ISS: THE PROGRAM MANAGERS SPEAK

BY J.R. WILSON

The International Space Station (ISS) can trace its origins to the early 1980s and two previous planned orbital platforms: the U.S. Space Station Freedom and the Soviet Union’s Mir 2. While the United States and the Soviet Union had been Cold War and Space Race rivals, they agreed to a joint venture, including other international partners who had been involved with the U.S. program since the 1980s.

In 1994, a new NASA program manager, Randolph H. “Randy” Brinkley, was appointed to bring new leadership and a cohesive structure to the International Space Station effort, including ensuring the U.S. and Russian space agencies – NASA and Roscosmos – followed through on their commitment to fully cooperate in the design, construction, and ultimate permanent manning of the space station.

That also included sharing responsibilities for transporting crew and cargo to low- Earth orbit and meeting the requirements and expectations of America’s other international partners: ESA (European Space Agency, representing 22 countries), JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

RANDOLPH H. “RANDY” BRINKLEY – 1994-1999

“ISS was a completely new space station. NASA spent a couple of months looking at redesigns, figuring out how to incorporate the Russian elements being built for Mir 2 and find a way that would ultimately work,” recalled Randy Brinkley, the first of five U.S. ISS program managers (PMs) to date. “Several months went by with three different teams looking at different configurations, with and without the Russians.

“At the end of the day, the configuration that exists today was selected and the decision was made to move forward, including how to get the Russians on board at the State Department level, intergovernmental agreements, MOUs [Memoranda of Understanding] and convincing the Japanese, Europeans, and Canadian partners as well! The U.S. owned more than 50 percent, but there were all kinds of things that had to be dealt with.”

At the Khrunichev Space Center in Moscow, from the left, astronaut Robert D. Cabana, STS-88 mission commander; Royce Mitchell, Boeing program manager for the Zarya control module; Anatoly Kiselev, president of Khrunichev Space Center; Randy Brinkley, program manager, International Space Station; astronaut William Shepherd, mission commander for Expedition 1; and Yuri P. Gidzenko, Expedition 1 Soyuz commander.

NASA PHOTO

ISS is not an official name, on the order of Freedom, Skylab, or Mir, but a description of the platform.

“They wouldn’t let us name the station itself, so we named every element ourselves. Zarya, which means ‘sunrise,’ was the Russian segment and the first element in space; Unity was the first U.S. node that recognized bringing the Russians on board; Destiny was the lab, referring to the science that was the reason it was being built,” Brinkley explained.

Brinkley believes establishing a good working relationship with the Russians and maintaining it was both his biggest challenge and his greatest achievement as PM. It went beyond politics and language to major cultural differences on top of the technical and operational challenges.

“Out of those efforts we came up with the slogan – ‘We Will Find a Way’ – that the Russians bought into. It came from a conversation with my Russian counterpart when I said ‘if we find a way,’ and he stopped me and said, ‘No, Randy, we must find a way.’ And that became our slogan,” he said. “The technical issues, frankly, were secondary to the bigger issues.

“We were in the middle of the change from the USSR to the Russian Federation. Then you had to use metric and do it all in real time. Not any of the space station elements had ever been tested on the ground to see if they would actually fit and work – the first time we did it was in space. Another huge problem was analytical evaluation versus test-to-failure. The Russian approach was to build 10 prototypes and test seven of them to failure, but we couldn’t afford that. So, we had to do design analysis, which they never did.”

The cultural differences – flavored by each nation’s politics – ran deep. And while often frustrating – on both sides – Brinkley said all parties involved in the program knew the only way to get the station built “was to sit down, ignore where we came from, and figure out the right thing to do.”

“It really involved building trust and overcoming our cultural differences. I thought they would welcome it all because they were empowered, but it actually made them culturally uncomfortable. They couldn’t make a decision; every night they had to call back to Moscow to make sure every decision was approved. They were on a close leash. We couldn’t really get anything done Monday through Thursday, but on Friday afternoon they would do something. The politicians were no real help.

“They’re very dedicated professionals, great engineers, highly educated. It takes a long time to develop a relationship with the Russians, but once you do, it will last a lifetime. But you have to earn their respect; you couldn’t just show up or, if you couldn’t make a meeting, send somebody else, because it was all about personal relationships. We never could have built it without them – and neither could they. So we all had to buy into finding a way to get it done.”

