| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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So I think that we come out of the pandemic and I am incredibly grateful for the mRNA vaccines. | |
| I'm incredibly grateful for Tony Fauci and the other leaders of the public health response in the U.S. and globally. | ||
| And that is, I think, an unpopular opinion. | ||
| I think that is not how most people feel about it. | ||
| And the anti-vaccine movement has really weaponized some of that distrust. | ||
| And many of them were talking about how the COVID vaccines were dangerous in some ill-defined way. | ||
| And many of them were saying that even before the vaccines were available. | ||
| And they've now shifted and they've taken the anger about COVID vaccine mandates and directed it toward routine school vaccines, routine school mandates for vaccines. | ||
| And that puts us in a terrible situation where all 50 states have mandates for some vaccines for kids starting school. | ||
| But even in the face of that, we have dropping rates of MMR vaccination across the country where before the pandemic, the kindergarten MMR rate nationwide was over 95%, which is exactly where you want it. | ||
| And it's now under 93% and falling. | ||
| And that sets us up for more measles outbreaks and more unnecessary suffering. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So you talk about the 2018 New York measles outbreak as something of maybe a practice run for the COVID-19 pandemic. | ||
| And you talk about one of your motivations for writing this book is that measles is something of a bellwether to let us know how we're doing in public health and medicine. | ||
| Are we prepared? | ||
| So I wonder, we're talking today in this week as the five-year anniversary of kind of the initial U.S. response to COVID-19. | ||
| It's five years later. | ||
| We're seven years after that 2018 measles outbreak in New York City. | ||
| We're amid a new measles outbreak in West Texas. | ||
| So I wonder if you could say more, where are we when it comes to preparedness for the next thing or the current thing? | ||
| I think we're much worse off than we were in 2018 and 2019. | ||
| And I wish that we had heeded the lessons of measles at that time. | ||
| And the lesson I think that measles was trying to teach us then was that even though we had high vaccination coverage across the country, there were pockets of individuals, there were neighborhoods where the coverage was much lower. | ||
| And that's where these vaccine preventable diseases like measles were causing outbreaks. | ||
| We didn't learn those lessons. | ||
| We moved into the pandemic where vaccination, which should have been apolitical and should have been available to everybody and I would hope welcomed by everybody, turned into a political issue. | ||
| By the mid to late pandemic, we were in a situation where your political party affiliation was an independent risk factor for death from COVID because it affected whether people were willing to get vaccinated against COVID. | ||
| And I think we've taken that out of the pandemic and into a situation now where there is still this politization of things that simply should not be political, like children's health and like vaccination. | ||
| And there is across the country a pushback against school vaccine mandates, which are incredibly useful tools. | ||
| They are tools that we need to keep vaccine coverage high. | ||
| There is misinformation online that is just rampant. | ||
| If you look at posts about the outbreak that's currently going on in West Texas, there are people saying that measles is good for you. | ||
| It makes kids healthier. | ||
| It does not. | ||
| It puts kids at unnecessary risk of death. | ||
| There's plenty out there about how the vaccine is dangerous or the vaccine is unnecessary. | ||
| All you have to do is give kids vitamin A. | ||
| That is also untrue. | ||
| And I think we're in a less trusting, more politically polarized place than we were seven or eight years ago. | ||
| And that is sad. | ||
| That is indeed sad. | ||
| And the other thing I think is challenging in talking about it, at least for me, is that there's a difference between a risk to you as an individual and risk to us as a society. | ||
| And so talking about that, for example, that you as a vaccinated individual, your risk for measles is, of course, very low, almost none. | ||
| But for us as a society, the risk is high as vaccine rates have dropped. | ||
| And same for preparedness. | ||
| I think the other piece that you do a nice job explaining, actually I love the title of chapter six of the book says, Making Nothing Happen, because prevention is invisible. | ||
| So given that prevention is invisible and some of these challenges about communicating individual risk versus actions we need to take as a society or we need the government to take, what's your advice to people who want to make a difference or how should we communicate about this going forward? | ||
| It's difficult. | ||
| I think that you alluded to that chapter in the book and I think the lesson of that chapter is that when public health works, especially when vaccines work, there's nothing to see because it just looks like regular life. | ||
| You don't get to know who vaccines help. | ||
| There's no kid with a sign around their neck that says, I would have died of diphtheria before I turned five. | ||
| It's just it looks like a regular kid. | ||
| And so how do you communicate that? | ||
| And I think it has gotten, if anything, more difficult to do so because there is so much out there competing for attention and telling stories that are nuanced, that talk about diseases that we no longer see may not be appealing to large groups of people. | ||
| And one of the reasons that we vaccinate is to protect the person we're vaccinating. | ||
| And one of the reasons we vaccinate is to provide some community protection around that person to build a wall of immunity that helps keep things from spreading, that protects people who can't get vaccinated themselves. | ||
| And that's become a harder sell also, I think. | ||
| We're in an area of an era, I suppose, of rampant individualism where people don't want to hear that we're asking them to get vaccinated to protect the people around them. | ||
| And I got asked this at an event not long ago by a public health student, like, how do we not lose faith? | ||
| How do we keep doing the important work of prevention? | ||
| I would argue that that work is more important now than ever. | ||
| And getting one more family to consider vaccination, taking care of one more kid, and making sure that they're okay is kind of all you can do now. | ||
| And advocating for change at the governmental level. | ||
| Well, that's the perfect way to wrap up this discussion, I think. | ||
| Thank you so much for this really insightful and enjoyable book. | ||
| And thanks so much for talking with me today. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| This was absolutely wonderful. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
| Oh, you think this is just a community censor? | ||
| No, it's way more than that. | ||
| Comcast is partnering with a thousand community centers to create Wi-Fi-enabled lifts so students from low-income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. | ||
| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Nadia Shadlow is on your screen this morning as she's a foreign policy senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and also former deputy national security advisor for strategy with the first Trump administration. | ||
| Nadia Shadlow here to talk about the future of NATO and Trump foreign policy agenda. | ||
| Let's begin with the headline on Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| This is from CBS News. | ||
| Vladimir Putin backs Trump's push for Ukraine's ceasefire in principle, but says there are issues to discuss with the United States. | ||
| Nadia Shadlow, what do you think about your reaction to the Russian president saying there are issues that need to be worked out? | ||
| What's the strategy here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Greta. | |
| Well, it's great to be here. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| Well, you know, I think that the devil is in the details, right? | ||
| I think yesterday was a great sign. | ||
| The meeting between the new NATO Secretary General Mark Route and President Trump went really well, I think. | ||
| You know, you really saw a lot of personal rapport, which, as we know, with the president, that's important. | ||
| You saw enthusiasm for NATO and for what the Europeans are doing in terms of increasing their contributions to NATO, which has been a key theme of President Trump since his first term, and it's continued into his second term. | ||
| And you saw, I think, what Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, which is essentially, you know, now it's in Russia's court, now it's up to Russia in many ways to respond and to do its part in creating a sustainable ceasefire. | ||
| Now, whether or not that happens, that's the question, right? | ||
| I mean, President Trump and his team are not naive about this. | ||
| They understand that the details will matter. | ||
| The Europeans and the Ukrainians are concerned, as far as I understand, that a ceasefire means time for Russia to regroup, to attack again. | ||
| So we want to avoid that, and we want to set conditions to avoid that. | ||
| But overall, I was encouraged yesterday by the turn of events, and it's pretty remarkable how different things look, you know, a week after the initial, you know, a week or 10 days after the initial Oval Office blow up with President Zelensky. | ||
| Speaking of Zelensky, the Ukrainian president reacted to Putin's response saying that this is typical and he's slow walking this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll leave this here to go live to NASA for a news conference after the launch of the SpaceX Crew 10 mission to retrieve international space station astronauts. | |
| Live coverage on C-SPAN. | ||
| I just wanted to say, in all of this, SpaceX and NASA kept safety at the forefront as we methodically stepped towards this launch date while accelerating the timeline by several weeks. | ||
| And then NASA also enabled this handover, as Dina was talking about, to be a few days shorter than typical, which further accelerates the Crew 9 return date coming up in just a few short days. | ||
| So we had originally set up to launch on Wednesday, but during Wednesday night's attempt, we detected an indication in the data that there might be some trapped air, as Steve alluded to, in the groundside plumbing that leads to the hold-down clamps out at the pad. | ||
| So we cycled the clamps themselves open and closed several times throughout the count to make sure that the kinematic behavior was exactly as expected. | ||
| But we couldn't figure out why the signature was still showing there might be some air there in the system. | ||
| And so out of an abundance of caution, we stepped into scrubbing the launch for the day. | ||
| On Thursday, the teams fed fluid through those lines to clear any potential trapped air. | ||
| And then turns out that resolved the issue and set up for a beautiful launch today. | ||
| So tonight, I found it to be a fantastic day to launch, both being Pi Day and the 23rd anniversary of SpaceX's founding 23 years ago on March 14th. | ||
| So yes, we did have Pi in launch control, if you're wondering. | ||
| And I'm happy to report that Falcon 9 safely delivered the crew and Dragon to their intended orbit with an anticipated arrival already been set about 1130 p.m. tomorrow Eastern Time. | ||
| So if you're watching the webcast, you might have noticed something floating off during the separation event between Dragon and the second stage. | ||
| This is a piece of insulation foam from our stage 2 lockstome. | ||
| And these insulation tiles are known to sometimes liberate during this separation event. | ||
| It doesn't pose any issues for Dragon or Stage 2. | ||
| It's made out of Zotec. | ||
| It's a foam material that did its job on the way to orbit, and then it's okay if it liberates. | ||
| After Crew 10 docks to ISS, the next big event for us will be bringing Crew 9 safely home to their families. | ||
| We're excited to welcome Nick, Alex, Sunny, and Butch back after the time at the space station, and we're inspired by all the groundbreaking research that they completed during their increment. | ||
| So undocking currently no earlier than Wednesday, March 19th, and as Dina mentioned, we will continue to look at the weather and find the best day to bring the crew home hopefully next week. | ||
| So Crew 9 will be the last Dragon mission to return to the East Coast before the recovery transition west that we've all been talking about. | ||
| So Crew 9 will return to the Gulf at one of our five landing sites there. | ||
| And then we'll have a few Dragon missions that land on the West Coast before Crew 10 comes home in July or August. | ||
| So I want to say a huge thank you to our launch partners for your trust and collaboration on this launch. | ||
| There are so many ways that these two missions were unique, but I think for me personally, the most powerful was being a more integrated part of the global mission of human spaceflight. | ||
| So we see ISS as this beacon of international collaboration and Crew 9 felt like a small part of that where two companies got to work together to the greater goal of advancing human spaceflight missions and making humanity a space-faring civilization. | ||
| So that was an honor to be a part of. | ||
| And yeah, just thank you for having me today. | ||
| It's an honor to be a part of all this and all the research that the crews aboard the space station conduct. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Mayumi? | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you, Sarah. | ||
| Good evening, everybody. | ||
| I am Mayumi Matsura from JAXA. | ||
| And first of all, on behalf of JAXA, I'd like to sincerely express our appreciation to NASA, SpaceX, and our international partners, and all those who are struggling for today's Crete launch and the continuous ISS operation. | ||
| And I am very happy to be here to share with you all today's success of Crete launch. | ||
| And it is a great pleasure, not only for me, but also for Japan, that Japanese astronauts boarded Kudrago for fifth straight year since its debut flight in 2020. | ||
| And I think this was brought by close cooperation co-validated between US and Japan for years through ISS program. | ||
| And as for Takuya Onishi, this is the second ISS stay mission for him. | ||
