, and those start to start a planning window for when we could accomplish what we think is right to do.

And of course, we are still waiting for more. There will be more recommendations to come, and they will continue to require a plan to address the issues, whatever they are, and there will be some time frame associated with that.

So we are targeting still to fly as early this fall as we can safely do this, but as we get recommendations that drive us out of that window where we just do not have the resource to do the things that we feel are prudent to do before we return to safely fly, then those windows will start to slip.

When will we have a definitive window? I think we will have a definitive window when we get the formal report from the Gehman Board. We have — and we are doing this simultaneously. So, very shortly after that, we will have the technical plan that we are planning to address the issues, technical issues and structural issues that need to be addressed, and at that time, we will have a more specific date. We are trying to get this as close to late fall and as early as we can because we have a job to do at the International Space Station.

You will probably see — and it will probably be reported, I am sure — that as we get piecemeal recommendations, there will be some things we are starting to do.

I think you all recall that early on, because we did separate bipod foam — and that was known very early in the process — some time ago, we started already redesign of the bipod foam area. So that work has been ongoing now for more than a month, and we know that is something now that we have to do. And that will be done before we return to flight, and because we started that some time ago, those technical activities for getting a solution to that problem, we think that is reasonable. It is still within the technical wherewithal that we could fly in late fall, just fixing that one problem.

Is that the only problem that needs to be fixed? Well, that is what we are still waiting to see, and the program is working on several of these activities that have expected dates for when we could complete.

So I think that you are going to continue to see a wide range of dates from the activities, the preliminary recommendations, from the engineering parts of our activity. There are some fixes that take us out into May or April as a preliminary recommendation. We haven’t looked at those things. Those things are being looked at to see how we could accelerate those things, whether we will do some of those things or not, whether those are the right recommendations to complete. These are internal mass study processes. I think a lot of those will continue.

So the program office, the engineering analysis that is supporting the Gehman Board is seeing everything technically that is being provided to the board, and based on what they are seeing are already doing the kinds of things that make sense. They are generating some of these dates.

The formal return-to-flight plan, which will have the definitive date that we are going to shoot for as our return-to-flight launch, that has not been established. That will be proposed from a staffing function in the return-to-flight planning team that is hosted at the Johnson Space Center led by Jim Halsell. That will be recommended to the Space Flight Leadership Council here in Washington co-chaired by Dr. Mike Greenfield and Captain Bill Ready, and collectively, that group will receive the staff recommendation on return to flight. And that group will decide what NASA is going to do. And then from that process will come a return-to-flight date, but it has not been established to date.

QUESTIONER: General, [inaudible].

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: Yes.

QUESTIONER: Do you have any sense yet whether you are going to pay for that fix within what you have for 2003?

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: Well, it is really not clear. I think as we mentioned, you know, this year our budgets and the work content that we thought we were going to do are not in sync in both the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, and there has been obviously a lot of interest in the cost for, first, the Columbia disaster and the recovery and all of those activities. We are working very closely as we are now closing out some of those activities to have an accounting of what those costs are and to understand.

And I think you know there was a supplemental that provided money for that as some of the agencies are paying their own costs themselves. So we are still putting that story together.

Obviously, we are not blind when we thought we could. So we are generating some savings on some of the recurring costs that we might have spent as we launched, and we are also suffering some inefficiencies because we have an infrastructure, standing infrastructure, people, process, buildings, that are not doing the things they normally would have been doing to meet the mission.

So there is going to be a lot of budget issues, and obviously, we are in the heart of the budget cycle process now trying to sort these things out, but in this regard, the monies, you know, will not drive the cost of what needs to be done to return the Shuttle fleet to flight, will not be the driver. Safety will be the driver.

So we are not overly concerned now about the issues of how we are going to pay for what the return-to-flight activity will be. We are certainly interested in accounting for that, and at the end of our planning exercise for return to flight, when we have a definitive return-to-flight date, it is going to then drive the required manifest for the Shuttle program. That will determine what the new baseline for the Shuttle activity is programmatically, and also it will provide a new baseline for the International Space Station. And both of these things are dependent on when we will, in fact, return to flight.

Unfortunately, some of these decisions may not be perfectly in concert with our budget cycle. So, as we prepare for an amendment to the ’04 request, given the new realities of where we are in human space flight, at some point we are going to be forced to make some projections, some estimates for when we will return to flight for budgetary reasons to give some estimate for what our baselines for both of these programs will look like.

