NASA at 50 Oral History
Project
Edited Oral History Transcript
Scott J.
Horowitz
Interviewed by Rebecca Wright
Washington, DC – 20 March 2007
Wright: Today is March 20th, 2007. We
are at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to speak with Dr. Scott
J. Horowitz, the Associate Administrator for the agency’s Exploration
Systems Mission Directorate, for the NASA at 50 Oral History Project.
Interviewer is Rebecca Wright. In preparation for the space agency’s
fiftieth anniversary the NASA Headquarters History Office commissioned
this oral history project to gather thoughts, experiences, and reflections
from NASA’s top managers. This information recorded today will
be transcribed and placed in the history archives here at NASA Headquarters,
where it can be accessed for future projects.
Are there any questions that I can answer before we begin?
Horowitz: No, I think you have most
of the questions.
Wright: Well, we shall begin. Thanks
again for providing this time in your busy schedule. You are responsible
for leading the agency in the development of the nation’s new
spacecraft that will return astronauts to the Moon, and travel to
Mars and other destinations in the solar system. You began your career
with NASA in 1992 as a pilot with the Astronaut Corps. Tell me how
your career brought you to this current position.
Horowitz: Well, that’s an interesting
path. How did a wayward pilot find his way to the Headquarters building,
which is something that a pilot never wants to do? Well, in ’92
I joined NASA as one of the astronauts in the Class of ’92.
I was fortunate enough to get to fly on four different shuttle missions.
I flew on [Space Shuttle] Columbia STS-75. I flew on [Space Shuttle]
Discovery STS-82 to the Hubble, and then flew twice to the station
on STS-101 on [Space Shuttle] Atlantis, and STS-105 as the commander
on [Space Shuttle] Discovery.
Between missions you work other items in the Astronaut Office, other
duties as assigned, work a lot of technical issues. One of the things
that I had worked on and off over all those years was as an interface
between the Astronaut Office and the group at NASA Johnson Space Center
[Houston, Texas] that was looking at advance programs going on to
Mars. A lot of work was being done by a small group led by Doug [Douglas]
Cooke, who is now the ESMD Deputy Associate Administrator.
So I got to know Doug Cooke and the group that were doing a lot of
these trades, and had always been interested. My background is in
aerospace engineering and design of rockets and aircraft, and I was
providing a crew perspective in a lot of the design trades they were
doing, to figure out how we were going to go to Mars someday.
I also ended up working in a new group in the Astronaut Office called
the Advanced Programs Office. We started that up about the time we
were working on the Orbital Space Plane, OSP. We had a few people
from the Astronaut Office, and we were responsible for, again, working
on the Astronaut Office, the operator’s perspective, coming
up with concept of operation and everything for OSP.
In that time also, near the end of OSP, NASA received the vision for
space exploration. In 2004 that started, that was kicked off, and
myself and a couple of other people were working ideas on the concept
of operations. Of course this was after the Columbia accident [STS-107],
and we had a few ideas on how to make the next generation of spacecraft
safer to do the mission we needed. The concept that we came up with
was one that we called Safe, Simple, and Soon. In order to be safer
you need a simpler vehicle, and the country probably needed it sooner
than later.
That was a small group of people including John [M.] Grunsfeld of
the Astronaut Office, Marsha [S.] Ivins and myself, and a lot of this
was a lot of very deep soul searching after the Columbia accident
as to how did we ended up where we are today. The real basic realization
is we had built a very, very complex vehicle (the Space Shuttle) that
no matter how hard we worked on it, chances of making it or not making
it on a mission was on the order of about one in a hundred, and that
was as good as it was going to get.
So when we were looking at Orbital Space Plane, which was being looked
at about the time of the Columbia accident, in fact the requirements,
high-level requirements for that came out within three weeks, actually,
after the accident, we realized there was a need for somebody to pursue
a safe, simple, sooner approach to getting people to and from low-Earth
orbit.
