Posted on 04/17/2002 1:45:18 PM PDT by boris
Teacher In Space Highlights O’Keefe NASA Vision Speech Space News, April 15, 2002, page 3
A highly touted policy speech by NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe disclosed plans to send teachers to space, but con-veyed no dramatic change in the direction of the U.S. space agency.
NASAs plans to send astronaut-in-train-ing Barbara Morgan, a former elementary school teacher, to the international space station no sooner than 2004 was the highlight of O'Keefe's April 12 speech at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York.
NASAs public affairs operation billed O'Keefe's speech as a major address, but aside from the Teacher in Space announcement, there was little that O'Keefe had not already articulated in various public appearances since taking office in January.
O'Keefe did not announce any bold ini-tiatives, such as returning to the moon, privatizing NASAs fleet of space shuttles, or inviting new partner nations into the international space station program. Nor did he suggest the possibility of changing NASAs previously announced plan to scale back its contribution to the space station. John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University here, said the speech could prove to be a victim of its own hype. "I think it had been spun as something it turned out not to be," he said.
Rather than the bold, new vision for NASA some had expected, Logsdon said, O'Keefe's speech was more or less a "re-statement of the mission that has guided NASA for the past decade -- Earth exploration and are we alone?"
In his speech, O'Keefe said NASAs mandate is to "improve life here, to extend life to there, [and] to find life beyond."
To accomplish these goals, O'Keefe said, NASA must undertake three central missions:
• Understand and protect our home planet. • Explore the universe and search for life. • Inspire the next generation of explorers.
"The only way to really comprehend our climate and to protect the scarce resources of our planet is to look at the Earth as a single, whole system," O'Keefe said. "The mission is to understand and protect our planet. Protection includes using our scarce resources to improve life on Earth by living in an environmentally sound manner," O'Keefe said. "NASAs contribution will be to help collect the data [President George W. Bush] has called for to frame the policy choices we must consider to meet the challenges of climate change and establish responsible international environmental standards."
Studying the Earth as a system already is a central goal of NASAs Earth Sciences Enterprise, which operates a fleet of environ-mental observation spacecraft.
Logsdon said O'Keefe's affirmation of the Earth Science program, however, is significant given the questions some scientists have about the Bush administration's commitment to global change research.
In the vision O'Keefe articulated, protecting the Earth also incorporates NASA aeronautics programs focused on safer, cleaner air transportation. It also includes lending a hand in the U.S. effort to combat global terrorism. "Protection of our home planet includes sharing NASAs unique technology and imagery with other government agencies, academia and industry, to thwart those who seek to do harm or arrest trends that diminish our quality of life," O'Keefe said. O'Keefe also raised the possibility that NASA might be able to develop technology to prevent future terrorist attacks like those that occurred Sept. 11.
"It is not a technology leap to design systems to preclude the use of commercial aircraft as weapons," O'Keefe said. "This goal we're working on is an imperative inspired by the events of Sept. 11, which touched us all -- and NASA was no exception."
O'Keefe said the search for life, coupled with solid science, will drive NASAs exploration of the universe. Repeating a point he has made on a number of occasions, O'Keefe said NASA "will go where the science dictates that we go, not because it's close or popular."
Robotic and human space flight activities must stop functioning as independent, self-contained programs and start working together toward common goals, O'Keefe said.
O'Keefe also said NASA will renew its commitment to edu-cation to inspire the next generation of space explorers. To that end, O'Keefe announced that Morgan will at long last fly on the space shuttle.
Morgan, 50, originally trained as teacher Christa McAuliffe's back-up for the ill-fated 1986 space shuttle Challenger mission, which ended in an explosion that claimed the lives of McAuliffe and her six crew mates.
Morgan has been training as an astronaut since NASA officially resumed the Teacher in Space program in 1998.
No longer in the classroom, Morgan currently works for NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where she has served in Mission Control on multiple space shuttle missions.
Her mission is targeted for 2004, sometime after the scheduled deployment of the core U.S. elements of the international space station.
O'Keefe said NASA will work with the U.S. Department of Education to establish a program for selecting other teachers for space flight opportunities.
Alan Ladwig, a former NASA associate administrator for policy and plans who managed the agency's Teacher in Space program in the 1980s, said he was pleased to see O'Keefe recommit NASA to the program without any hand wringing about safety.
Ladwig said restarting the program with the highly trained Morgan could deflect criticism about the dangers of sending a nonprofessional up on the shuttle.
"Yes she's been out of the classroom for a couple of years now," Ladwig said. "But maybe that's the best way to get this started again."
As for the rest of O'Keefe's speech, Lad-wig said it was about what could be expected given NASAs budgetary outlook.
"There are those who might wish the call was for a bolder vision -- human trips to Mars and stuff like that -- but the fact of the matter is that's not going anywhere right now," Ladwig said. "It might be a con-servative agenda compared to some that might be of-fered, but I think it's a realistic one."
Reps. Sherwood Boehlert and James Walsh, two New York Republicans who pay close at-tention to NASA, attended O'Keefe's speech and afterward offered words of praise for the administrator. However, Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas, the House Science Committee's ranking Democrat, who was not in attendance, was less charitable in his assessment of the address, which was carried on NASA TV.
"If goals are to be more than words, we have to provide the resources and commitment needed to realize them." Hall said in a statement. "The best way the administrator could demonstrate his commitment to `science-driven missions' would be to complete the international space station--restoring the crew size and research ca-pabilities that successive Congresses and administrations have supported."
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