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>> Bill, first off, thank you so much for being
in here with me today.
A very exciting day, a very successful day.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about what we got
to see this this morning.
>> It was really my pleasure to be down here and actually get
to witness the capture and birthing
of the Dragon Spacecraft to the Space Station.
Again, I was here for the demonstration flight and I got
to watch a little bit of the tension as we learned how some
of the systems would actually operate and work.
And then I got to see the results today
of where they took the lessons learned
from that previous demonstration mission and the lidars,
the thermal imagers, all the equipment that was needed
to make this work just worked extremely smooth.
I can't say enough about the crew on orbit
that was really ready to go do the capture.
[inaudible] was ready to do the capture,
they did it a little bit early and it worked out really well
and the Control Center Team here and the team out in Hawthorne
and the SpaceX just did a phenomenal job
of making a pretty complex ballet in space look pretty easy
and it was not easy by any stretch of the imagination
but they just did a great job and it's great
to have the Dragon Spacecraft onboard the Space Station today.
>> It's not easy by any stretch,
a lot of milestones overcome throughout the years
that we've been working side by side with SpaceX,
talk about some of the milestones we had
to over come to get to this point.
>> Yeah. I think what's really interesting and fun
for me is I get a chance to kind of step back
and see the teams interact and work with each other
and the beauty is really them working together.
The SpaceX Team has some new, creative ways of doing business
that are a little different
than the way we would have done business from a NASA standpoint.
The NASA team gets to see that, they get to learn from that,
they can actually react and implement
that in their ways of doing business.
The NASA team also has some ways they've been doing things along,
you know, they've learned throughout history
and then the SpaceX team sees those
and at first they may be kind of reject some of those ideas,
some of the ideas for configuration control
and how we monitor things and watch things.
It's a little different than what they're used to
and they discount those initially and then
after a while, they start saying, hey, you know,
this is really --
now we understand what you NASA guys have been doing
and they modify their stuff a little bit together.
So the beauty is like in any teaming relationship,
if you come together with an open mind and you look together
and you work together and you have that common goal,
you can achieve so much more as a combined team
than you can individually.
And I think it's just a real pleasure for me to get
to watch the best of spaceflight come out in the SpaceX team
and the best of spaceflight come out in the NASA team to end
up with this wonderful event that occurred today
with this capture and birthing.
>> They're really bringing in kind of the best of both worlds,
some old school NASA knowledge, some new blood from SpaceX,
making this Dragon Capsule successful,
really exciting stuff.
So now first commercial resupply mission [inaudible]
to the International Space Station,
what does this mean for NASA?
Why is this important?
>> You know, again, I think this is tremendously important
when we retired the shuttle, we needed a way to get, you know,
scientific investigations, as well as necessary supplies,
crew equipment, food, other things,
to and from Space Station and we entered
into the commercial orbital transportation system activity
with the Space Act Agreements with both orbital
and with SpaceX, now this is the first commercial flight
where we're buying essentially services
to carry up things to orbit.
And I think the thing we miss sometimes is the exciting cargo
that is really onboard this flight.
There's some critical components that we needed to get launched
to station, they're there.
Probably the most important thing
for this flight is this will allow us to return some samples
from the Space Station.
There's a glacier freezer that's on board,
as well as some cold packs that are in the Dragon Capsule.
We have three minus 85 degree freezers on board Space Station.
We've not returned anything from those freezers
since the shuttles quit flying last year
so they're stocked full of really precious blood samples
for the crew 'cause we're trying
to monitor how the blood chemistry changes
over time during an expedition.
There's also biological samples in there,
there's also some plant samples where we had some plants
that we've fixated the plants and then we froze them
in the minus 85 degree freezers.
So these are unbelievably unique and precious specimens.
And you know they've been captured, the unique presence
of Space Station, they're --
and locked in these frozen samples are potentially
information that can reveal a lot about what microgravity is
and how it works in the biological sense.
So those are sitting up there.
They're waiting to come home, they need a way to come home.
Our freezers were starting to get full so we're going
to take approximately one third of the samples
that have been stored in those freezers on orbit,
put them in this glacier freezer and then get a chance
to return them here to the earth on the Dragon Capsule
at the end of the mission.
So it's not only the [inaudible]
but it's also given us the ability
to return this precious cargo.
So I look at the vision of where we were when we laid
out this concept to go move forward to bring
in some commercial providers to provide services for us.