I’d worked on that and then when the vision for space exploration,
came out after that in 2004, started looking at this concept and actually
came up with an idea for a vehicle that would meet the performance
requirements of going to the Moon, which required more performance,
because it’s a healthier mission, and came up with a concept
that utilized a solid-rocket booster 1st stage and an upper-stage-LOX-hydrogen
engine, which was eventually to become the Ares I launch vehicle.
Couldn’t sell that concept inside of NASA, in fact, even submitted
information to the JSC Legal Office for a patent on that idea, and
they saw no useful application for the idea, and I have that letter
today. Pretty much out of frustration I finally decided to leave NASA
at the end of 2004 and go off and pursue other opportunities, and
ended up through a whole series of events eventually working for ATK
Thiokol in Utah. I really went there to go skiing, and they offered
me a job, so I said okay.
My wife said I had to work, so I got a job, and they were interested
in helping me develop the idea of the concept further, which I did.
Eventually Mike [Michael D.] Griffin took over NASA. They ran the
ESAS [Exploration Systems Architecture Study]. ESAS concluded that
the right answer was a vehicle similar to the one I had sketched,
with a heavy launch vehicle, which several of us had come to the same
conclusion that you needed a heavy launch vehicle.
Then I was contacted if I’d be interested in applying for the
job as ESMD Associate Administrator, so I applied for the job and
was offered the job to come to Headquarters, and basically give up
living in a ski resort making a lot of money and working real hours,
to come to Washington, D.C., which is the sixty-four-square-mile logic-free
zone, to deal with the abuse and work ridiculous hours at half the
pay, but happy to do so, because it’s in the pursuit of a worthy
goal. So that’s a long answer to a short question, how did I
get here.
Wright: We definitely like the long
answers, and it was definitely an interesting journey. During that
journey through your NASA career, how has NASA changed?
Horowitz: That’s a great question.
NASA, when I showed up at NASA in ’92, there was very little
change. It was pretty, what I called a fully matured bureaucracy.
NASA had been around a long time—we’re approaching fifty
years—and we kind of got set in our ways, so a lot of processes
and a lot of thinking process were kind of set in the way we did business,
which is a problem. When you’re doing something new you don’t
know everything, and it’s exciting and people are learning and
developing, and the process is all changing.
The good thing for Shuttle is you had a nice steady process. You do
this, you do this, you do this, and you fly a Shuttle. But what had
happened during basically since [19]’81 when we first started
flying the shuttle, designed it in the seventies, it’s been
almost thirty years since we developed a new launch vehicle, so we
had gotten completely away from how to develop a human-rated spacecraft.
Hadn’t done it. In fact, it’s been almost two generations
of engineers, so if you go around NASA it’s really tough to
get people who think in the development mind frame.
The people we had developing Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were developing
all the X-planes that were the first ones to go supersonic and all
of that kind of work, and there were dozens and dozens of projects
they cut their teeth on. What’s happened in the last couple
of years since Mike Griffin has come onboard is to change the culture
to start thinking like a group that’s going to design a new
spacecraft. So there’s been a huge amount of change in just
the last couple of years. We have an administrator who understands
how a rocket works.
So where we are today is there’s been a huge amount of change
in the last couple of years. We have an administrator who is technically
competent, and we have a vision, which is something NASA was lacking.
One of the things I saw for a long time is NASA really was missing
a high-level objective. The Shuttles are amazing vehicles, the [International]
Space Station’s an incredible project, we’ve done amazing
things in space, but there was no high-level from-the-top goal for
NASA to really sink its teeth into. It was more of, do this project,
do that program, business as usual.
So with the advent of the vision for space exploration, and then with
someone who understands the technical realities of what it takes to
do a program, and understands the type of organization that it needs
to carry out that kind of a vision, there’s been a lot of change
in the last couple of years. So I saw a long period of very little
change, in fact more of digging in, same old same old, and then the
couple of events in the last five years, the vision for space exploration
and Mike Griffin coming onboard, changing the basic governance models
of how we do business has really begun to turn the boat around, if
you will, to get us vectored in the right direction to accomplish
this.
