Former NASA administrator shares stories, insights on space travel
By Jason Gabak
Editor
During his career Sean O’Keefe has held many prestigious positions.
Currently O’Keefe is University Professor and the Howard G. and S. Louise Phanstiel Chair in Strategic Management and Leadership at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
Concurrently, he serves as Distinguished Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
He has held positions such as chairman and CEO of Airbus Group Inc., the U.S.-based division of the global aerospace, defense and space corporation.
Prior to that, he was vice president of the General Electric Co. and chancellor of Louisiana State University.
On four separate occasions, he served as a presidential appointee — as administrator of NASA, secretary of the Navy, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and comptroller and CFO at the Defense Department.
It was his years with NASA, from 2001 to 2004, which O’Keefe was sharing when he was the speaker at the Skaneateles Speaker Series organized by the Professional Services Committee of the Skaneateles Area Chamber of Commerce.
O’Keefe began with a look at where the space race began.
He shared the famous words that John F. Kennedy shared in 1961, stating that by the end of the decade the United States would land a man on the moon.
“It was an audacious and bold statement,” O’Keefe said. “If we can accomplish this, imagine what else we can do.”
This speech by Kennedy, what has come to be known as the “New Ocean Speech,” according to O’Keefe touched on something in the American collective psyche and rallied and inspired people to take on the challenge presented by Kennedy.
“As Americans it is part of what we do,” O’Keefe said. “We take a challenge and we go conquer it. As Kennedy said we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. He said we are going to go to the moon and that got everyone excited.”
O’Keefe said this was no small task as NASA had only been established three years prior to Kennedy’s speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower and the technology for space exploration was in its infancy.
The space race, O’Keefe said, was born out of the Cold War and Russia’s launch of Sputnik also served to fan the flames for exploration.
According to O’Keefe, between Kennedy’s speech and the first moon landing, public interest did ebb and flow as there were numerous other critical events taking place during these turbulent years such as Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement.
But at NASA there was a very specific focus.
“We were going to keep trying until we achieved,” O’Keefe said. “We didn’t know how we were going to do these things, but we kept working at it and the technology advanced in ways we only dimly imagined to be possible.”
Through the Mercury, Gemini and ultimately the Apollo missions, NASA and its staff of scientists, engineers and a host of others solved the problems they were faced with to break the bounds of the Earth and reach the moon.
Along the way and all through the history of NASA, technology continued to develop, some of which we take for granted today such as GPS systems and computing power.
As an example, O’Keefe said the movie “Apollo 13” and its scenes from the flight control room showed the computers available at the time of the mission and the computing power in that entire room is equivalent to the power of most laptops today.
O’Keefe said this kind of advance in technology, computing power and miniaturization is a result of the work connected with space exploration.
But despite all these advances, there are still barriers we face in trying to go farther into space.
Over the past three decades, O’Keefe said advances have continued from the shuttle program to the International Space Station to private companies now making the supply runs to the space station, each of these has been an important step.
But there are hurdles between the Earth and Mars for example.
O’Keefe used Mars as the next closest object in the solar system after the moon, but said there are many factors to take into consideration.
He pointed out human biology as being a key limitation.
Microgravity and radiation have proven to have negative consequences for humans spending long periods of time in space.
O’Keefe said humans lose as much as 20 to 30 percent of their muscle mass under these circumstances and 15 to 20 percent of their calcium.
The further humans travel from the Earth the greater exposure there is to radiation in space, creating a shuttle or other transport thick enough to protect humans for a long journey such as the six months it would take to get to Mars is a challenge to further manned space exploration.
Another challenge is fuel and food.
For a long term journey the amounts of fuel and food needed to sustain people for the journey to and from Mars as well as during their time on the planet are more than are currently feasible.
But as with Kennedy’s challenge more than 50 years ago, that human determination to conquer perseveres.
Via the international space station NASA is learning ways to mitigate the effects on the human body through diet and exercise and is learning more about how to food might be propagated in space.
It is this focus and determination to solve a problem that O’Keefe said he saw day after day at NASA and he said this carries on.
“The resilience of the people that work there is amazing,” O’Keefe said. “They are capable of keeping motivated. The dedication they have, they are naturally fired up. It has been that way from the start. They have that mind set that we can do this.”