They also had to overcome doubt and criticism from politicians, the media, and the public in each team’s home country.

“There were so many critics who said there was no way to overcome all the obstacles. When we started, nobody believed we would ever build the space station, much less launch it or that it would actually operate. But we did build it, we did launch it – with no spare – and it actually worked. It’s probably one of the 10 great engineering feats in modern history, if not in history in general.”

Participants pose for a photo at the Space Station Processing Facility ceremony transferring the “Leonardo” Multipurpose Logistics Module (MPLM) from the Italian Space Agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), to NASA. From left, they are astronaut Jim Voss, European Space Agency astronauts Umberto Guidoni of Italy and Christer Fuglesang of Sweden, NASA International Space Station Program Manager Randy Brinkley, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, ASI President Sergio De Julio, and Stephen Francois, director, International Space Station Launch Site Support at Kennedy Space Center (KSC).

NASA PHOTO

For his part, Brinkley said getting there was a matter of “surrounding myself with the right people, listening to them and recognizing from day one that the only thing I knew was how much I didn’t know. I tried to provide leadership and expertise and be there for them. I was an engineer in the Marine Corps, but that’s not my expertise. That was being a squadron commander and fighter pilot, not so much on design. My forte was operational.”

Brinkley gave the Russians major credit for making the ISS possible and keeping the program alive through a series of problems that otherwise would have derailed it. He gives equal credit to the Space Shuttle,

without which, he said, the station never could have been built. And he believes the ISS itself to be a vital part of any future manned space exploration – long-duration flights and habitats to conquer the known and unknown hazards of living and working on Mars, in the asteroid belt, and on the moons of the outer planets.

“I think the space station, in terms of what we’ve learned about being able to operate in low-Earth orbit for extended periods of time, will be better recognized when we leverage that experience for the next step in space exploration, venturing out to Mars and elsewhere. One hundred years from now, who knows, but I think history will be fairly kind to the ISS,” he predicted.

But first, the program must survive perhaps the most difficult and game-changing event in the history of manned space: commercialization.

“It will be interesting to see how NASA and the government transition the space station to a commercial entity and their ability not to think like a government, but to find a way for it to be commercially viable. To this day, one of the biggest impediments of the station returning the original investment is not the space station itself, but the cost of access to space, which remains extremely high,” he concluded.

“At some point in time, how the space station does overall will involve reducing the cost of getting to space and back – especially back. It’s still very costly to bring things downhill. And the commercial programs are breaking that paradigm. Poundto-orbit is dramatically less today. Instead of paying $150 million to launch a satellite, now you can do it for half that. But it still gets really costly when that pound is somebody’s dinner.”

TOMMY W. HOLLOWAY – 1999-2002

Space Shuttle Program Manager Tommy Holloway, who previously was the first director of the Shuttle/Mir program, was asked to move over to the space station program when Brinkley retired in 1999. ISS was nearing the end of a two-year hiatus that followed the launch of the first two major elements by Russia (Zarya, providing attitude control, translation, electricity, and communications) on Nov. 20, 1998, and the United States (Unity) two weeks later. The shuttle-delivered Unity mission also included the first crew to enter the ISS: shuttle (STS-88) Commander Bob Cabana, with Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev.

Holloway was still settling into the job when the Russians launched the third module (Zvezda, providing sleep stations, toilet, kitchen, environmental control, exercise equipment, and communications) on July 12, 2000. The Zarya/Unity then rendezvoused and docked with Zvezda, making the ISS habitable for the first time. Permanent occupation began on Nov. 20, 2000, with the Soyuz launch of Expedition 1 (William Shepard, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko).

Although it may have appeared things were back on track, Holloway found himself addressing three significant problems.

Tommy W. Holloway, former ISS Program Manager.

NASA PHOTO

Tommy W. Holloway, former ISS Program Manager.

“The first thing I encountered was a program-wide approach that everybody had their own schedule. The program had been slipping a few months at a time for a couple of years and people had started working to their own schedules. So I tried to instill that schedules were part of the program and we had to work to schedules. It was a matter of attitude,” he recalled. “Second, the government team was moving toward having program operations in the same group as an integration element focused on getting the hardware developed. I thought we needed a stand-alone group for operations, which included the control center management team.