That’s not to say that it’s all perfect. We still have
a long way to go. But it’s the most change I’ve seen at
NASA in my career, just in the last couple of years.
Wright: Well, you’re mentioning
the combination of a vision and leadership, and then earlier mentioned
about your responsibilities. How do you take your scope of current
responsibilities and move it into a strategic plan to fulfill that
vision with your leadership?
Horowitz: Yes, the way I look at my
job is it’s kind of interesting being in this office at NASA
Headquarters. I’m kind of a technical guy, too, just like my
boss, love technical design, but also understand that there’s
a need to explain what we’re doing to all of our stakeholders.
One of the reasons we’re sitting in an office in Washington,
D.C. is that we have the Congress and the White House. We work for
the White House, obviously, the administration, to help keep them
all informed as to what it is we’re doing, and why we’re
doing what we’re doing, and to be working really hard to improve
our credibility.
NASA has a problem with its credibility; it’s very low. A lot
of people go see a lot of programs and projects that we have started
and not finished, a lot of budgets that have been overrun by huge
margins, and a lot of it was due to people promising things that they
couldn’t deliver on.
So my job is to make sure we don’t promise things we can’t
deliver on, and make sure I allow the people that work on doing the
real work, my program and project managers, to provide what I call
the top cover for them. So the way for a program, especially a program
of this size and complexity to succeed is they need stable requirements,
they need to make realistic assumptions on what technology they’re
going to have, and not base things on “unobtanium” as
we like to call it, and they have to have a stable environment, which
means a stable budget and other things that allow them to operate
their programs in a manner that lets them produce the results that
we want.
So really my leadership, if you will, is to help provide that environment,
not allow high-level changes to the requirements, not allow them to
base programs and projects on unobtanium technology, and to do everything
I can to get them a stable budget environment, and if things change
in that environment to make sure that the people that are paying the
bills understand the consequences of changes to the budget, and not
promise that I can deliver when those changes occur.
If you change the amount of money available to do something, you either
have to change the content or the time. Something has to change. You
can’t keep promising, “Oh yeah, I’ll take a 25 percent
cut and we’ll make it happen, thank you very much.” That’s
not realistic. So part of my leadership is really just to provide
a good environment for the people who do the real work to get the
job done. That’s kind of my job.
Wright: Do you have some insight that
you can share on how to provide understanding for those that right
now you’re developing something for the future out of nothing?
Horowitz: We’ve been to the Moon.
We’ve been there. We have the technology to go to the Moon.
Now, are we going to use the same exact bolts and nuts and screws
and computers? No, we’re not. We’re going to take advantage
of the existing technology where it makes sense. So one of the things
trying to explain to people, for example, the design of this new launch
vehicle. The first stage of it is the solid-rocket booster. We’re
going to add another segment to it, but it’s basically the same
technology. In fact, a larger version had been fired in 2003, so the
changes to that are pretty minimal. So that’s a good, cost-effective
solution, because that’s a very safe, reliable solution for
the first stage.
We’re bringing back the J-2 as the J-2X. That flew on Apollo.
It will be a better engine. So one of the ways I explain things, it’s
like looking at airplanes. People say, “Well, we’ve been
there, done that.”
And I say, “Well, you’ve been there and you’ve done
that with airplanes.” If you go out to an airport and you fly
a 737, which you probably flew on your trip up here, you probably
flew a 737-800. Well, the very first 737 flew back in 1967. If the
two airplanes were parked on the ramp, unless you’re an aero
[aerospace] engineer or an airplane buff, you probably couldn’t
tell the difference except one’s got little funny things pointed
up on the wingtips, and maybe you might notice that the engine looks
bigger in diameter on the new one versus the old one. Other than that
you wouldn’t know the difference, but they are significantly
different aircraft.