There were a lot of skeptics at the beginning
but as evidenced today, I think you're starting to see
that this can work and can move forward.
And I think we also need to not lose sight
of how difficult this is so if a problem occurs, we just need
to react to that and not lose faith in what we're doing
and just continue to keep moving forward.
You know, we're -- it will be exciting
to get these samples back, it will be exciting to see some
of this research actually get investigated by the folks here
on the ground and Dragon has allowed us to do
that with this return portion of the flight coming up.
>> So, really excited.
I mean science, such a huge part
of the International Space Station, such an integral part,
now all those important samples have a ride back down to earth.
We talked a little bit earlier, telling me about some
of the really cool science experiments
that we have going on.
Tell me a little bit about some of those.
>> Yeah. What's going on on station is we have an aquarium,
a fish habitat that was launched on the HTV
and it's been installed by [inaudible] on board station.
It's there, it's been checked out,
it's ready to be operated and used.
The fish are coming up on the Soyuz flight and I was
down here not only for the capture and birthing but I was
down here for the flight readiness review
for the Soyuz flight.
And on that Soyuz flight, we'll fly up some [inaudible] fish
that will actually inhabit the aquarium.
And what's intriguing about that is we've --
we were looking at bone loss potentially with this,
we've flown these fish before in space for a 16 day mission
but we've never been able to fly them for 60 or 90 days.
And if you think about it, you know, humans that walk
around on the earth, we experience bone loss in space
but our systems are loaded by one gravity.
You know, the bones are stressed by just walking
around on the earth, or we fly [inaudible], same kind of thing.
Their bones are loaded by one gravity.
The fish bones are not loaded by one gravity,
they're essentially swimming around in the lakes or oceans
or aquariums here on the earth so it's much
like our neutral buoyancy facility
where we go simulate microgravity
for our crew members, these fish experience that all the time.
So now we'll fly these fish to space, put them in this habitat
on board Space Station and then we'll go look and see
if they actually have the same bone loss
from [inaudible] terrestrially one G loaded other animals have
or there's something different that goes on.
And what this will do is this will allow the researchers
to get more insight into the mechanism behind bone loss
that occurs in space.
So is it truly a one gravity loading condition?
Can you compensate for it by putting the crews on treadmills
and loading them with bungees or doing the, you know,
dance resistive exercise device that they use, the [inaudible].
Can we accommodate that or that is there something else that's
fundamentally going on.
So what's exciting is these fish will give us another insight
into this phenomena we observe in space and we've really got
to learn to control these things if we're going
to go beyond lower orbit, go to asteroids, go to Mars,
get out into space, we're going to be exposed to long durations
of microgravity conditions and we need to understand how
to control those symptoms.
So this experiment that's coming
up on the Soyuz will be very important to give us some
of the, some insight into bone loss we've not been able
to see before.
So, again, it's exciting and we have to dig a little bit
to see what the sciences going on board in Space Station
but there's lots of great investigations every day onboard
the Space Station.
>> Do they put in a little plastic castle
in that fish tank for the...
>> I don't think there's a little plastic castle
or any plastic plants in there but you'll get a chance
to see some of the video from station
when the fish get [inaudible].
>> We'll definitely be following along with it.
So, again, Dragon commercial resupply,
getting into full swing but they're --
SpaceX isn't our only partner in the commercial resupply.
We have another partner who's moving through and well
on their way to [inaudible] supply
on the International Space Station, that's orbital.
>> Yup. And the orbital is in --
they're going to launch out of Wallops, Virginia
and Wallops Island, Virgina.
They're out on the launch pad now,
they've just moved the rocket out last week and they lifted it
up and installed it on the launch pad.
You know, they had to build essentially a launch pad
from scratch.
There was no launch pad for this rocket before so they had to put
in not only the cement infrastructure and the facility,
the [inaudible] that holds the rockets but they had to put
in a, you know, a propellant system
that can handle cryogenic oxygen and kerosene to deliver it
to the rocket and also there's some helium that needs
to be supplied, et cetera.
So there was a lot of buildup of the launch pad.
[ Inaudible ]
Building it from essentially open beach
to essentially a launch pad
so they've been very busy getting that in place.
There's been some, you know, typical problems
as they check things out, valves don't quite function right,
systems leak a little bit, some flanges needed to be re-torqued
so they've been working through all those problems
but now they're at the point where the rocket is
out on the launch pad, they'll do some filling demonstrations.
I think they started around the 20th of this month,
so probably about 10 days from now.
