- Yeah, my name is Mark Kirasich and I'm currently the program manager of the Orion spacecraft development effort here at the Johnson Space Center. - [Interviewer] I think you mentioned earlier that you had been inspired by the Apollo 11 landing when you were a young boy so talk about that and how you ended up coming NASA as a result of that. - I was nine years old in July 1969 and very vividly I remember exactly where I was, and who I was in the room with when we first landed on the moon, and I remember running out into the street with my dad, and we looked at the moon, and we tried to find Neil and Buzz. We couldn't see 'em, but it was incredibly inspirational and that's what motivated me. That's what got me interested in science, and math, and engineering, and it took over my education and my interests, and it drove me to want to come and work in the space program. - [Interviewer] So when do you get here and what has your career been up until this point? - I arrived at the Johnson Space Center in 1983 and I had gone to the University of Notre Dame, and Stanford, also. I have degrees in electrical engineering. When I first came here, I worked in the mission control center. It was the early part of the space shuttle program, STS-7. Bob Crippen and Sally Ride had just landed and it was at a great time to be here. We were just starting to make the shuttle really operational and flying new, unique, dynamic payloads and that's the area I worked in. I worked in the office called Shuttle Payload Integration. So we would work with customers, people from other government organizations, different NASA centers, commercial satellite operators, and we would help them integrate their payload into the shuttle, and then we would help them operate it during the shuttle on orbit missions. I did that for about 10 years and then about that time we were starting early studies on how the shuttle could dock with the Mir, the Russian space station. And for a number of years I worked integration between the shuttle operations area and the Russian Mir program. And, in fact, I was a liaison in the Russian mission control center in Moscow for the first docking of the space shuttle to the Mir Space Station, and for a number of dockings thereafter. In 1996, I was selected to be a flight director and I was both, a space station assembly flight director, also a on-orbit increment flight director. And this was in the very early days. Actually before we started flying the late development of the hardware, the lab, and the node, and I was the lead flight director for the very first space station element, and worked a number of these space station assembly flights, and with two of the increment crews. In 2006, with the dawn of the Constellation Program and our new human space exploration program, I knew I had to be a part of it so I became involved in Orion in 2006. Just a little over a year ago, I became the program manager of Orion. - [Interviewer] So you've worked on that program for the last 11 years or so? - Yes. - [Interviewer] Talk about what division is for Orion if NASA looks to expand back into deep space with human activity. - From its inception, we've designed Orion and we've put a lot of emphasis in makin' it adaptable and multi-mission capable. So actually over its lifetime, we've had a number of different missions. In the current architecture, in the current NASA vision, we will be part of the deep space exploration program, and the goal is to go to Mars in the 2030s. In order to do that, we have to learn to live and operate in space at distances farther from the Earth. For the last 35, 40 years, all of our operations have been in low-Earth orbit. There have been long missions, but all within a couple hundred miles of the surface of the Earth. And to go to Mars, it's many hundreds of thousands and millions of miles away from Earth so we have to practice moving farther and farther away from Earth. In the first leg of that, we will do this practice around the moon in a lunar orbit. So Orion will be the vehicle that takes the astronauts from the surface of the Earth and then does lunar orbit missions. We also are going to build something called a gateway, in the lunar orbit, which will be some sort of laboratory where the astronauts will learn to live and work as they would on a mission to Mars. So Orion will be instrumental in the construction of that gateway. We will take the pieces that we take to the gateway, once we get in orbit around the Earth, we will very similar to how Apollo did it, we will undock from the launch vehicle, we'll turn around, come back in and grab the piece of the gateway, and then we will ferry the gateway out to the lunar orbit, and rendezvous with the pieces that are already there, and attach the new piece. So we'll be the transportation vehicle, the crew transportation vehicle, assembly vehicle for the gateway. - [Interviewer] Help me understand that from an orbital dynamic standpoint. Orion will be in low-Earth orbit and how will it boost itself from low-Earth orbit to lunar orbit? Do you not need a second stage for that? - There is a core stage.. There is a core stage on the launch vehicle, which inserts us into orbit, and once we get into orbit, there is an upper stage associated with the launch vehicle. It's called an ICPS. It's a NASA acronym for the first mission and we're gonna develop a new stage, a new upper stage, called the exploration upper stage, or EUS, for later missions. So the exploration upper stage will actually provide the maneuver that will break us out of the Earth's orbit and send us on our way to the lunar orbit. Once we get to the moon, it will actually be Orion's engines that do the lunar insertion orbit burn, put us into orbit, and then also break us out of the orbit, and bring us back to Earth. - [Interviewer] Your astronauts will ride Orion and whatever assembly needs to take place in lunar orbit, they'll get out of Orion to do that essentially? - Yeah. Right now, the architecture.. What will happen is the Orion with the astronauts will dock to the gateway and if, on a particular mission, we're carrying a new piece of the gateway, it will be on Orion's nose, and we'll dock that piece to the gateway. And then once we arrive, we'll open the hatches and the crew will enter into the gateway. And the current plans are to put the airlock for any space walks or assembly activities that we might need to do at the gateway, there will be an airlock at the gateway