They’re about the same shape, about the same size, they do the
same thing, move people from Point A to Point B, but the new one does
it much safer, much more fuel efficiently, and has much more technology
embedded in the aircraft. That’s kind of what we’re going
to be doing here, is the shape and the basic—the reason the
rocket looks the way it does, which is a tall, skinny rocket with
multiple stages and a capsule on the top is, that’s what physics
drives you to.
The physics hasn’t changed, and barring any what people are
always trying to bet on, this revolutionary technology, which again
remember I said earlier that if you try to bet something on a revolutionary
technology you will probably fail if you’re not trying some
kind of a technology that has a high level of maturity. So when I
try to explain to people I try to relate it in terms that they can
understand as to what we’re doing.
So really, we’re not doing anything Earth shattering. What we’re
doing is we’re trying to do good engineering, good systems engineering,
and so this is a big program. It’s a big project, but we’re
not violating any of the laws of physics this time, and that’s
why we have a high potential of success.
Wright: You’ve talked a lot about
going back to the Moon, but your job encompasses past that as well.
So share with me your vision of where we will be within the next fifty
years, or where you would like to see us be within the next fifty
years, [with you] being in such a position to shape that now.
Horowitz: Yes. When you look at the
vision for space exploration it talks about Moon, Mars, and beyond.
It’s very clear about that. The Moon is not the goal. The Moon
is a step along the way to further human exploration of the solar
system, and eventually beyond. We can look how much further beyond?
Some people ask will we ever go to Mars? Absolutely we’re going
to go to Mars. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter
of when.
If you look at our current budget and you look at what we’ve
accomplished, there’s no reason to suspect why in the next fifty
years we wouldn’t be at Mars. In fact, given current spending
rates, if we do it right one could forecast that we might be at Mars
in the 2030-35 timeframe, just looking at the kind of budget if NASA
gets about the same money per year, if we don’t go off on a
weird track somewhere and try to do something strange.
What you’ll see happen is in the next few years we’ll
develop the Ares I and the Orion spaceship. We’ll start flying
it to Space Station, and then we’ll prepare to go on to the
Moon. We’ll build the Ares V, and the Ares V will really change
the ability of the United States by allowing us to send a heavy-lift
vehicle, which can put on the order of 260,000 pounds in low-Earth
orbit. This is actually more than the Saturn V could do. We gave up
a fundamental capability, the United States, when we stopped flying
the Saturn V back in the seventies. We lost twenty years.
So barring making another mistake like that, we will have the basic
capability required to go anywhere, because we’ll be able to
put up large objects required to go on to Mars and beyond, and beyond
will depend on what technology we have to launch on this heavy-lift
vehicle. You still have to do the first fifty miles. As was once told
to me, the first fifty and the last fifty miles are the hardest.
So what I see happening is by 2020 you’ll see us returning to
the Moon, but we’re not going to go back—it’s not
going to be just to get there and that’s the goal. We will actually
go back with a capability we’re designing today that’s
much more capable than the Apollo folks enjoyed. We’ll be able
to send four astronauts down to the surface, and we’ll have
a vehicle that can deliver large amounts of payload to the surface
to be able to put some infrastructure in place. We won’t just
go to the equator. We’ll probably start out at the poles, and
we’re going to build up an outpost.
We’re also going to provide an opportunity for other countries
to participate, that’s part of the whole strategy, and the commercial
world will hopefully be providing us low-Earth orbit capability, and
then eventually the commercial world will find a reason to sell services
to the Moon, so it will continue to follow as NASA explores. We will
be hopefully opening the frontier for the commercial world to follow
as they see markets and see fit, because if we can buy services from
them more cost effectively, then we can concentrate on the next-harder
thing.
After we spend some time in the outpost and learn all the lessons
we need to go on to Mars, then we’ll start seriously contemplating
putting together a Mars mission. We have to solve some problems like,
how do you deal with the long exposure of radiation to astronauts,
because Mars missions are measured in many of months and a couple
of years, versus just a couple of days or months on the Space Station.
So I fully expect that you’ll see us starting to go to Mars,
particularly in the 2030-ish, [20]35 timeframe, and by the fifties,
fifty years from now you’ll see an established Mars outpost
and us going to other interesting places in the solar system.
