July 8, 2009 Image of Charlie Bolden (credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA)

Charlie Bolden is giving the NASA Policy talk today. The last several of these that I’ve heard (excepting when Alan Stern spoke) have left me angry or discouraged. Griffin was not an astronomers’ NASA director. But it’s a new day and a new administration, and just 30 seconds into Charlie’s talk I can tell I’m going to leave with faith in his ability to communicate to my community and to support our dreams.

[Note: Bad Astronomer Phil Plait as coverage as well. Check it out?]

NASA Director Charlie Bolden is a grandfather (he talks about his grand kids all the time), an astronaut, a communicator who brings laughter, and a person willing to admit with humility that he’s not the smartest person in the room, and to admit with pride that he likes working with all the smart  -icists in the room.

As he speaks, he is looking forward to a great year of new launches and new science. He remembers the 1990’s discussions of how Hubble would change our understanding of the world we live in as it brings us understanding of the Big Bang and so much more (which it did). We live another new era of discovery.

• Kepler is finding planets (5 announced yesterday).
• Last month WISE was launched and it will bring a deeper, higher resolution survey of the sky in the Infrared. The mission is launched, the cover is off, and tomorrow we get to see the first images and see if it is in focus (Charlie points out each mission has three hurdles: Does it launch? Does it get first light? Is it in focus? Remember why we worry about that third one?)
• There is also SOFIA, which was resurrected from the desert and is now flying, door open, on the verge of having the telescope installed
• Fermi has revealed whole new classes of pulsars
• Spitzer found the largest ring around Saturn, and
• A combination of images from many of the great observatories has found the  the most distant clusters.

And then there was Hubble. Director Bolden was part of the Hubble in its first days, and as he brought up this most recent mission he teared up. He is telling us stories of his own work, and telling us of their struggles getting Hubble out of the cargo bay. These are stories I’ve never heard. The arm struggled with its weight and they had to read numbers off this that and the other things as they exceeding limits in unexpected ways. And it got worse. As Hubble was deployed, one of the Solar Panels got stuck and didn’t deploy. To protect the Hubble, hanging as it was on the robotic arm, they stopped stabilizing the shuttle (that would have put torque on the whole system as it got yanked around). Left to their own dynamics, the Shuttle and Hubble tumbled together as they orbited around the planet, with the whole team working to find a solution (It was found – there was a piece of software designed to make sure the solar panels didn’t get torqued too much. They disabled it and the Solar Panel deployed right away. It worked. It all worked. And he was part of that magical moment when Hubble floated away to take on the universe.

Transitioning  form his emotionally spoken story – his voice cracking more than once – back to policy, he declared the importance of partnering internationally, treating our partners as equals and with respect, and of building strong international collaborations.

He carries with him the message that during the White House Star Party, a cold clear night in D.C., President Obama and his wife and daughters spent nearly 45 minutes going from telescope to telescope. They were engaged, absorbing with interest the views through telescopes while hearing about the discoveries of high school astronomers – discovers of rare neutron stars, supernovae, and more, each student having their own science discovery behind their name . The Obama’s have their own interest in astronomy, and they value the importance of space and space education.

The White House Star Party is an example of one of the things we do right: Engaging people intellectually and passionately in astronomy observing and content.

He challenges us to go forth and communicate our work: Educating and sharing our results to increase understanding and passion for astronomy.

There is more coming: More launches of more missions.

And the Decadal Survey reports are forth coming and will be used to shape our future, making sure that NASA addresses with its missions the most compelling science of our time. And to succeed in these missions we need to create an educated work force ready to dream these missions, build these missions, and generate the science from these missions’ data.

To make this future real we need to both educate and do science while always always inspiring.

Closing his talk, Bolden gave us these words: “The future of manned space flight will not be paid for out of the hide of science. … Let’s embrace our future together.” He states that together we and are international partners will work on great things and do science while we educate a future generation. This is a partnership, and we will inspire together.

And now we are into questions… (Paraphrasing as close to quotes as I can)

Q: Will you be teaching anything?
A: I won’t enter the teaching profession on a formal basis, but I’m privledged to travel and communicate to people and through that get communicate in my own small way

Q: Will be have a manned space flieght before 2020
A: Yes. This will not be the president who precedes over the end of manned space flight. … We have incredible partners in terms of technology. [HUGE PARAPHRASE] The Japanese have the incredible HTV. We’re asking if they can work to make it capable of returning things to earth

Quote: I recently had a surgery with robots in my body – It was incredible! But I wouldn’t want to turn those robots loose!

If you had told me we would not be on the surface of the Moon today, I would have told you were smoking dope. We became risk adverse have Challenger. We have got to become willing to take risks.