| And during the first day, he said he realized the importance of working together with ground team. | ||
| And he had a strong desire to deepen his knowledge on flight control team work. | ||
| And as a result, he became a flight director. | ||
| And Japanese JAXA flight director, and its cosine is J-Flight. | ||
| And since then, he has been supporting ISS and the GM operation as J-Flight. | ||
| And then using his perspective as an astronaut. | ||
| And in addition to that, as Dina mentioned, Takuyo will support as ISS commander this time while he is on board. | ||
| And as far as I know, an ISS commander from Active Flight Director is not only the first in Japan, but also in the world. | ||
| And many of them, many of you are probably not aware of this, so I'd like to highlight that point. | ||
| And he will undoubtedly make good use his new knowledge he gained from J-Flight work to serve as an ISS commander. | ||
| And I do believe he will show us a great teamwork that no one has ever seen before. | ||
| And this time, Q10 mission is definitely a symbol of solid international partnership. | ||
| And I know the partnership, not just Q10, has been and will continue to be essential for our space activities. | ||
| And human space activity, as you know, are expanding from ISS, Rio, to further spheres such like Moon and Mars. | ||
| So today's success, based on our international partnership, is another step toward further future of future space activities. | ||
| And lastly, I am deeply honored to witness this historic moment with you all. | ||
| And once again, congratulations on the successful launch today. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you all for those opening comments. | ||
| We will now take your questions, beginning with those in the room here at Kennedy. | ||
| Please raise your hand, state your name and affiliation, and to whom you are asking the question. | ||
| And we'll start with Marcia. | ||
| Hello, Mr. NAP. | ||
| Looking ahead to Splashdown, if you undock Wednesday, when might that occur? | ||
| And given that Butch and Sunny have been up for nine months, are there any special precautions you're going to need to take to accommodate them or extra medical tests to learn more about long-duration spaceflight? | ||
| And what kind of celebrations are you planning after they've gone above and beyond for almost a year? | ||
| I'll take the first part and see if Dean has anything to add. | ||
| I think the undocking time we're looking at might be as early as 4 in the morning, Eastern, 4 a.m. | ||
| In terms of precautions, you know, they'll have the standard precautions that any crew has. | ||
| They'll obviously have their suits that we've sent up and tried them on. | ||
| They've got custom seats that are made to fit their body and their suits. | ||
| And then, you know, every crew that comes back goes through a fluid loading protocol just to make sure when they get back that their body is conditioned properly. | ||
| But they'll go through all. | ||
| There's nothing beyond what we'll normally do. | ||
| They've done training already on the Dragon spacecraft while they've been on orbit to get familiar with the differences in the suits and the umbilicals and the seats and all that. | ||
| So they'll be ready to come home when we're ready. | ||
| We'll watch the weather. | ||
| You know, the weather's always a challenge. | ||
| It's always windy over the water. | ||
| We'll have to find the right opportunity. | ||
| And then in terms of celebrations, I don't think we've fought that far ahead. | ||
| Obviously, we're excited to get Crew 9 back, and I know Butch and Sonny are excited to come back. | ||
| And then we'll celebrate, you know, when they're ready. | ||
| It'll take a little time to get them back reconditioned, and then we'll do a proper celebration. | ||
| See if Dana has anything to add. | ||
| I'll just add a couple of things that undock if it's around four in the morning on Wednesday. | ||
| The phasing will vary depending on where our landing site will be and how long we're going to be in transit essentially to that splashdown location. | ||
| Sarah had mentioned that we'll be targeting only certain sites, the Gulf sites essentially in Florida, so we'll have fewer opportunities, but we haven't pinpointed the exact one that will be available to us. | ||
| I'll also just note that Butch and Sonny have been on orbit for a little over 280 days or something. | ||
| We can get you that trivia, but there have been many crew members who've been on orbit longer than that. | ||
| And so we don't see any need for any special precaution. | ||
| Like any astronauts coming back, there's an acclimation period, and so that'll vary by crew member. | ||
| And also it does vary by how long they've been on orbit sometimes. | ||
| But I'm not aware of any special precautions or parties, although, of course, you never know. | ||
| All right, let's go to the front row here on the left-hand side. | ||
| Hi, I'm Faith Abam with ABC News. | ||
| There are several steps before the crew 10 team docks at the ISS. | ||
| Are there any more concerns about anything that could possibly go wrong at this point? | ||
| I mean, obviously there's lots of steps, right? | ||
| There's a series of maneuvers we have to do. | ||
| We did one maneuver today, a rendezvous maneuver. | ||
| We'll do a number of those as well. | ||
| The crew today will get out of their suits and be in the spacecraft, and then they'll get back in their suits for docking. | ||
| We'll check out the docking system. | ||
| We'll go through all the standard steps. | ||
| We're going to take it one step at a time and watch the vehicle carefully and watch the crew carefully on the way to rendezvous and docking. | ||
| But there's nothing unusual so far. | ||
| The spacecraft is very healthy. | ||
| The crew is healthy. | ||
| So we'll just take it one step at a time on the way to docking. | ||
| And Steve's being very modest. | ||
| Getting a spacecraft to rendezvous with another object in orbit, it requires incredibly precise navigation, planning. | ||
| And our systems do that very well, right? | ||
| And so what he's saying is our systems are all working good, so we're going to be able to do that really amazing thing and dock with the space station. | ||
| All right, another question in the front. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Sawyer Rosenstein NSF. | ||
| This is probably for Steve. | ||
| I know there was questions on the Wednesday attempt, the fact that you had Sphere X launching within less than 24 hours. | ||
| There was a Starlink that was supposed to launch within less than 24 hours. | ||
| Can you kind of clarify the NASA rule to if that is still the case with no Falcon launches 24 hours before one of the NASA missions? | ||
| And are there any plans to reduce that time as the launch cadence goes up? | ||
| Yeah, that's a good question. | ||
| We had initially, a number of years ago, established a 48-hour timeframe in between our launch and another Falcon 9 launch. | ||
| We recently, for this mission, reduced that time to 24 hours. | ||
| And then we looked at the timing of the specific missions. | ||
| Spherex was about 21 hours. | ||
| And we talked to our team and looked at the amount of work we needed to do to look at the vehicle at Falcon 9 launch for Sphere X. | ||
| We also had a NASA team in place observing that launch. | ||
| And so we adjusted the time to 21 hours. | ||