Wright: What do you believe is NASA’s
most important role for the nation with this vision, how will it impact
society, and how will it impact the future generations knowing that
NASA’s sending this vision ahead?
Horowitz: Well, one of the most important
things that I like to think about is we can look back in history and
see what the Apollo program did, and one of the things—then
people can try to put a dollar value on it, but I think it’s
fairly difficult—is how do you measure the value of the motivation
of a generation?
One of the reasons that I’m sitting here today is I was motivated
by watching NASA do great things. Everyone comes up with these, “Oh,
we need a cute theme,” or, “We need a cute poster,”
or, “We need some kind of a crazy saying to motivate people.”
And my response is, “No. You just need to do great things. If
you do great things, you will motivate people because they’re
excited.” Putting an outpost on the Moon is exciting, and you
don’t have to become an astronaut. There are thousands of people
that went into the math and sciences and engineering disciplines that
really peaked around the Apollo program, and then at the end of that
program we saw that drop off in this country.
So the United States is losing its technological edge, and, in fact,
in some segments people would claim we’ve lost it, and so maybe
one of the greatest things, greatest gifts that this nation can get
out of its space program is the fact that we will inspire the next
generation to do something that’s even grander than what we’re
doing today or doing tomorrow or in the next few years.
In fact, one of my biggest fears growing up, especially through high
school and stuff as I watched the end of the Apollo program and people
were talking about what they were going to do next, is I truly believed
that at the rate I watched NASA go, that by the time I was old enough
to go to work for NASA that all the cool stuff would have been over,
and we would have been on Mars and that would have been done.
Little would I have guessed, because if you had looked at the rate
at where we were headed, there was nothing to say we shouldn’t
have been a big presence on the Moon and off to Mars with a Space
Station flying and everything by the eighties. Those were the original
projections and I believed it as a kid. But there were some changes
in policy and major decisions made that changed that course of history.
So I think by picking grand goals and doing exciting things, then
we’ll motivate the next generation. That may be the biggest
benefit of doing something like this.
Wright: Since you’re helping to
develop that foundation for the next fifty years, what is the importance
of robotic spaceflight?
Horowitz: There’s always been
this big feud, if you will, between the robotics and the human spaceflight
capacity, and I think that’s just a silly feud to have. There
are great things for robotic spacecraft to do, and there are great
things for humans to do. For example, I could send a robot out today
into a field to go look for fossils, and the chances of that robot
finding a fossil are slim to none. It could spend days and days and
days and days running around looking for fossils, and probably couldn’t
figure them out, where I could just take somebody who knows what to
look for to find a fossil, either a trained geologist or just anybody
who’s trained in a little bit of basic geology, and they could
go out and find a bunch of fossils in an area that had them.
There are tasks that require the human mind to make decisions. There
are dangerous things you’d rather send a robot to do. There
are places that we can’t protect the crew that it’s better
to send a robot to. There are robots working with people, and so there’s
a whole field of study going on there. For example, you could be at
your Moon base, so let’s just fast forward ten years. I fully
expect on the Moon base that you’re not going to jump in your
suit and run outdoors every day to go do the million things that you
want to do.
You may have some robots, and you may have a control panel there in
your little lunar outpost, and you might send a robot off to go look
at some prospective, interesting areas, and do some surveying and
all that, and then you might get in your suit or a rover and go out
to that area and do some detailed work with a robot helper. So I think
you’ll see the collaboration between humans and robots changing
all the time, and people need to realize there’s roles for both,
but there are huge advantages to having a human in situ.
Wright: Before NASA there was NACA [National
Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] with the primary focus on aeronautics.
What are your feelings as you look to the future, how NASA will be
involved with that field as well?
Horowitz: That’s interesting since
I’m an aero engineer and a lover of airplanes. I have a lot
of old NACA reports, and, of course, books on airfoil design and everything
that we got from NACA. NASA has four major directorates. We have aeronautics
and we have science, we have exploration and we have ops [operations].