is the current plan. - [Interviewer] Talk about the adaptability of the vehicle. Obviously it's undergone quite a number of changes in the last 11 or 12 years. You kind of have a mission, but you don't know what that gateway's gonna look like, and you don't know, eventually, if there's gonna be sorties down on the lunar surface or what Orion's gonna called on so you really had to develop a pretty flexible vehicle. - One of things we did early on, and it took some effort, was we designed Orion to be a very versatile vehicle, able to support a lot of different missions. So as the missions have changed over the years.. In the early days, we were gonna start with space station missions, and then we were gonna be a lunar vehicle that allowed lunar landings, and then there was an astroid retrieval mission, and now there's a gateway mission. So our mission has changed over the years, but because of the effort we put in up front to add capabilities, to add volume, to add propulsion capabilities or redundancies, Orion is actually been able to be adapted to all of these missions with very little change over the years. - [Interviewer] The administration recently asked you to study the possibility of putting crew on after Exploration Mission 1. From the standpoint of Orion itself, when you looked at that, how much work in terms of life support or other areas, maybe the heat shield, would you have had to accelerate to get the vehicle at a configuration where you would have felt comfortable in late 2019 or early 2020 to put a crew on? - So our initial and our current plan is to fly one uncrewed test mission before we actually fly the crew on the new launch vehicle and Orion for the first time. And that first mission was called EM1, Exploration Mission 1. And earlier this year, the new administration asked us to evaluate how we could put crew on the first mission. So we looked at it and it involved.. We identified two classes of challenges we had to address. First were capabilities that we had not put on EM1 because we didn't need those capabilities. So, for example, we do not have the life support system, the system that purifies the air and removes the carbon dioxide, on EM1 because we don't need it on an EM2. So we had to look at how we would accelerate the development of those systems from Exploration Mission 2 to Exploration Mission 1. And then there was the aspect of there were some elements of the EM1 design that we were testing or validating during the EM1 flight itself so we had to look at how would we validate those systems without the uncrewed test flight ahead of the crew test flight, and the heat shield was one of those systems. We have a new architecture for our heat shield. It uses a block design as opposed to a monolithic design and we're counting on data from the first mission to validate that design before the first crew flight. So we had to study what would we do to accelerate or do that validation in different ways. And the team worked it, and for all of the things, for all the things we were missing on the first flight, we're able to develop alternate plans, ways to accelerate the capabilities, ways to conduct the verification and validation activities in different methods. It would have taken a little more time, it would have taken a little more money, and there would have been some additional risks because it would have been the first flight, but the team was able to pull together a plan for it. - [Interviewer] How disappointing was it to see EM1 slip out to 2019, even with the uncrewed flight? - Well I think the team is very anxious to fly Orion. So any time we run into a challenge and we have to work around a challenge it is disappointing, but the exciting part of our job, day in and day out, is the hardware's comin' together and there's a lot of hardware in the pipeline right now. We have four crew modules in various stages of manufacturing we're testing right now at this point. The Exploration Mission 1 crew module is at the Kennedy Space Center, well into its assembly. Our structural test article is in Denver, a full scale structural test article crew module, and it is undergoing very rigorous tests. We've actually started machining the Exploration Mission 2 crew module. This is the crew module that will take humans back to the moon for the very first time and we see parts coming together for it right now. And finally, the fourth crew module is the test article crew module that we'll use for our ascent abort flight tests, it's under manufacturing. So the great part of the job is we have all these pieces of flight hardware in work right now and they present us challenges every day so the team's excited about comin' to work, but we're also really excited to get to that first uncrewed flight and then the crew mission. - [Interviewer] You're working on the module for EM2. That's the last one. The ascent abort test, what's the latest date you were supposed to do that? - Yeah, we had planned to do that at the end of 2019, but one of the byproducts of the EM1 crew study that we just finished is we saw an opportunity to pull that ascent abort test back up to earlier in the year so we're looking at the feasibility of that right now. Do we have the funding to do it? Does it fit in the schedule? But we're very likely to pull that test flight earlier into early 2019, probably the spring time. - [Interviewer] Would you launch that on a.. So you're using a single stage booster for that? - For our ascent abort test, our ascent abort flight test, we actually procure a special rocket. It's a rocket we get from ATK, using some engines provided by the Air Force. It's a small rocket, relatively inexpensive, that can simulate the conditions that we need to abort under it. So we'll simulate the very dynamic flight conditions that Orion would actually see on the space launch system, but we can do it much more cheaply with this booster we put together. - [Interviewer] You mentioned the block heat shield. At this point, are you pretty confident that's going to work for you? - We changed our heat shield architecture in between our first orbital flight test, which was called Exploration Test Flight 1, and EM1 for a number of reasons. We had some manufacturing challenges and some strength challenges so we studied a number of different alternatives for the next flight and we settled on the block architecture. At the time we picked it, any time you change something as complex as a heat shield, especially