| So we're constantly looking at those missions. | ||
| What we feel like now is we learn from every single Falcon 9 flight. | ||
| And so it's really an advantage, a safety advantage to us to have Falcon 9 fly, see if we can learn something from that flight. | ||
| And if there's something off-nominal, we can actually stand down and evaluate it. | ||
| So we had the benefit before our flight of not only the Spherex launch, the NASA SMD launch, but also a Starlink launch as well that fell within that 21-hour period. | ||
| All right, we're going to take a phone question. | ||
| We'll come back into the room and get you guys. | ||
| Micah Maidenberg with the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Hey, good evening. | ||
| For Steve and Sarah, did NASA and SpaceX accept more risk for the Crew 10 flight compared with earlier crew missions, given the changes that have been you guys made in the run-up to this week? | ||
| And if that's the case, could you kind of explain that and quantify it, if possible? | ||
| Thanks very much. | ||
| I wouldn't say there are any additional risks taken. | ||
| This is one of the benefits of having multiple spacecraft in different processing lanes at the same time. | ||
| The vehicle that we switched to was pretty far along in its launch processing campaign for another mission that we're flying later in the spring, and so that was available. | ||
| We did look at some of the nuanced differences between requirements of various contracts between the NASA contracts and others. | ||
| And that drove some amount of work on this particular vehicle. | ||
| He was mentioning the coding degradation that we looked at to ensure that the engines were ready to fly. | ||
| But no, it was a pretty standard pre-launch process other than switching around the order of hardware and tests and when we did what on which spacecraft, from my perspective. | ||
| And from NASA perspective, we went through our normal process. | ||
| We did it in, I would say, an accelerated timeframe. | ||
| You know, we look at what we call non-conformance as anything that maybe any valve that didn't perform exactly per the spec or exactly per the right timing. | ||
| We looked at we have certain witnesses that we do and inspection points that we go through as the Dragon spacecraft is built up. | ||
| You know, we missed a couple of those on the NASA side. | ||
| We actually witnessed the heat shield installation, but we went and looked at all the build records. | ||
| We have enough experience with the technicians for the heat shield assembly, and so we felt comfortable with that. | ||
| Probably the one area that maybe was a little bit more risk, I would say, was the coding on these thrusters. | ||
| These thrusters had flown a few more times than we had in the past. | ||
| We went and analyzed that very carefully. | ||
| We did a set of testing with a very similar thruster. | ||
| SpaceX did it at McGregor, Texas. | ||
| And then we went back and looked at the qualification data just to make sure we were good to go. | ||
| So we went through our standard process, standard flight readiness review and commercial crew, agency FRR process, solicited dissenting opinions, asked our engineers if they were ready, and we felt very confident to go into the launch campaign. | ||
| And Steve, remind me, the fleet following or the witnessing of tests and inspections that you guys do with us, you often do that. | ||
| Not just you follow not only the capsule that's the primary plan for your mission, but also others. | ||
| Was this one that you had already been following along with to some extent as well? | ||
| Following this capsule, obviously, we had flown it before. | ||
| Last time was on Crew 7, and we had started a little bit early to start looking at this capsule. | ||
| And the capsule also has some upgrades. | ||
| One of the upgrades that I talked about is a new energy modulator system. | ||
| You know, we had seen, we talked about skip stitching on previous flights. | ||
| We're flying an energy modulator on this particular vehicle that we tested at the Langley Research Center. | ||
| There's a facility there that we can actually subject that energy modulator to all the loads and forces that we would see in flight. | ||
| And we think this is a significant upgrade that we're going to go fly. | ||
| So, as Sarah said, we followed the whole fleet and we were in a good posture to go fly this vehicle. | ||
| Okay, question here in the second row. | ||
| With Talking Space, question for Steve. | ||
| Thinking about troubleshooting and problem solving, what would be a key, it seems like focus would be a key element to successful troubleshooting and problem solving. | ||
| What would help you individually and the teams that are part of the organization to focus and have success each day, each challenge? | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, in engineering and space flight, I was just thinking this morning, you know, I was texting a friend and he asked me if the launch was still on track. | ||
| I said, yeah, the launch is still on track. | ||
| Everything's working fine. | ||
| And then I thought to myself, a spacecraft and a launch vehicle on the PAT has millions of parts that have to work correctly, and we have to test those parts. | ||
| And every single day, and I've been watching our team very carefully ever since the beginning of the year, and they've been focused. | ||
| They've been going through the testing on the vehicle, been following along with the testing, doing independent analysis that NASA does. | ||
| And so, you know, we're very focused on this mission, Crew 10, and then we'll be focused. | ||
| We're also focused on the Crew 9 vehicle on orbit and making sure that vehicle is safe to bring the Crew 9 crew back as well. | ||
| So it's really just attention to detail every single day, making sure that everybody does their job. | ||
| It's a bit like a football team. | ||
| You know, everybody has their job, whether you be an offensive lineman, a wide receiver, or tight end, you have your job to do, and you just watch to make sure that everybody is being diligent and asking the right questions. | ||
| And the interaction between NASA and SpaceX is phenomenal. | ||
| On the particular problem we had at the launch pad, you know, the NASA team looked at the data, SpaceX team looked at the data. | ||
| We weren't quite comfortable, had multiple meetings back and forth on the data. | ||
| Just today, with a NASA guide, one of our experts on the hydraulic system, wanted to replot all the data one last time just to make sure we're ready to go fly. | ||
| And he did that. | ||
| And I talked to him before I went on console, and he was ready to go. | ||
| All right, a question here in the front row. | ||
| Yeah, Eliano Sheriff with LEN Space. | ||
| And this question is for whoever can answer it. | ||
| The current administration has made claims that the previous administration refused to bring home the Starliner astronauts despite an offer being made. | ||
| Can you give us any clarity about this? | ||
| I think the short answer is I can't give you a lot of clarity there because those discussions I wasn't part of. | ||
| So I can't tell you if they did happen or didn't happen. | ||
| All I can tell you is NASA is an incredible non-partisan agency. | ||
| We get support from whoever is in office. | ||