“Another issue was during the budget development for 2002, we found we didn’t have enough money, which really wasn’t unusual. During the time things were not moving, the program actually was running under budget, but things had been added that were not funded. I felt the budget was underfunded, so I submitted a 2002 budget request that was substantially over guidelines. That resulted in OMB [Office of Management and Budget] establishing an independent cost evaluation committee to review the program. I thought that committee knew the answer before they started and were not really interested in the data. It was painful.”

The committee’s recommendations led to canceling a couple of elements, including a Japanese-supplied centrifuge NASA was to launch. The Russians owned, launched, and had 100 percent usage of their own material, but the other international partners used NASA resources, along with their own. NASA “charged” them for launches – not money, but a sort of bartering deal. The barter associated with the centrifuge was deleted and spent on something else. Each partner has its own labs on board ISS, but NASA has an interest in each of those as part of the bartering agreements.

“We were directed on what to do after the OMB review,” Holloway said. “For example, propulsion aboard the station is all Russian and NASA has no backup system. We had a program to do that, but made the decision to cancel that when we had to match the program to the budget we got, although there were some things – like the centrifuge – over which we had no control. It was not a fun time.

“The EU and Canadian partners were not directly affected by NASA’s budget, but the Japanese were. They had representatives at JSC [Johnson Space Center] and we met with them on a regular basis. We worked directly with the international project managers, not the space agency leaders. I tried to implement the idea that this really was an international space station. I tried to take everyone into consideration and treat everyone equally in the decision-making process and not always favor NASA. Having a good relationship with the project level people, be it Russians or Canadians or whatever, helped.”

Tommy W. Holloway in the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) during Day 1 of the STS-3 mission.

NASA PHOTO

The Russians had been flying their space stations for 20 years, while NASA’s experience was three missions on Skylab. On the ISS, NASA is the integrating organization and overall in charge of flight safety issues. But the Russians might have been considered the glue holding everything together.

“After Columbia, we wouldn’t have had a space program if it hadn’t been for the Russians. In the big picture, the Russians have been very cooperative and did what they needed to do. And they were very capable. They might give us a hard time about something from time to time, but, overall, they were very supportive of the program,” he said.

The schedule, the first major problem he faced, was where Holloway believes he made his mark.

“I think my biggest accomplishment was I kept things on track while I was program manager. I’ve been amazed – and I had nothing to do with it – how well this system has operated and the operations and sustainment guys have been able to work around problems they’ve encountered.

“Apollo 11 was the biggest achievement of the 20th century, with only minor problems along the way, but putting this station together, with parts coming from all over the world, is absolutely amazing – especially since none of the hardware saw its physical-and data-mating pieces until they got into orbit. They’ve done more than 100 spacewalks to maintain it and keep it working. It’s an amazing thing.”

Although he is doubtful about a successful commercialization of the ISS, especially by 2024 – “I would predict, at the end of the day, the system will figure out how to keep it going until 2028” – Holloway sees the space station as a blueprint for how future manned space exploration should be done, with a major role for commercial entities.

“If we decide to go to Mars – and when I say we, the U.S. can’t do that by ourselves – it should be an international partnership, like the ISS. Behind everything we did in space, the overriding thing was flying people into space for the glory. But that day has passed for this country, and now it needs to be a benefit-driven system, which means commercialization paying a big part of it is probably a good thing. It is a transition that is hard for some of the elements in NASA to make, but I think it will be huge from this point forward.”

WILLIAM H. GERSTENMAIER – 2002-2005

Despite problems with funding, support, language and cultural differences, and the metric system, the most difficult – and potentially program-ending – event in the ISS’ history during its first decade was the loss of Columbia on Feb. 1, 2003. The resulting twoand-one-half-year grounding of the shuttle fleet consumed most of the tenure of the ISS’ third program manager, William Gerstenmaier, who later became associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate at NASA Headquarters.

Former ISS program manager and current Associate Administrator for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate William “Bill” Gerstenmaier.

NASA PHOTO

ISS assembly had continued on schedule until the Columbia accident. The hiatus on assembly that resulted was accompanied by a reduction in crewmembers to two at a time to decrease the logistics required to support the station. For 29 months, until shuttle flights resumed with STS-114 on July 26, 2005, Roscosmos was responsible for all ISS resupply missions, and for crew rotation for 41 months, until STS-121 on July 4, 2006, when the number of crew aboard the station returned to three. The work by the NASA team to assess the consumables needed was a huge undertaking. There was no idea when shuttle flights would return. Keeping a crew safe on ISS for this period was a tribute to the amazing ISS team.