Quotish: If you’d told me when I was training to be an astronaught that we would not be on the surface of the Moon today, I would have told you , you were smoking dope. Let me say that again: If you’d told me we wouldn’t be back on the moon today I would have told you that you were smoking some bad dope. I thought I was going up on the Shuttle and coming back to train to go to the moon.

We became risk adverse after the Space Shuttle Challenger. That has got to stop. We’re going to drop satellites into the ocean periodically. Human mistakes are going to happen. We don’t want to plan for this. We want to work to avoid this. But we can’t be afraid. We need to take risks to move forward.

…

We’re open to comment and to criticism. We’re not going to do things the way we used to do.

…

Audience Comment: I’m concerned about the emphasis on international collaboration. That seems to imply large missions. What about small missions?

A: (Summary of long response) International Collaboration doesn’t imply large missions. It implies opening doors for other countries by helping them doing things they can’t do on their own. Consider scientists in Nigeria who are working with researchers at the University of Alabama on small research missions. It is our duty to share what we can do.

My Words: I don’t think everyone can educate face to face, but I think all of us have something to give, and that as a community, if we create a culture of collaboration, of partner globally, and of working to find ways to decimate our results and value the communicators as highly as we value our top researchers we can create a new generation of people who understand science and understand how to love science.

I’ll be writing more on this later. Right now, all I know is I’ve seen a great speaker speak from the heart about my dreams and how we can work together to make them real. I’m in love, but, as Phil put it, this really was only a first date.

I want to believe.

Many Faces of NASA

It is with great hope that I blog this town hall meeting. Tonight the new EP/O Lead for NASA, Steph Stockman (geosteph on twitter), is presenting NASA Education and the new vision for NASA’s new future under Charles Bolden.

As some of you know, for the past several years I have one conference after another blogged with a certain degree of bitterness the mistreatment of education and astronomy at the hands of Michael Griffin. I’ve reported name calling and budget slashing. I’ve even watched graduate students tell him “You’ve budget slashed my dreams into oblivion” to have him respond with more name calling. It has been ugly.

But there is hope! Bolden respects teachers! (His parents I think were teachers.) And the new EP/O director is savvy to new media, literate in K-12 educational theory, practiced in informal ed and generally is an educational triple-treat. These are good things!

Anyway – Steph is talking She is starting her talk by explaining why we see NASA doing the things it does – the changes in vision, the changes in reporting, the random NASA stuff we all have to track. She is giving us transparency in government one annoying reality at a time – but it’s better to be annoyed by reality then by mysteries.

The new Space Mission Directorate Outcomes will include 10 areas of effort (slid flew by too fast to grab what those 10 areas are) that will address 4 areas of education (higher ed, K-12, informal ed, and outreach). Within this context, outreach is seen as something that directly connects many aspects of NASA public affairs with formal education. (Outreach is what I do.)

Funding will come out through a variety of projects, ranging from mission-based EPO (Like the Little SDO videos), major activities (this is what we’re doing with Galaxy Zoo), and even supplements to science grants (Got science? I’d love to talk to you about ed!)

Bringing us all together are a set of NASA education forums under themes such as Astrophysics, Planetary Science, Helioscience, etc. (My grant straddles Planetary and Astrophysics.) The forums are a really cool thing – They foster collaborations, sharing of resources, and generally supply a support mechanism for those of us with NASA grants. For the past couple months I’ve attended the monthly Planetary Science telecon and learned about a lot of lunar projects I never knew about that I can plug into and about get help for an upcoming Moon related open-secret-project I can’t write about here.

NASA is also using working groups to help define what NASA can do to best support us through their products and activities. These working groups (~10 people each), will consist ~50% of people working on NASA EPO (SEPOF teams in NASA speak) and the other 50% will be outsiders (for instance people from government) who can bring in a fresh perspective. On the list I am happy to see a Web Presence and Social Media Working Group! As part of all of this, they are going to make a user friendly NASA Science Mission Directorate EP/O web-portal, and they are going to make it possible to find NASA educational products in a straight-forward way. One of the more controversial parts of this (but one I support) is they are going to put all NASA products through a review process to make sure they are good products that we really should be promoting. When this first gets implemented, all existing products that haven’t been reviewed will get yanked until everything can go through the review process.

Yeah for accountability!

And all of the sudden we’ve landed in Q&A.

Q: How do we marry Project 2061 and NASA products?
A: (This is a really bad paraphrase) With meta-data. This is part of the review process – we’re going to make sure what we produce is aligned with standards and fits within the vision.

