As the tenth administrator to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Sean O’Keefe is responsible for leading and managing 11 NASA centers around the country. In the past year he has led the agency through the Columbia tragedy and provided direction toward the Space Shuttle’s safe return to flight. Now he and other officials are tasked with implementing President Bush’s new space policy that includes plans to complete the International Space Station by the end of the decade, retire the Space Shuttle fleet by 2010 and return to the moon by 2020. In this interview with All Systems Go, O’Keefe provides his outlook for the agency, future space exploration initiatives and the continuing role contractors will play to support NASA’s new vision.

ASG: How will the President’s plans change NASA as an agency?

O’Keefe: Organizationally, this will require a different way of doing business within our agency. We will create an exploration systems enterprise within the NASA framework that will be on par with space flight, space science, earth science, biological and physical research, education and safety and mission assurance and aeronautics. We will exploit the new technologies, new capabilities, and new ways of looking at challenges within the context of an organizational framework that will be responsible for looking at this challenge as a large-scale systems-integration endeavor. When you’re focusing on exploration as a primary set of objectives we’re seeking to achieve, it forces you to think in totally different ways about how to achieve that objective. It isn’t about stand-alone efforts; it’s about how do you integrate different programs and different ways of looking at the problem in order to achieve an entirely different outcome that might not have been possible.

ASG: What will be the Presidential Commission’s role in helping the agency meet its objectives?

O’Keefe: The mandate of this commission is to take the presidential directive, the policy, the strategy and the vision and help us find what implementation strategies should be examined, including a broad range of different commercial alternatives, looking at international participation, considering workforce challenges that we will continue to encounter as a consequence of the requirement to recruit and retain the kind of quality workforce that’s necessary.

ASG: Will the agency draw on earlier space exploration initiatives to develop the vehicle that will replace the retiring space shuttles?

O’Keefe: Exploration and discovery have been what this agency has been all about for the past 45 years, but this is a new directive. There isn’t a whole of lot of baselines for doing this. There isn’t a condition in which you look at a benchmark, “How did someone else do it?” We’re it. So while there may be parallels to earlier development efforts – Apollo, to be sure, and the staging approach that was done with Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, it nonetheless is a totally different kettle of fish. The idea of going back to do it precisely that same way is not recognizing that in the last 35 years technology has advanced significantly. How we then look at that set of requirements for exploration, vehicle capabilities and power generation and propulsion capabilities, gets us out of the mode of a series of working assumptions that were applicable then. It changes the dynamic very dramatically today. Very dramatic technology advances have occurred, that give us a new opportunity to follow up on this new mandate, which is going to be an exciting time. It’s one that we’re very, very excited about being part of and very pleased that the president’s direction is as confident in our abilities to do so.

ASG: What challenges remain for NASA in implementing the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s recommendations for return to flight?

O’Keefe: Our largest challenges are engineering in nature and human judgment in nature. We have to be equally diligent and thorough in our response to both. The technical engineering challenges involve working through the recommendations of the Accident Investigation Board and finding necessary solutions to make repairs on the external tank, as well as the bolt catcher (bolts that cause the Solid Rocket Booster to separate from the external tank approximately two minutes into the shuttle flight) and all of the issues they raised in the course of their investigation. Working through the human challenges is going to be tough. That involves a cultural change. We need to be equally committed to solving that dilemma, as we are with finding solutions to the technical issues.

ASG: Do you see the roles of NASA and contractors shifting? If so, how?

O’Keefe: Not necessarily. I think that NASA will end up taking a more assertive role in the diagnostic, in the casting, and in the research by the establishment of our engineering and safety center. But I don’t see this as a fundamental shift in the contractor responsibility or NASA responsibility. I think the operational activities will continue and, if anything, they will be heightened mutually on both sides

ASG: How can Boeing and its people help NASA achieve these goals?

O’Keefe: Be diligent! That’s our primary responsibility right now. We really need to make sure that we work through these recommendations of the Accident Investigation Board and implement them thoroughly. It’s imperative that we accept the findings, comply with the report, embrace the general context of that report and be diligent about implementing these recommendations to the best of our ability. That’s our best guarantee that we learn from this experience and emerge from it a stronger and safer community in pursuit of space exploration objectives.