And what they'll do there is they'll actually fuel the rocket
three times to make sure they can really understand how it
gets fueled to get all the precise timing
down to get ready for the launch.
Then they'll do a hot fire test after that completes
and that will verify that the hold down system works,
the launch countdown software works, all those things work.
And then they'll do a launch probably later this year,
probably some time in December that we'll launch
with a dummy Cygnus Capsule on top, it will be just to check
out the launch system to make sure the rocket can operate.
And we'll get to see that
and then they'll do their demonstration
to station some time next year in 2013.
So, again, I think they're making good progress,
lots of challenges, you know, things seem mundane
but to deliver, you know,
minus 420 some degrees Fahrenheit oxygen
at the right conditions.
And by right conditions, right pressure and flow rates
and all these things, it's not a trivial experiment at all.
It's not trivial to get the launch pad [inaudible].
>> It's still rocket science.
>> It's still rocket science and they'll work
through those things so we'll see how these demonstrations
and field tests go over the next couple weeks but, again,
they're making good solid progress and moving forward.
They've got several rockets already
at Wallops that are ready to go.
They've got a couple Cygnus Capsules that are there
so I think once they get through this kind of startup stuff,
they'll be ready to go ahead and deliver cargo to station,
which will be, again, another way
to really effectively utilize station.
And we really designed it that we need both of these companies,
we can't do it just with SpaceX alone.
We need both the cargo delivered by orbital and by SpaceX
to make station functional
and get the research that we intended.
So we're looking, again, for them coming online as soon
as they're ready to come online.
And, again, I get to see the same NASA teams,
maybe different teams, working with these folks,
helping out with the orbital team.
I've been seeing it where a lot of our folks from Kennedy
and Marshall and Stennis who have experience in launch pads
and in launch design, we ship those up to Wallops
and they've been helping the orbital team.
They've actually done some work with them hand in hand,
done some test conducting with them as they do through tests,
teaching them how to operate and do things.
So, again, I'm seeing the NASA team take the newer teams
and give them some experience, help them along
over through some of the rough spots, be encouraging
but then I also get to see my team get excited and invigorated
about a new way of doing business
that they've not had a chance to experience.
So, again, that teaming relationship I described
with SpaceX, that same teaming relationship is alive and well
with orbital and it's a tremendous thing for me to get
to see that drive, that pull of spaceflight, that wanting
to go beyond low earth orbit to understand what we can do
with Space Station,
to understand those research questions,
to see these teams get united by that passion
and move forward is just, is a tremendous blessing for me
to get to see these teams work together.
>> Really fascinating to see the synergies between the two teams
and really spreading the knowledge out,
getting as many people involved in spaceflight
as we possibly can, really exciting stuff.
So, successful Dragon today.
Anything else you'd like to say real quick?
>> Not really.
Again, I think, you know,
spend the time understanding what's going
on with Space Station.
I think here in the next couple days, there's some good passes
of station going overhead, especially in the U.S.
in Houston and also on the East Coast so if you get a chance,
go outside and watch this little white dot go overhead.
I tell people that you also have to have a picture of the crew
so you need a picture of Uri and [inaudible]
and Sunny [assumed spelling] so you can show your friends
that these little -- these three people are
in that little white dot [inaudible], right?
And here they go across the sky so I think --
and also spend a little bit of time, go out to the web,
research a little bit, find
out what the research is we're doing today on Space Station
and then figure out a way to talk to you neighbors
and friends about what that research is and how
that research affects their lives.
And so use that little white dot going overhead that you see
to essentially maybe talk to your friends and neighbors
about what you're doing and what excitement you see
in the space program.
So, again, and my only thought
for the day is the weather's been good here in Houston
so if you get a chance, especially tonight
or tomorrow night, get a chance to get out there and take a look
and see this marvelous thing that flies overhead.
>> Absolutely and it is amazing to see it too,
when you see it streaking across the sky
and just thinking there are people living on that,
it's been up there for 10 years, it's this modern marvel.
It really is inspiring.
>> Yup. And you can even say there's a Dragon
Capsule attached.
>> And there's a Dragon -- yup.
>> Yup.
>> All right.
Well, Bill, thank you so much for being here today.
Again, Bill Gerstenmaier, Associated Administrator
for Human Exploration and Operations.
A very successful day.
It's been an honor.
>> 'Kay. Well, thank you very much.
>> All right.
Thanks.
>> Thanks.