| Our presidents always care a lot about what happens at NASA. | ||
| And it's great to see that trend continue with our current president. | ||
| He injects a lot of energy into our thought processes, and that's been helpful for us. | ||
| All right, let's go to the back of the room. | ||
| Bill Harwood. | ||
| Hey, thanks. | ||
| Bill Harwood, CBS News. | ||
| For really anybody, you know, this mission has taken on this whole thing with Crew 9 and getting Bush and Sonny home that I've never really seen with any other mission to this level. | ||
| I don't know whether you call it hype or whether you call it reasonable. | ||
| What do you guys think about that? | ||
| The fact that you're launching Crew 10, but you can't start a story about Crew 10 without putting Butch and Sonny in the lead. | ||
| Which is fine with me. | ||
| I'm not complaining about that. | ||
| I'm just wondering what you guys think of that from a NASA perspective, the way this has taken on this life of its own. | ||
| I can start and let Ken comment. | ||
| I mean, I appreciate all the interest in the mission. | ||
| I appreciate the interest in NASA, but for us, it's really about doing the job that we do every single flight to get the Crew 10 Dragon spacecraft, the Falcon 9 vehicle, ready to go fly, to fly the crew that we have on that spacecraft to the station and then execute the handover. | ||
| And the same thing with the spacecraft that's there. | ||
| You know, just a few days ago, we inspected the thermal protection system, just like we would for any mission to make sure that it's good to go return home with the external high-def cameras on the space station and also the robotic arm. | ||
| So we try to just focus on what's important, and what's important is really making sure that we can safely return the crew and safely get the crew there and try to avoid, I try to avoid with my team, getting too much into the hype, you know, and they are so focused and doing their job. | ||
| I'm so proud of both the SpaceX and NASA team for doing their job in this situation. | ||
| That's, as you said, Bill, it's a little different than what we experienced in the past. | ||
| And I'll see if Ken has anything to add. | ||
| I'll just say it's great to see how much people care about our astronauts. | ||
| If it was me, I might use different words. | ||
| You know, I think people use words to describe things based on their point of view and their frame of reference. | ||
| For me, if I was going to describe the crew, I would describe them as professional, devoted, committed, really outstanding astronauts. | ||
| Okay, we're going to go to the phone line for our next question, Chris Davenport. | ||
| Kate, thanks very much for doing this. | ||
| And Sarah, thanks for mentioning that piece of insulation foam that came loose from the second stage. | ||
| You said this has happened before and doesn't pose a problem, you know, but the word loose insulation foam is just going to generate a certain response given, well, you know. | ||
| And I'm just wondering if this is something that SpaceX is going to look to try to fix and prevent from happening again, or if it's something that just happens and is unavoidable. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, so these foam tiles are mounted to our LOX dome, which gets very cold. | ||
| The temperature changes drastically throughout the course of it, successfully getting the vehicle into orbit. | ||
| And so it's, I would say, expected that occasionally you'll see some liberate just because of the thermal environment that it's exposed to as it's doing its job to get to orbit. | ||
| On our satellite missions, there's actually an adapter that covers these foam pieces that the satellite is mounted to, and so you don't see it as commonly then. | ||
| But Dragon, which has a kind of open-air trunk, you'll more commonly see these pieces coming out of stage two. | ||
| But this is a known risk that we carry in our system that we've analyzed and we've expected because we've seen it before. | ||
| And I think the good thing about the foam, right, and at Dragon, at Falcon 9 Dragon separation, as Sarah said, that foam is contained within the trunk. | ||
| Dragon's moving away, so in terms of velocity that that foam could make contact with anything, it's very low. | ||
| It's a very lightweight piece. | ||
| And so SpaceX has assessed that. | ||
| And we know that's not a concern. | ||
| Sure, that's one of the things that SpaceX will go look at, and as they always do, to see if they can correct it over time. | ||
| But in this timeframe, it's not like some of the foam kind of scenarios we've had in other programs. | ||
| All right, we will come back to the room after we take one more question on the phones from Joey Roulette with Reuters. | ||
| Hey, thanks, Darrell. | ||
| And thanks, guys, for doing this, and congrats on what sounds like a successful launch. | ||
| And I just wanted to follow up on Micah's question and Steve, just kind of get like a quantifiable response or some kind of number on what the probability of loss of crew for this flight was or how different that might have been from past flights. | ||
| I mean, I think you said that this was kind of an unusual pre-flight process this time around. | ||
| And so I just figured it'd be good to get a number on if there was any kind of numerical difference on the probability of loss of crew for this flight that you guys accepted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| Yeah, oh gosh, I don't have the lost crew number that we use from the design phase with me, but there would have been no change in that essentially for this flight. | ||
| We wouldn't have assigned a new loss of crew risk for this flight based on our process. | ||
| Again, I felt like we started looking at capsule 210 endurance late last year a little bit because we thought we might be in this situation. | ||
| So we started looking at some of the non-conformances. | ||
| We started looking at some of the data. | ||
| I mean, the Dragon vehicles, if you just compare them, they are all virtually identical except for Capsule 206, the very first spacecraft. | ||
| The prop system is a little different on that one. | ||
| So in terms of the safety risk for this vehicle, it really was unchanged from any other previous flight. | ||
| So we didn't assign any new loss of crew number for the flight. | ||
| Okay, so the front row here, Will, has a question. | ||
| Hi, Will Robinson-Smith with Spaceflight Now. | ||
| Thank you all for your time this evening. | ||
| Question to Steve and to Sarah. | ||
| In the write-up after the launch readiness review, it was mentioned that the leak issue that was present in B1086 when it landed and had the subsequent fire, that that was cleared to move forward with this launch, but that root cause had not been found yet at that point. | ||
| Has that been resolved now? | ||
| And did this flight provide any additional data that might help clear that? | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Do you want me to go for it? | ||
| Yeah, so we are still moving through our root cause of why the fire originated. | ||
| But what we did ahead of the Spher X mission and the Crew-10 mission is we asked ourselves of all the possible causes, could any of these have any correlation or connection to what will happen on the ascent phase of a mission, which is what matters for this mission? | ||