Q: What about assessment?
A: Over the years, standards have changed. Summative; Summative + Formative; Just Fromative. Etc. In the future, an evaluation/assessment professional needs to come to NASA HQ to help understand proper assessment. In the future, anyone doing assessment will need to have approval for their survey / instrument.

Q: Does this mean you are now your own Institutional Review Board?
A: Yes & No. It’s unclear. … Look, currently everyone is kind of doing their own thing. Likard scales from 1-5, inverse, 1-10, and all sorts of things. We need to try and sort this out into something more consistent.

At this stage, the Q&A deteriorated into a discussion on what it will take to get all NASA products and websites 508 compliant. I’m going to stop here and just be happy for clarity and transparency and hope.

As for the dreamers of my generation? We’re pretty much… Well you know what word goes there.

According to NASA, the average age of someone accepted into the astronaut core is 34 (my age). It then typically takes a few months to a year to be selected for a mission (if you ever are selected), and then another half year or longer to train for a mission. My guess would be that someone hired in the current round (and NASA is currently hiring astronauts) would get their first opportunity to fly in late 2011 or so.

Except I don’t think we’ll have a manned government funded space program at that point in time. And it scares me how little people are aware of this.

Here are the facts:

• The last space shuttle launch is currently scheduled for May 2010. The Shuttle fleet needs to be retired. While the shuttles still work (mostly) they were only meant to last until 2000, and it is increasingly difficult to keep them running (NASA buys parts on eBay periodically). There are also only so many resources to go around. We can’t pay the salaries of the folks who service and run the shuttle fleet and pay people to design and create whatever comes next.
• The original plan was to use Russian capsules to launch astronauts to the International Space Station after the shuttle fleet was retired. For that to happen, Congress needs to invest in the Russian Space Agency *now* and send them money *now* to pre-order capsules that take three years to build. Due to the latest Russian actions in Georgia, Congress is justifiable reticent to invest capital in that country. While there are plans to continue the Space Shuttle to fill possible gaps… At some point the shuttle will die – some vehicle will suffer one too many technical problems, and like the old pickup you give up on, it will be sent out to rot in the back pasture (or at least at the Smithsonian). Hopefully it will fail with no one in it. Once this happens, my guess is the whole fleet will be grounded.
• The new program to build launch vehicles, Constellation, is seriously delayed. According to official NASA pages, Orion (the manned half of the Orion program) will have it’s first launch in 2014. Unofficially, it is facing all sorts of delays and cost overruns (1, 2). And if Obama is elected, he’s announced he’ll delay the mission 5 years. My guess – Constellation will launch 2019 at the earliest, and more likely 2022ish.

Getting the Constellation program going is far harder than anyone seems to have previously anticipated. This is going to be a rocket that makes the Saturn V look average. To get it to work, everything has to be rebuilt, from beneath the ground on up. Literally. The Crawler may not be able to support the Ares rockets’ weights and the Launch Pad will need to be restructured for this taller rocket. These are rebuilds not fully budgeted.

I have to admit that I’m afraid that if the cost overruns for the Constellation program become too great, it will simply be canceled. This has happened before (e.g. the X-33 and see also).

Needless to say, as I look at the facts as I can google them, I’m not going to apply for the Astronaut core (actually I wouldn’t anyways – I enjoy teaching too much). And, I’m going to encourage students interested in the astronaut core to get to know the non-NASA space cores. As we move into the future, I’m hoping that the commercial space agencies may somehow find a place in space doing science now and then.

Just as I fear NASA is about to enter a period without a manned space program, I also think that thanks to Scaled Composites (who will bring us Virgin Galactic) and Bigelow Aerospace commercial space flight is going to become what Concorde flights were in the early 1980s: expensive but possible for anyone who wins the lotto or makes a killing on the stock market.

I have very mixed emotions about how I see NASA’s role in space slowly dieing just as I see commercial manned-space on the verge of becoming something great. NASA needs astronauts as construction workers and repair artists (really, what they’re doing to the Hubble Space Telescope is art). Most science in space can be done by robotic probes, but fixing and building often needs hands. We need astronauts. I’m just not convinced we need as many as we have. As someone who once wanted to be the first Journalist in space, I still hope to someday get my ticket, but I don’t know how to advice my students any more. The best I can say is work hard, try hard, prepare for everything and learn Russian and/or Chinese. And have a plan B. NASA probably shouldn’t even be plan A. Maybe Plans A through D …

I hate giving advice that tempers dreams. I hate that NASA is breaking my heart all for lack of funding.

(If we leave Iraq, can we please send 1 months worth of war funding to NASA? Please?)

This blog is not showing up in Google on the first page of searches for my name or Star Stryder or starstryder. I have no idea what’s going on. If anyone has any ideas, can you please email me? pamela at starstryder dot com.