But the post-Columbia grounding was merely a preview of what was to come – and what Gerstenmaier and his team had to prepare the program to incorporate.

“It was an interesting time. We were given the decree that the Space Shuttle was going to be retired at some point fairly soon. The Space Shuttle was a critical element of being able to supply the space station, as well as to actually assemble the space station. We were really scrambling on how we were going to replace the capability of the shuttle with a new system and a new vehicle. We had to figure out the right phasing and work through all of the political activities associated with that,” he recalled.

NASA astronaut Mark Kelly (right), STS-124 commander, talks with Bill Gerstenmaier (left), and Chris Scolese (center), former NASA associate administrator and current center director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, beneath Space Shuttle Discovery after landing.

NASA PHOTO

“Under [NASA] Administrator Sean O’Keefe, the Vision for Space Exploration was established, and the Vision framework involved retirement of the Space Shuttle and a goal of lunar exploration. Under Administrator [Michael D.] Griffin [O’Keefe’s successor], the details of Vision were developed. This included the exact number of remaining shuttle flights and details of an exploration strategy – Ares I, Ares V [rockets], Altair lunar lander, and Orion [Crew Exploration Vehicle] – that began with the Moon.”

The plan included designing and building a new four-man spacecraft – the Orion, part of the Constellation Program – to complete assembly of the ISS, return to the Moon no later than 2020, and eventually take humans to Mars. Work on the Orion spacecraft and its Ares rockets, named after the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Mars, began in 2005.

“Mike wanted to expedite that activity to actually move a little bit faster than what had been done under O’Keefe. He was looking to try to ramp down the Space Shuttle Program even faster than the previous administrator had done. We were under a lot of pressure to try to figure out creative ways to finish construction of the ISS and keep the space station supplied and functional and able to do research,” Gerstenmaier said.

“We also had to convince our international partners that NASA would support their module delivery with shuttle and that we had a way through commercial cargo to support long term ISS research for NASA and our partners.”

The new approach also required major changes in the way NASA did business. The ISS was designed with hardware that was intended to be returned to the ground, repaired, then flown back up on the shuttle. Without it, a completely different tactic was required for ISS hardware.

“We had to now look at hardware as being expendable, where it could not be returned, because we lost a lot of return capability when the shuttle went away. So that hardware had to essentially be disposed of on-orbit, then replaced in a steady stream from the ground. It changed our entire management and operations philosophy with the station,” he explained.

“We were in a tremendous transition period and tremendous uncertainty about exactly how we were going to realize the vision of

completing station assembly and then also moving into research. It looks all fine and well-ordered from today, but at that time there was a tremendous amount of angst in the system about how we were going to pull all of this off. I’ll tell you frankly, even today we’re not fully transitioned … but at least we’re down the path.”

It also was essential to honor NASA’s commitments to all of the international partners.

Oxygen was another problem.

“We used to just change out the huge, big oxygen tanks on the outside of the airlock. We could not do that anymore, so we had to essentially put a quick disconnect on the side so we could recharge them. We didn’t have the capability to bring high-pressure oxygen up, so now we have an oxygen recharge system and a compressor that actually raises the pressure from supply tanks,” he said.

“There was a ton of work of taking a station that was designed to be reserviced and operated with the shuttle in place to the new system. The big changes were really in the oxygen system, the nitrogen system, and the communication systems. All of those had to be redesigned to accommodate some new, smaller transportation system.”

MICHAEL SUFFREDINI – 2005-2015

When Michael Suffredini took over as ISS program manager in 2005, he had no idea he would become the space station’s longest serving administrator at 10 years.

“A number of factors played into that. My boss stayed in his job that whole period. The job evolved. I took over right after return to flight following the Columbia accident (and resumption of assembly). It was a very dynamic period. We also were bringing on the commercial providers and transitioning to a more commercial user support standpoint,” he recalled.

Michael Suffredini, former program manager, International Space Station (ISS), is seen with a scale model of the International Space Station at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., Jan. 14, 2011.

NASA PHOTO

Michael Suffredini, former program manager, International Space Station (ISS), is seen with a scale model of the International Space Station at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., Jan. 14, 2011.

“There was always something different with ISS. It was a very engaging job, always on your mind, and that made it that much more exciting. You always have responsibility for the crew on orbit. I never got to the point where I was looking around for what I wanted to do next. With giant programs like this, there is a lot of transition; I think they kept me because the head of human operations missions – Gerstenmaier – and I worked well together and had a lot of trust in each other.”