| And in this case, the answer was no. | ||
| We found that there would have to be three separate anomalous events all happening simultaneously in the first two or three minutes of flight in order to see anything like what we saw there post-landing. | ||
| And so that got us comfortable with it not being an elevated risk to this mission. | ||
| And SpaceX did a great job of looking at, I would say, forensics from that booster, the 1086 booster on the drone ship. | ||
| They actually looked at a particular fitting that might have been a source of a fuel leak. | ||
| It had a very interesting signature where it wasn't as, of course, when you have a combustion event after landing, you're going to see a lot of heat damage components. | ||
| This one wasn't, so they think maybe this particular fitting might have been leaking a little bit of fuel on that particular booster. | ||
| We went and analyzed our booster. | ||
| We did a static fire. | ||
| We didn't see any fuel leaks. | ||
| We actually sniffed for fuel to see if there was any present in any of the nine engine bays. | ||
| There was not. | ||
| We actually went in on a couple of the bays and looked at this area where there was a fitting. | ||
| And so that's a potential root cause. | ||
| And then we looked at the thing that you would be worried about if you had a fuel leak as a LOX leak during ASEN. | ||
| The vehicle that we just flew was very tight during static fire. | ||
| It was tight during all the testing at McGregor. | ||
| And so that gave us rationale to go fly the flight. | ||
| And of course, SpaceX resumed their other missions as well. | ||
| And we learned from those flights. | ||
| Okay, the third row. | ||
| Maybe I'll just have one last question. | ||
| One of the cool things about the design of that line is it was designed to be full engine out, which is just another important part of all of this. | ||
| If there were to be a fire to break out in one engine, for example, and we did actually see an engine out scenario, gosh, in the old, old days, I think it was CRS-1 or 2 to 10, 12 years ago. | ||
| Right, but that rocket had an engine out. | ||
| It has sufficient scaffolding to isolate the fire to that single engine bay. | ||
| And then the rest of the engines complete the mission as planned. | ||
| And so that's, I guess, an additional layer of protection. | ||
| If we were to see an event like this, we wouldn't expect it to propagate to the rest of the rocket. | ||
| I'm Roy Sapparo with NBC News. | ||
| Thanks again for doing this. | ||
| This is for whoever wants to answer this one. | ||
| I'm sure you're still seeing this as I am. | ||
| What do you say to people that are still calling Butch and Sonny stuck or stranded, quote unquote, and calling Crew 10 a quote rescue mission? | ||
| You want to do that one, Steve? | ||
| I mean. | ||
| First principle in space flight, you always have a way for the crew to come home. | ||
| And Bush and Sonny have had a way to come home all the way back to the crewed flight test mission. | ||
| If you remember, their vehicle, if there would have been a contingency, they were going to come home in Starliner first. | ||
| Then we transitioned to the Crew-8 vehicle and then the Crew-9 vehicle. | ||
| So they've always had a way to come home. | ||
| To me, we are embarking upon a handover with two crews. | ||
| And Butch and Sonny happen to be part of the expedition now. | ||
| They've been there for a number of months, almost 10 months now. | ||
| And they've executed spacewalks and they've done science. | ||
| And so for me, it's a normal handover. | ||
| Uniquely, this time we launched Butch and Sonny with a Starliner and we're bringing them home on a dragon. | ||
| That's the only difference to me. | ||
| And maybe Ken has something to add. | ||
| Yeah, you know, if you look at it mathematically, by percentage of the original planned mission, this is the largest percentage extension, right? | ||
| That's probably how we engineers will think about it in the future, is mathematically. | ||
| There's been other really long extensions. | ||
| We've had other people stay up there a really long time. | ||
| But if you look at what was expected and what they ended up with, this one was a big percentage of the initial plan. | ||
| But every astronaut that launches into space, we teach them, don't think about when you're coming home. | ||
| Think about how well your mission's going. | ||
| And if you're lucky, you might get to stay longer. | ||
| And it really is a gift when you get to stay longer in space. | ||
| On my most recent flight, I did get to stay a little bit longer than we planned. | ||
| And I was so happy that we did get to stay longer. | ||
| The reasons were terrible that we stayed longer on our mission. | ||
| But one of the positives about everything that happened was more time in space. | ||
| And Don Pettit is up there right now. | ||
| I flew with Don 20 years ago. | ||
| The only time we ever came closer to an argument in space was when we argued over who might get to stay longer. | ||
| Because they were talking about having us extend for an extra six months and spend a year in space. | ||
| Neither one of us got to, so we both got home. | ||
| And then he eventually won that because he flew again and is still up there now. | ||
| Standing up, Ken? | ||
| Hi, thank you for doing this. | ||
| I walked in a little late picking up the camera. | ||
| So I'm wondering about the ISS leak. | ||
| Can you report anything about that? | ||
| A lot of people are wondering about that. | ||
| Is it mitigated? | ||
| Is it getting worse, getting better? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So you're talking about the Paracol league at the back end of the Russian service module. | ||
| And that leak's still ongoing. | ||
| Roscosmos keeps that hatch closed for most of the time. | ||
| So the only time they go in there would be for accessing the progress vehicle in order to get consumables or supplies out from a progress vehicle or in order to specifically do inspection or repair associated with that. | ||
| You know, we monitor the leak carefully and try to determine whether we have additional increases in the leak rate. | ||
| Right now it's fairly steady. | ||
| But again, crew does not go in that module very often. | ||
| So we just take little short snippets of data here and there as we go. | ||
| The investigation has been ongoing and Roscosmos leads the investigation. | ||
| We have our team as well providing assistance in terms of testing or analysis and providing data. | ||
| But our team is working very closely with the Roscosmos team on that. | ||
| I'd say the status has not really changed. | ||
| Are they doing any stress testing of the materials to see what it can take up to? | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| So we on the NASA side have we do have some of the Russian materials and we are doing testing on those types of materials, various types of tests that we've pre-coordinated with our Roscosmos colleagues. | ||
| Our Roscosmos colleagues also, they of course understand their material very well and perform some tests. | ||
| So the answer is yes and we are trying to correlate what we're seeing and go over those results as we have them with our Roscosmos colleagues. | ||
| Another question to the front of the room on this side, ABC News. | ||
| Thank you again. | ||