I see NASA going forward with a balanced portfolio, and aeronautics
has been kind of in the background for a few years and is starting
to come around on its own again.
There’s a lot of very important work that aeronautics needs
to do to support both science and exploration. I’ll give an
example. When we come back from the Moon we’ll be going really
fast. When we hit the atmosphere we’ll have to design the spacecraft
to have a heat shield that’ll be able to maneuver in the atmosphere
and reenter, and that requires the knowledge of how a vehicle reacts
when it hits the atmosphere at a very high speed. It’s an aero-thermodynamics
problem.
Well, that expertise resides in aeronautics, so we need smart people
in aeronautics to advance that state of the art in their ability to
analyze that problem, that really haven’t done so in a lot of
years. So there’s some basic aero work we need done now. We’re
going to send a Mars surface lab to Mars. Well, it also has an atmosphere.
Well, someday we’re going to send people to Mars, and we’re
going to need a large vehicle with a fairly good size heat shield,
and so actually today the Exploration Mission Directorate, the Aeronautics
Research Directorate, and the Science Mission Directorate are working
together to instrument the heat shield for the Mars surface lab, to
get data for all three directorates, and the aero people will be using
that data to update their models and prediction capabilities so we
can use them for future vehicles that we design for Mars.
We’re also looking in the field of hypersonics, which is a field
that I’ve always been fairly interested in. I think it’s
a very exciting field, and not a lot of work has been done in that
field. In my estimation we could do a lot more, and so we’re
seeing more work done in hypersonics.
I know that we’re working in aeronautics to help the FAA [Federal
Aviation Administration] by providing expertise in how to analyze
systems that will affect the airplanes that fly in the future airspace.
People are always going to want planes that are more efficient, that
are quieter, that are safer, and that’s going to require the
experts that we used to think about in the old NACA, in the aeronautics.
People forget that NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration;
the first A is for Aeronautics. So I think there’s great things
for aeronautics to do.
Of course now with Lisa [J.] Porter running aeronautics, I think that’s
great because I think she gets it. She’s a smart lady and so
I enjoy working with her on aeronautics. I’m a closet aero engineer,
so I try to sneak to their seminars.
Wright: She’s probably glad you’re
on this end, too.
Horowitz: It’s fun. It’s
good stuff.
Wright: You’ve mentioned some
aspects of it, but what are some of the lessons that you’ve
learned being part of the NASA agency these years that you want to
apply as you move through the next years?
Horowitz: Lessons from management or
technical?
Wright: Well, from your own experience
either organizationally, technically, just ones that you feel are
some basic lessons that you want to make sure you apply.
Horowitz: One of the basic lessons I’ve
learned is especially in large organizations, communications is a
problem. Most of the issues I deal with day to day can trace their
roots to a breakdown in communications. It’s the old, “What
we have here is a basic failure to communicate,” line. It’s
really tough in large organizations, and we’ve had the advent
of Blackberrys and Internets and all that. I’m not sure that’s
helped. In fact, in some ways I think that has made it worse. People
have gotten sloppy in their communications.
In fact, one of our project managers came up with a great suggestion
at our last quarterly. You’ll find yourself in one of these
e-mail flails, I call them, where suddenly you have forty messages,
and I’m not exaggerating, on a topic, and people are talking
past each other and it’s getting out of control, and he says
at any point, he’s instituted a rule that someone can throw
the e-mail flag. Everyone has to stop sending notes and pick up the
phone or call a meeting and talk face to face.
So what I’ve learned from being at different levels of the organization
is that keeping people informed of what’s going on is really
important, and so I work hard, I’m not always very successful
at it, but try to work hard at making sure information is going both
ways, up and out to our stakeholders—they don’t like to
be surprised, I don’t like to be surprised—and down and
in to the people doing the work so they’re not surprised.
