LUNCH WITH SEAN: Yesterday (9/5/02), Craig Dooley and I attended the Armed Forces Appreciation Luncheon, held by the New Orleans Regional Chamber of Commerce. The keynote speaker was New Orleans native Sean O'Keefe, Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Mr. O'Keefe was on hand to present several awards to local active and reserve military personnel in honor of their outstanding community service efforts. As such, his comments highlighted the Agency's benefits to national security and homeland defense.

According to Mr. O'Keefe, the September 11 attacks changed the context of the NASA/national security relationship. NASA was chartered as a civilian agency, but now he sees it working "closely in collaboration with the homeland security agenda". NASA is looking into technology which could "preclude" terrorists from gaining control of commercial aircraft, and there is a new awareness of the utility of NASA's earth science assets for national security observation. The Agency is considering how NASA-developed technology can be applied to national security uses.

On the topic of space exploration, Mr. O'Keefe pointed out that the 196 day endurance record (for American astronauts) recently set by the Expedition 5 NASA crewmembers is still far short of the time required to get most anywhere else in the solar system, and one primary focus of the Agency today is to develop technologies to enable longer-term missions. "We are today in the 'age of sail' in space exploration", he said, and asserted that NASA was working to bring us to the (metaphorical) 'age of steam' to enable more ambitious manned missions.

Mr. O'Keefe praised the University of New Orleans and the Michoud Assembly Facility for their science and engineering contributions to space exploration over the years.

After the luncheon and with some significant prodding, we approached Mr. O'Keefe and spoke with him for a moment, putting in a plug for the Mars Society's "One Percent Initiative". Mr. O'Keefe responded by pointing out that NASA currently spends 4-5% of its budget on power generation research and %5 on "endurance" R&D for support of long-duration manned missions (presumably meaning Mars). I thought these numbers were a bit high (though in fairness they were off-the-cuff and not really intended as firm stats), so I checked them against NASA's 2002 budget. Using the numbers on page AS-16 of the Agency Summary, and combining all the technology development, space science, and space biology items I come up with 7.56% -- which is a generous amount, considering I had insufficient information to split out unrelated aeronautics items, etc. (if any readers can give me a better handle on the budget items, I'd appreciate the input).

The point, he said, was to "get out of the same loop" (not sure what, specifically, he meant by that -- but I can guess a number of possibilities), and to improve human endurance in space so that we could start doing interesting things again. At the end of our brief conversation, he coyly suggested that we watch for "big changes" coming in the December/January timeframe (interesting timing -- as noted here last month, the final report from the Presidential Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry is due November 19).