It was, indeed, a period of great change for the program: recovery from the Space Shuttle’s post-Columbia grounding; doubling of the size of the ISS crew; completion of assembly, immediately followed by the permanent end of shuttle flights; the resulting return to reliance on paid seats aboard the Soyuz for U.S. astronauts and their international partners, as NASA no longer had the ability to launch humans into space; transition from a construction program to an operational science lab; gearing up for commercial space transport to get America back into manned space flight and initial preparations for commercialization of the ISS by 2024.

“Getting back to flight was a big deal. As an agency, we were trying to balance risk with mission and it was important for us to know when we ultimately had to go do something and give the shuttle program the relief it needed as they were getting ready to fly again. It was a challenging period because we had to stand up and say ‘the mission is important and we have to get on with it,’” he explained.

Michael Suffredini, former ISS program manager.

NASSA PHOTO

“Then there was bringing the partners on and their vehicles. We had to start balancing more of the partner needs than we had in the past once their elements arrived. We had some phenomenally challenging failure modes. In one we had to move the solar arrays around and, at the same time, we discovered the big joint on the starboard side had gotten chewed up. Both problems were pretty dramatic. We focused on the solar array – and it was a minor miracle we pulled it off while the shuttle was docked. Once the shuttle left, we did a lot more work on it.”

The other issues, while not as dramatic or life-threatening, nonetheless posed major challenges to the future of the ISS and manned space exploration.

“The next most challenging thing was bringing on the commercial program. I was a big fan of the COTS [Commercial Orbital Transportation Services] effort, but the transition from when the shuttle retired to the first flight of those vehicles in a timely fashion took a lot longer than we had anticipated. Between that and the HTV [JAXA H-II Transfer Vehicle], we made it to the first commercial vehicle flight carrying cargo to the ISS,” Suffredini said.

“The last one, which they’re still working on, is transitioning to a station that works more on a commercial model. NASA typically plans things two years in advance and we had to recognize, with six or seven cargo flights a year, we didn’t need as much detail as we evolved to a more customer-oriented process. ISS changed the mindset. With the shuttle, if it wasn’t safe, we didn’t go. But with ISS, we are flying every day and can’t just stop. We decided maybe our experiments didn’t have to be built with such reliability and lack of risk.”

Becoming customer-oriented and implementing a commercial model also meant a change in NASA’s relationship with its international partners, as well as other potential customers of the ISS’ laboratory facilities, giving them a greater voice in future decisions.

“We involved the partners in any processes we were changing to validate the safety of a payload or commercial spacecraft coming to the ISS. When it came to commercial spacecraft, we already had a sort of template in how we handled HTVs coming to the U.S. Segment. The partners had the latitude to build their launch vehicles and spacecraft however they wanted. With the HTV, the Japanese had to meet our requirements for redundancy, accuracy, reliability once they entered a 2-kilometer sphere around the ISS,” he said.

“That was a lot different than what had been done before, but when we did the commercial providers, that was the mindset we used. The cargo wasn’t really all that expensive, so that was the place to take the risk. The European ATV [Automated Transport Vehicle] docked with the Russian Segment. We were trying to get to a system similar to landing at an airport.”

The new paradigm did not just involve NASA and its international partners, but also all of the contractors working on the space station, another effort in explanation, negotiation, and persuasion Suffredini had to master.

“All of our contractors had to evolve with NASA on how to service our customers. The partners were in the position of seeing how we did it, then deciding what they wanted to do. So NASA took the first steps to encourage and support commercial users and, in the process, making necessary adjustments to do that in a safe way. The partners supported us along the way because we all shared the same environment, but they didn’t have to do it themselves right away. So that transition was a particularly challenging one, with the U.S. doing it first.”

Throughout all of those challenges and his decade-long tenure, the Russian space agency was a close and invaluable partner with NASA, despite a few problems, Suffredini acknowledged, from the unexpected post-Columbia grounding of the shuttle fleet to its planned permanent retirement five years later.

“They were critical. In the end, they were the backbone of the station until we got it assembled part way and were able to provide power; prior to that, from the early flights, they provided all the power. They built the first module, which was American-paid-for, Russian-built. They provided life support and the galley until we got ours up. After the Columbia accident, they stepped up and provided transport for our crews and cargo,” he noted.