In fact, what you usually find most people are upset about is they’ve
been surprised, one way or another. Someone found out you were looking
at something and they had no idea that you were concerned about this,
so they’re surprised. So communications is one big lesson.
One of the other lessons I’ve learned is that this agency needs
people in leadership positions that have the technical background
to understand what it is they’re leading. I don’t care
what anybody says, you can’t just go to some school and learn
how to be a manager, and expect to be able to manage anything as complex
as the space program. It just doesn’t work. And while I have
a lot of lessons to learn in management, at least I understand what
it is we’re trying to build. I don’t know everything about
what we’re trying to build, but at least I know which end of
the pointy rocket goes forward, and that F equals MA [Force equals
Mass multiplied by Acceleration].
You need that. You really do, or you’re not credible to your
stakeholders, you’re not credible to people you work for, and
you can’t decipher the reams of information that are being thrown
at you, that most have a technical basis on which you’re going
to make a decision. So I think technical competence in leadership
positions is what this agency, more than probably any other agency
I know of, needs, because of our particular mission, which is, it
is rocket science. It really is rocket science.
So those two things from management, the communications and technical
competence in leadership is really important, so maybe those are a
couple of the top items that I think about.
Wright: A lot was said, especially after
Columbia, about NASA’s culture. What is your perception of NASA’s
culture, and where would you like for it to be?
Horowitz: Everybody talks about culture.
What was missing in Columbia, I think when people are talking about
culture was there wasn’t a good flow of information from the
right people to the people who had to make the decisions. So you can
have people with good technical backgrounds in good decision-making
roles, but if they aren’t presented with the right information
at the right time, they can’t make the right decisions. So I’ve
seen that a lot.
NASA’s new governance model is actually very interesting. We
have the programmatic chain of command, if you will, and we have the
technical chain of command. It used to be mission directorates, which
were then called codes, owned Centers. There were Centers that worked
for Code M, and there were Centers that worked for Code S, and there
were Centers that worked for pick your code. That’s not the
way NASA is organized anymore.
The new governance model is we have Mission Directorates, and the
Mission Directorates have programs. So, Exploration, we are a Mission
Directorate and we have programs like Constellation. I have a program
manager, and that program manager’s job is to execute the program,
and we tell him budget and requirements and, “This is what we
need you to go do.” Now, they get technical help and technical
expertise from the Centers, so the Center Directors own the bulk of
the talent, if you will, to actually do the job. And so the Center
Directors don’t work for Mission Directorates anymore. In fact,
they’re on the same level in the agency, and so that’s
the board of directors, includes the people responsible for the programs
and the people responsible for the technical work, which makes sense.
So I’ll give you an example of a situation that might arise.
The program gets told by the Mission Directorate, I say, “Program
manager, I want to launch this rocket tomorrow.”
And he goes, “Yes, sir, going to launch that rocket tomorrow.”
Now one of his technical guys working for him goes, “Well, that’s
the dumbest thing I ever heard. We’re not ready to launch that
rocket for—,” pick a technical reason. So he goes to the
program manager and says, “You’re full of baloney, don’t
want to launch this rocket tomorrow.”
And he goes, “You don’t understand. Senator fill-in-the-blank
has told the ESMD [Exploration Systems Mission Directorate] guy, ‘You’re
going to launch this rocket.’ And he’s told his program
manager, me, to tell you to go launch this rocket.”
He goes, “Well, I disagree, so I’m going to go tell my
management.”
So now in one or two phone calls the Center Director is calling me
and saying, “That’s a dumb technical solution.”
And I say, “You don’t understand the program pressure
I’m under.”
And he says, “You don’t understand that’s a bad
technical solution.” So within two or three phone calls, if
you use a phone instead of a Blackberry, we are now meeting face to
face to look at the programmatics versus the technical. If we can’t
resolve the problem it goes to the NASA Associate Administrator and
the NASA Administrator. So in less than half a dozen levels of communication
you’ve gone from almost any level in the organization to the
top to resolve a serious issue. You always want to resolve the problems
at the lowest level, but you need a way to elevate to upper management
if required.