| I'm not sure if you've spoken to them yet, but what's been the reaction to the successful launch by the crew, the Sunny and Butch team on the ISS? | ||
| And how significant is it that we had a female pilot and a female commander on crew 10? | ||
| So first of all, I think it's really cool that we had two females in the flight crew, two women in the flight crew. | ||
| And I think it's cool that Ann's one of them because she was one of the first and a two-woman EVA. | ||
| I don't know, Sarah wanted to talk a little bit about that. | ||
| Oh, I was just telling them before this that I've got three daughters at home that I know we're watching tonight. | ||
| And so I was excited too to see them on board and thankful to them for a milestone that hopefully many more will follow after. | ||
| And Dina may have gotten something from Crew 9. | ||
| I'm sure they're excited. | ||
| Have you heard anything yet, Dina? | ||
| About coming home? | ||
| Yeah, about the fact that Crew 10 is on the way. | ||
| Oh, well, I have not heard yet, but the launch occurred while the crew was asleep. | ||
| They might have gotten up and taken a peek. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| So I've not really heard anything yet, but it's possible that they were just quietly watching. | ||
| I suspect they're excited that there's new faces coming, right, and new people coming, and they know they're going to get to come home with their see their families pretty soon. | ||
| All right, the question there in the fourth row, gentleman back there. | ||
| Hi, thank you so much. | ||
| I'm Nick Valencia with CNN. | ||
| This question is to dovetail off of an earlier question, but for you at SpaceX, Sarah, Ken may not have been part of the conversations for the initial offer from Elon Musk about bringing these astronauts home earlier, but I imagine as the director of Dragon that you might have been. | ||
| I'd love to know what the specifics were of that offer, what was made into who was it made at the Biden administration in the White House. | ||
| Yeah, so I wasn't in the conversation either. | ||
| I'm grateful for the leaders in our nation in the spheres of politics and policy, my sphere is engineering. | ||
| But what I do know from almost 15 years of working with this exact team with commercial crew and ISS is that NASA is always looking at multiple options, every option available for any operation that they may go do, and then many contingency options for when the unexpected inevitably happens. | ||
| And so I got to see that in this case, and we certainly brought all the ideas we had to the specifics of the operation. | ||
| And then we were just thankful to be a part of the path that was chosen. | ||
| Yeah, SpaceX has been a great partner for us. | ||
| Whenever we have something come up that's a little bit different on orbit, they help us figure out how to handle it, how to modify Dragon or come up with an extra way of dealing with our different contingencies. | ||
| Okay, let's go to the other side of the room now. | ||
| Yes, hi, I'm Bert. | ||
| Dick from the National Space Society, my question is for Adina and anyone else who might want to answer. | ||
| It's always impressive to see the partnerships, the diversity, the collaborative efforts. | ||
| We have NASA, JAXA, Roscosmos here. | ||
| How do all those collaborations point to mission success and the objectives of the International Space Station? | ||
| And also, I work with a lot of students. | ||
| And for the others, what lessons can I share with students about the success and how this works? | ||
| Well, I'll just give you my thoughts on this. | ||
| The intergovernmental agreement that was signed many years ago and led to the International Space Station, somebody had to think of that and put it on paper. | ||
| And then as people plowed into trying to actually assemble and build the space station, you can imagine that there was a lot of discussions about how it would be built and who would have what pieces of that. | ||
| But over time, this has slowly gotten to a point where on a daily basis, it'd be just like you and I having a conversation. | ||
| And we do this with our JAXA colleagues and our European colleagues and our Russian colleagues on the ground on a daily basis to operate the station. | ||
| On board, the crews are having dinner together from different nations. | ||
| When you're all working together on a common problem, you don't really see, I'd say, any differences. | ||
| You see each other a little bit more as working toward the same goal. | ||
| So I just say same as on Earth when people are aligned on a common goal, that's really helpful. | ||
| The ISS really is kind of a shining example of what you can do on a huge scale internationally if you're all partnered together. | ||
| So I'm not sure if I answered all the questions, but that's my thoughts on it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I thought Ann's words were really poignant when she got to orbit. | ||
| I think that was in the webcast. | ||
| Is that when Ann's first words down to the ground team were poignant about collaboration? | ||
| They were. | ||
| Yes, they were. | ||
| All right, the gentleman in the second row has been patiently waiting. | ||
| Hi, thanks for being here. | ||
| Nick Gibson with the spokes interview. | ||
| I'm curious what the last few days were like for the members of Crew 10 following the delay Wednesday. | ||
| Is there anything you do to help keep them prepared for the mission and how do they pass the time? | ||
| I would say from my perspective, you know, when we called the scrub on Wednesday, they understood, they know what it's like, that when you get in the dragon, you get in the launch vehicle, there's a chance that you're not going to go that day. | ||
| They got out. | ||
| They were very professional, very complimentary. | ||
| We did a debrief with them after that operation just to make sure there was nothing that we could do better the next time. | ||
| That went really well. | ||
| And then they followed kind of the issues and what's happening. | ||
| Maybe spend a little time with each other and maybe study their procedures a little bit more. | ||
| And then when it's time to go on launch day, you could tell Ann and the crew were ready again. | ||
| And Ken, you've probably been there before. | ||
| I don't know if you have anything to add. | ||
| You know, I've launched on time before. | ||
| It was rare, but we did launch on time even back in the space shuttle era. | ||
| And then had missions where we scrubbed seven lots of times, scrubbed six times. | ||
| And after a while, it gets old, but the first one's kind of nice because you get a chance to rest a little bit. | ||
| Usually people are tired at building up to the launch. | ||
| And you can catch up with all the notes that you didn't write down, spend a little extra time with your family. | ||
| So generally, that first scrub is kind of nice. | ||
| But I don't know, you'll have to ask the Crew 10 crew when they come back what they really thought about it. | ||
| Jessica Muir had reported out on our broadcast that she's friends with Ann McLean. | ||
| She said they went to the astronaut beach house. | ||
| So several members spent the day there with some of their family members. | ||
| So thank you for that question. | ||
| We'll take another one here on the first row. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Appreciate that. | ||