“Then we retired the shuttle without having an alternate crew [transport] method. The Russians could have taken advantage of that, but they did not. I was there when we started negotiating seats on the Soyuz when they knew the shuttle was going away. The initial cost was $50 million, which was for a vehicle that flew to the ISS, stayed docked for six months, and had to be maintained. The price thereafter was adjusted for inflation, which was high in Russia at the time. There’s no doubt they were making money off the seats, but it wasn’t really that much.”

It was a period of tough decisions for NASA – and Suffredini.

“I can’t tell you how much the partners did not appreciate that situation, but the Russians stepped up, increasing their Soyuz manufacturing capability, knowing they eventually would have to take that back down, which is not something the Russians like to do. But they kept us viable throughout this period, so I have a lot of respect for my Russian counterparts. They completely understood the relationship, they remembered how much money we provided when they needed it, they knew it was the right thing to do and they did it,” he said.

“So I have a positive outlook on all our partners, but especially the Russians, who are still keeping us viable today. We have a lot of political challenges right now, but when it gets down to the people we work with, they understand human spaceflight and the need for these countries to work together. It’s the only thing I know of that hasn’t been impacted by sanctions and other problems.”

As to his own achievements while program manager for half the space station’s lifetime, Suffredini cited the successes they had in dealing with that laundry list of challenges – but shared the credit with all of the other nations involved, the contractors, and the NASA team, including the station crews.

“We were met with challenges all along the way and our ability to work together was a crowning achievement of the time I was there. First, assembly of the station in a compressed period of time when the shuttle was basically retired out from under us. After the Columbia accident, it was decided the shuttle was too expensive and dangerous. We gave up four flights, although we did get two of those back. So second was the transition from shuttle to commercial cargo vehicles, what we did together with the partners. And ultimately the transition of the station from assembly to a user environment,” he said.

“While we were assembling it, we fit research in where we could, but crew safety and safe assembly got priority and the research guys got whatever scraps were left. But when we completed assembly, that reversed. By the time I left, we had gone away from doing things because it was part of the system to a little more than 70 hours of crew time a week on research. To me, that was probably the most fundamental and hardest change we had to make, just getting the mindset of everyone who built the ISS and knew what it took to make it successful to the exact opposite. That was a huge change that took the final third of my time as PM.”

KIRK SHIREMAN – AUG. 5, 2015-

Current ISS Program Manager Kirk Shireman took over responsibility for the space station in mid-2015, picking up many of the challenges his predecessor had worked on before his retirement. Shireman brought with him eight years as deputy PM on the ISS, followed by two years as deputy center director for JSC, which he said gave him an intimate knowledge of how the program, the center, and the agency operate.

It was a combination he would find invaluable as he was tasked to complete the start of commercial manned flights to the ISS, promote greater attention to customer and international partner requirements, and smooth the path to full commercialization of the space station.

Kirk Shireman, NASA’s ISS program manager.

NASA PHOTO

“Of the two biggest problems at that time, the most urgent was evolving the culture from the assembly mentality, where NASA’s requirements were primary, to a more research lab culture, where the customers’ requirements were tops. We already had an initiative started – RISE [Revolutionize ISS for Science and Exploration] – and have worked on that my entire time here. That is a significant shift, not only in our mentality but also in our processes and procedures and how we deal with our customers, accelerating our processes to accommodate them.

“The second, not as urgent when I took over but perhaps most important now, is integrating the commercial crew vehicles into the ISS. Once there were a lot of technical issues to address, but also some question about when they would fly. I’ve spent three years working very, very hard on that problem and had some pretty significant successes, but they still aren’t flying to the ISS [as of mid-2018]. That is still our biggest concern.”

Commercial launch dates to the ISS must be viewed not as a single, fixed point, but as a distribution of probabilities, he continued.

“There is some probability it will launch in April next year [2019], but there also is a probability it will be some time later. So we have to be prepared for contingencies and making sure we can deal with that should they slip to the right,” Shireman said.

“Another issue is how to foster this LEO [low-Earth orbit] economy, supporting NASA research, technology, and development, and this economic activity at the same time. Figuring out how to do that is a big deal. How do we transition what we’re doing so there is something that follows on after us with this transition?”

Echoing the sentiments of his predecessors, Shireman has doubts about the 2024 target date to transfer the station to commercial operators when U.S. government funding is scheduled to end.