But if it cannot be resolved, people know there’s a path all
the way to the top, where the NASA Administrator can make the final
call, and that is a huge, huge difference, and that is a huge benefit
of the way we’re organized now, which is completely different
than the way the organization worked. Now, it doesn’t work perfectly,
and what we’re trying to instill in people is that there is
this chain of command. You are expected to be technically competent,
you are expected to bring up issues, and so the challenge is teaching
everybody their responsibility and how to use that responsibility
correctly.
So that’s the big challenge now that we’ve given them
the framework. It’s now getting everyone to learn how to use
the framework. So the cultural issue now is training people how to
work in this environment. We want them to be the experts in their
field, and we want them to speak up when they need to speak up.
Wright: As our time starts to move closer
to the end, a couple of questions I wanted to ask before we close,
and one of them is we’ve been talking about vision, we’ve
been talking about the next fifty years. If someone asked you today,
“Why would I want to have a career at NASA?” what would
you tell them?
Horowitz: Well, anybody who’s
thinking of getting in this business, this is a good time to think
about it. The next couple of years will be a little tough, because
we’re in this transition, but we’re ready to open a whole
new frontier. So I truly believe in a few years that you’re
going to see excitement like I was able to enjoy as a kid growing
up in the Apollo program. It’s going to only get more and more
exciting as we start making progress towards the new vision.
The next few years will be the hardest. This will be a difficult time,
because we’re transitioning out of twenty-plus years of operating
Space Shuttles into a new system. But once we get through that transition
point, you know, it’s like, watch our dust. It’s going
to be something, because we’re going to be developing a little
launch vehicle, the Ares I, we’re going to be developing the
Orion spaceship, and then we’re going to be developing the Ares
V Heavy Lift, and then we’re going to be doing lunar landers,
and then we’re going to be doing outpost design, then we’ll
be doing missions to Mars, and the future is very bright, and we can
do all that on the budgets that we have today.
Wright: What do you find to be the most
challenging aspect of these next years?
Horowitz: Living in D.C. [laughs]
Wright: For the agency?
Horowitz: The biggest challenge for
us is to make sure that we can prove that we have credibility with
our stakeholders. We have to deliver. We have to say what we’re
going to do, and then we have to do what we say. If we do that, then
I think the future will get a lot easier.
But again I come back to, NASA has a credibility problem. We haven’t
delivered a lot of programs on cost, on schedule, and we’ve
promised a lot of things because we thought it was in our best interest
to promise things that we could never deliver. We have to stop doing
that, and so we have to be able to lay out a program like we have
in the exploration program, that is achievable, doesn’t require
miracles, doesn’t use hope as a management tool, and gets back
to our basic tenets of technical credibility and excellence, and deliver
on the vision for space exploration. That’s our biggest challenge.
Wright: Well, before we close is there
anything you’d like to add, maybe a thought might have run through
your head.
Horowitz: I think I espoused almost
all the thoughts I have in my head, not that I have many, but that
I truly, truly think the next fifty years will be real exciting. We
just have to provide stability and execute on the programs that we
have, and the best way to show the nay sayers that they’re wrong
is to prove it. So, getting launch vehicles on the pad, and getting
new spacecraft flying, and executing the missions in a timely manner,
and being honest.
I think that’s something that’s really been lacking is
real technical credibility and program credibility, because NASA either
hasn’t been honest with itself or with all of its stakeholders.
I think it’ll take time, but as we move forward it can only
get more exciting as we execute these things. It’ll be tough.
This is not easy stuff. It is rocket science, and technically that
may be the least of our challenges. Dealing with the politics and
trying to keep everybody interested and excited about the future,
that’s probably our largest challenge.
Wright: Well, I wish you the best of
luck with all that you have to do.
Horowitz: Thanks. “Good luck with
that,” right? [laughs]
Wright: Well, we’ll be on your
side, and thanks again for finding time today.
Horowitz: Thank you, glad I was able
to do it.
[End
of interview]