| So we're again with the NSF. | ||
| This is probably for Sarah. | ||
| So Crew Dragon Endurance, I know, had to swap out for the new capsule that wasn't ready. | ||
| But from my understanding, this capsule kind of bounced around again from Crew 9 to Frame 2 to Axiom 4, now to Crew 10. | ||
| Can you kind of explain why that was and what the SpaceX process is for determining what capsule for what mission? | ||
| I think some of those might not have been. | ||
| I'm trying to remember the history now. | ||
| I know that, let's see, we had a new capsule originally in preparation. | ||
| It's now probably going to fly the Axiom mission that's coming up in May. | ||
| You know, we have four or five lanes of processing where we get to swap in capsules at different phases of their flow. | ||
| And we usually have multiple in parallel or some awaiting certain processing steps depending on what their launch date is. | ||
| And so it's relatively straightforward for us to switch what we're doing in what lane or move capsules around. | ||
| And we've kept, as I think Steve already mentioned, we've kept our capsules so similar that that makes that a lot easier to do. | ||
| Whenever we roll in changes or upgrades to one capsule, we retrofit all the other capsules with those same changes. | ||
| And so there's no capsule that's getting behind another capsule where we'd have a lot of work to do if we were to do a swap. | ||
| We just have a fleet of five spacecraft, five crew spacecraft, and three cargo spacecraft that could fly any mission that they need to. | ||
| Time is almost up. | ||
| I'm sorry, Steve. | ||
| I was going to say, I'd have to go back and look. | ||
| I think at one point the new capsule was chesting my memory, but I think at one point we were going to fly it on crew 9 maybe, and then we moved off of that new capsule off of crew 9. | ||
| But I would say that building a new capsule, it just takes a lot of hard work and dedication and building some new components up. | ||
| You know, we had built the first four capsules kind of in fairly rapid succession over a couple year period, 206, 207, and then 210 and 212. | ||
| And then now this one's a little lagging behind, so sometimes it takes a little longer when that you got a vehicle that's lagging behind. | ||
| But the thing I would most compliment our team and SpaceX on is the adaptability. | ||
| When we looked at the manifest and saw that, hey, we'd really like to fly this mission in March ahead of the Soyuz handover, and we looked at capsule 210 and we started, our team started looking at it to see if we could go really get all the data reviewed. | ||
| We pivoted together very quickly, and that is the beauty of having multiple capsules ready at multiple times for multiple missions. | ||
| And we NASA appreciate that, and we took advantage of that. | ||
| Okay, our time is almost up. | ||
| We'll take another question from NBC News in the back. | ||
| Gina, this might be a question for you. | ||
| Two quick ones. | ||
| First, you mentioned that 4 a.m. Wednesday might be the earliest opportunity for crew 9 undocking. | ||
| So, is there a world where they would have splashdown? | ||
| I know we don't know exactly where they're targeting, but would that potentially be the same day? | ||
| What would be the soonest possible? | ||
| And then the other question I had is: we know Elon Musk talked about the possibility of deorbiting the ISS as soon as 2027. | ||
| I'm curious what your thoughts are if that's possible. | ||
| The first question is: I think it is possible we could splash on the same day. | ||
| Certainly, very possible. | ||
| Again, it just depends on the transit time associated with where the orbit lines up and then the splashdown opportunity that we select on the Gulf Coast. | ||
| And then I'll just caution you, though, that it could be difficult to find good weather on the very first day. | ||
| So, if you were even trying to pinpoint the day, I'm not sure we've really done that yet. | ||
| So, just to that's that would be the note earlier than day. | ||
| And then, in terms of ISS, you know, we are following our policy for the current administration has us deorbiting in 2030, and that's where our international partners have agreed to. | ||
| We have Russ Cosmos, who's agreed to go to 2028, and they're working on, you know, the we're working with everyone on the deorbit process, more working in that general direction. | ||
| So, that's where we are with that. | ||
| I know, Ken, if you had anything to add. | ||
| Just that I would say, Elon's all about going to Mars. | ||
| He has been since he started SpaceX and before that, right? | ||
| So, it doesn't surprise me that he wants to focus on that. | ||
| That excites me too. | ||
| But what I'll tell you is, our work in low Earth orbit, our work with ISS, the future work we'll do on our commercial LEO platforms, low Earth orbit platforms, is about Mars too. | ||
| And one of the fastest ways to get to Mars is to do work in low Earth orbit. | ||
| So, I think we're going to have a lot more time with astronauts doing their work close to Earth in orbit nearby. | ||
| Okay, we just have a few more seconds so we can grab one more from Will. | ||
| We'll wrap it up. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| I'll make this a quick one. | ||
| Regarding the future of Dragon Return, starting with Crew 10 when they are ready to come back, I know the plan is to splash off the coast of California, but will a Dragon recovery vessel stay in Florida as a contingency, or will both of them move to the West Coast for that? | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| So, we only need one vessel on the West Coast for the specific setup over here. | ||
| We have three landing sites. | ||
| They're all very close together. | ||
| There's no need for the, with the panhandle of Florida, you kind of needed two to take advantage of the entire Florida coast within a certain distance that you could helicopter the crew and cargo to their final destinations. | ||
| We don't need that over on the West Coast. | ||
| We've actually already moved a vessel, Shannon, over to the West Coast, and it's undergoing final preparations for its first missions. | ||
| And then, we actually had a number of facilities, and then some that we're upgrading, some that we're building over here. | ||
| You may remember we returned 20 dragons in the early cargo program over on the West Coast, and so we got to leverage that. | ||
| But yet, we have entirely new requirements with commercial crew program and science processing that we've benefited from these later contracts that we want to continue on the West Coast as well. | ||
| So, some new stuff, but also some heritage. | ||
| All right, thank you all for your questions today, and thank you to the panel for coming in and answering them. | ||
| If you'd like to listen in to crew audio as they make their way to the ISS, you can snap the QR code that you see at the bottom of your screen. | ||
| We'll be streaming mission audio commentary at nasa.gov forward slash multimedia. | ||
| And to continue following the crew 10 mission, stay tuned to our streaming platform, NASA Plus, or online at plus.nasa.gov. | ||
| We leave you now with highlights, a look back from suit up to launch. | ||
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