“I don’t believe ISS can be handed over to a commercial entity with zero government funding and be a viable enterprise; there’s not enough income to support the costs. If it is not viable, we will de-orbit it. I think there will be a debate between Congress and the administration on how to transition, how to work with industry so there is a viable alternative to flying to ISS,” he added.

“The challenge is what is intended by the administration and how do we make that transition. The desired end state is still in flux. And some are things not in the normal repertoire of NASA nor the government as a whole – helping create a market without dominating or dictating it. How do we grow it from being subsidized today to no subsidization – and do that without killing it?”

It is not just a NASA problem, but one affecting all of the nations involved in the ISS for the past two decades, as well as those interested in using its orbital laboratory facilities.

“We’re working daily with the international partners about integrating these new commercial crew vehicles into their program plans because their astronauts will be flying on them, as well. In terms of transitioning the ISS, every partner is aware of the transition report NASA submitted to Congress and how we are proceeding,” Shireman said.

Kirk Shireman takes the controls of The Boeing Company’s mock-up CST-100 spacecraft at the company’s Houston Product Support Center. Helping Shireman inside the fully outfitted test version of the CST-100 is Tony Castilleja, a mechanical engineer working on the Boeing project.

NASA PHOTO

“We have created a working group with representatives from NASA and all the international partners to work on what we as a partnership think the transition plan should be and stay consistent with the U.S. plan. We formed that in the past month and are working very well together to come to some agreement in the end, even if we don’t all agree on everything at the moment.”

While he likely still has years to go as ISS PM, Shireman already has some achievements he can list.

“I’m most proud of the mentality of our organization today, its focus on customer service and making their work as easy as possible for them, where in years past it was necessary to work to make NASA’s job easier, which sometimes made it harder for our customers. That means making their interface with us easier and working much faster to get their experiments onboard the ISS. It used to take two or three years to get something on orbit, but now it is possible to do that as quickly as six months.

“Second, probably more subtle, is I was heavily involved in the deal to obtain Soyuz seats for us in calendar year 2019. It was unusual because we didn’t actually buy them from Roscosmos, but from Boeing – and, in the end, at a significant discount to earlier prices – when we really needed them. NASA has a relationship with Roscosmos, which has a principal contract with Energia, which manufactures Soyuz spacecraft. Each party was able to meet the needs of one or more of the other parties and all were happy in the end. It was a win-win-win result by including two more parties than just NASA and Roscosmos, where a simple head-to-head deal was not possible.”

Even with the need for a “creative” deal on Soyuz seats, he joined the other American PMs in praising the efforts and support of the Russian space team throughout the ISS’ first two decades of operation.

“Our relationship with the Russians today is as good as it’s ever been. We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for the Russians – and they wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for us. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had our issues in the past, but we knew we could work through them and, when the chips were down, we both would drop everything and come to our partner’s aid. They came to our aid after the Columbia disaster and are still doing it. And when they’ve had issues along the way, we stepped up and helped them out,” he said.

“The fact we’ve worked together for so long – as individuals – I don’t expect the relationship to deteriorate despite any political environment, nor the changes that are coming. As we do more commercial activities, so are the Russians, as are our international partners. So I have no doubt it will be a strong partnership in the future, including future activities. I think we have forged a path for space activities in the future that goes on not for decades, but for lifetimes.”

Shireman credited his predecessors with making the ISS the success it has been, despite serious problems ranging from loss of the Space Shuttle to waning political support:

“The reason we are successful today is because all my predecessors were able to be adaptable. When things weren’t working, we adapted and tried something different. You can always find things you could have done different, but the fact my predecessors were able to adapt and succeed, no matter what, brought us to where we are today. They did a phenomenal job and we wouldn’t be here today without them.”

CONCLUSION

Each of NASA’s ISS program managers faced his own problems with keeping the space station on track, functioning and maintaining an unprecedented 100 percent safety record. Each also had his own goals, personal and for the station, but Shireman essentially summed them up succinctly:

“What do I think the ISS means to the country, maybe to the planet? The wonderful thing about the ISS, not just while I’ve been PM but since its beginning, is it’s not about any one person or program manager, but about what we’re doing, leaving a mark for humanity, advancing not only the U.S. but the species. It’s a great thing to be part of that and I’m truly blessed to have been part of it since 1994. I really believe that isn’t just me but what anybody in the program would tell you. In 10 years, I hope nobody remembers me but everybody remembers the ISS.”