QUESTIONER: You just said you anticipate doing something, and I don’t know [inaudible].

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: Well, an adjustment to the budget. We are not sure what that will be. We are not sure what —

QUESTIONER: [Inaudible.]

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: Right.

QUESTIONER: And what is the best estimate you have right now for the bipod redesign?

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: I really don’t have an estimate in terms of cost. I think they are still obviously in the early developmental area, and I think there is still at least one or two alternatives that they are looking at. So, really, an observation in terms of the bipod foam is a schedule-oriented one that the kinds of things one would do in these various design programs could be accomplished in a time period to support a fairly timely return to flight. The money issue has not been addressed either on the developmental activity for return to flight or obviously the mod that we would put in on the other vehicles.

QUESTIONER: General, do you feel any pressure to speed things up as a result of the problems with the Soyuz landing, and would you also address the same question for Hubble? They had some problems [inaudible].

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: Well, I am less informed on the Hubble requirement. I think we have some time, you know, to address the Hubble mission. Sop I don’t think that is going to be the driver for our return to flight, and I am not feeling an overt pressure to do anything different in that regard.

I think actually our experience with Hubble is doing pretty good and will probably be okay if we do have to delay the Hubble servicing mission a modest amount.

In terms of the Soyuz issue, actually despite the landing dispersion, which is obviously being analyzed by our Russian friends and obviously we will be participative in seeing what the ultimate cause of that was, I mean, the reality was it was a fairly minor [inaudible]. It was shocking and uncomfortable for our leaders over there because there was some period when it was uncertain where was the capsule, but they had good indications that the chutes had deployed.

And if one looks back through the history of the Soyuz program, not only is it one of the most remarkably dependable and safe of all the space vehicles that have flown, throughout their past they have experienced some anomalies that have caused them to come down in places that they least expected.

The design is robust in that it is Kazakhstan where there is a lot of open space, and you can tolerate a lot of down range or cross-range error. In fact, the crew was never in jeopardy, and the backup systems that are in the Soyuz spacecraft functioned just as one would expect.

So my confidence in our Russian partners and the Soyuz vehicles in particular for crew return remains unshaken. It will be interesting to see what Commander Bauersocks and Dr. Petit have to say about their experience, having ridden through that with [inaudible]. And they might have a slightly different view. It would be interesting to get their perspective.

I think generally the space community retains a high confidence level in those vehicles for the jobs that they are intended to do, and in the near term, these are the vehicles that we have supporting our crew.

QUESTIONER: One last question on the whole return-to-flight plan. The Gehman Board is going to report sometime this summer. Given that, how much longer before you have a formal return-to-flight plan?

GENERAL KOSTELNIK: Well, we would hope to do this fairly soon. Obviously, it depends on preciously, you know, what issues they address or what recommendations they make. Some of them could be longer to respond to than others.

Clearly, for the purely technical ones, our engineers are providing a lot of that information to the board direct. It is being validated by the board members proper and their independent consultants that are advising those. So we wouldn’t expect to have a lot of surprises. Plus, we are getting the preliminary recommendations as proposals or things to look at and comment on in advance. That is very helpful. So we will have a lot of the information already in hand and already in the process of being worked by the time we get the formal final report.

It will still take us some time to respond for those key schedule-sensitive actions, like bipod foam which we know we are going to have to do. Those things are already in place. Other technical issues as they come out will already be put in some stage of completion.

So I am hopeful that we will be able to address not only our response to the Gehman Board, but I am sure that there will be congressional hearings on these issues following that for the Congress to get the full sense for what the board is, both for the Gehman Board and perhaps for NASA’s response. But I am hopeful that we can do this in the short term, you know, perhaps 30 days or so.

QUESTIONER: Mr. Parson, do you believe that the Shuttle program should rely more on civil servants and less on contractors?

MR. PARSON: Well, I have been a part of it in both ways. I think that the Shuttle program right now needs to take a hard look at that and make sure that we have the right mix of civil servants to contractors, and we are going to do that. I think that is part of this whole process is to, again, take a good hard look at what is the Government’s responsibility and what is the contractor’s responsibility.

As far as whether there is disproportionate amount in either way, I really can’t comment right now. I believe that from a leadership standpoint, Leadership Council standpoint looking at it, we feel like we have kept that pretty well balanced, but there is always an opportunity here to take another look at that and make sure we have got the right mix.

MODERATOR: Thank you very much.

[End of press conference.]