for a lunar orbit type return, there are some challenges. So when we started the block development, there was a long list of we call them risks and we tracked the risks very rigorously in a risk management system, and over the years we burned 'em down one by one, and from a manufacturing standpoint, from a consistency standpoint, from a formal do the blocks work well, from the mechanical strength, all aspects of the blocks have proved really, really good, and I would say we burned down 90% of the risks that we started with when we selected this architecture several years ago. And the last remaining.. Actually I would say there were two remaining risks. One has to do with when you install the blocks on the carrier structure of the heat shield. In a monolithic, in the old architecture, it's very easy to test. You can pull on the monolithic carrier and you can see if it's attached well. That pull test is much harder to do with blocks so we had to develop an alternative testing technique and we're using non-destructive evaluations. So, for example, we're using an ultra-sonic test that can look through the blocks and see if it's bonded well onto the carrier structure. That risk right now, we are currently developing the technique and we then test the method for testing. We call it.. It's a very rigorous set of tests where we intentionally induce flaws in the bond and we make sure our evaluation techniques can find those flaws. And we are just now beginning this month, May in fact, and we'll finish probably middle of July. We'll validate proof that our method for making sure the blocks are attached to the carrier structure are there. That's the last major risk we have preflight. And then the one remaining risk that we check off during the flight has to do with an interaction that you can really only see when you have a full scale sized heat shield interacting with the entry velocities. And what happens on a full scale heat shield, you have interaction between the environment, and the heat shield, and the weight the heat shield applies during entry. So that, we actually need the flight test data for and that's why EM1 is a very important test for us. - [Interviewer] So it was interesting in looking through some of the old oral histories. One of things Robert Gilruth said was that, "I don't think people realize "how hard it was to go to the moon "and I don't think they'll realize that "until they actually try to go back." And so as someone who has developed a spacecraft that's trying to operate in this lunar area and come back from there safely, maybe you could talk a little bit about how big of a step up this is from, and I'm not saying just going into low-Earth orbit, but I'm saying how big of a step it is to go to make that next step from low-Earth orbit into deep space. - I think Robert Gilruth was a very smart man and it is a challenge designing a spacecraft to take people farther away from the Earth than we've been in many years. When you do this, there are a number of things that come to play into your design equation. First of all, it takes a lot of propellant, it takes a lot of mass to propel things to those distances. So all of the sudden mass, how much the spacecraft weighs, becomes immensely more important than for a low-Earth orbit mission and mass is a challenge for low-Earth orbit missions. For every pound you put on the spacecraft that has to land in the ocean, you have to push it to the moon and you have to return it to the moon. So mass is always at a premium So every design decision we make, we have to look at how much are we adding to the vehicle. The other thing that is a big difference from a low-Earth orbit mission is if you have a problem in a low-Earth orbit mission, you can be back on Earth within a little over an hour and half. When we travel these distances, it can take days to return the crew safely if there's a malfunction with the spacecraft. So we put levels of redundancies in the spacecraft that you don't ordinarily need for a low-Earth orbit mission. For example, one improvement that we've made, even over the redundancy that the Apollo spacecraft had, is we've designed the vehicle such that if the cabin leaked and there's nowhere in the cabin, the spacecraft can continue to operate, all of our avionics are on cold plates, there's an environmental support system that will take care of the crew in a spacesuit, and you can actually fly for multiple days from these great distances as far out as the moon, and return safely to the Earth. So there's safety and redundancy challenges that you have to consider when you fly these distances. And finally, the environment is harsher. The radiation environment. The temperature extremes that you can see. Around the Earth, even though things can get very hot and very cold, you're still close to the Earth, and you see the sun once an orbit, and you get the reflection off the Earth. When you fly away from the Earth, you can have parts of the spacecraft that are exposed to deep space for hours at a time, and it can get really cold. And the other side, which is pointing at the sun, can get really hot. So the thermal and the environment gets much more challenging. - [Interviewer] One of things I wanted to ask you about was as you look ahead to the middle of the 2020s, you've got Orion, you've got the exploration upper stage, you've got the service module, and my understanding is that with that capability you can get to a high-lunar orbit, but you can't get to a low-lunar orbit. So are there upgrades being planned, in addition to the service module or to the upper stage, that would give Orion some more flexibility in where it can go? - Actually, with the Orion spacecraft today, the Orion spacecraft can go to various orbits and that gets back to our flexibility. Orion itself doesn't need to be upgraded. We can do high-lunar orbit missions, low-lunar orbit missions, asteroid retrieval missions, a lot of different mission capabilities. But low-lunar orbit doesn't get you to the surface so the goal then if you wanted to land on the surface, you need more elements. You would need a lunar lander, but Orion can do a wide variety of lunar missions. - [Interviewer] So I'm gonna ask you the question, but you're gonna look at-- - Yes, thank you. - [Interviewer] Thinking back on the Apollo missions, what are some key takeaways for you? - When I think back, again, to Apollo.. First of all, there are some big things to me. First of all, I think Apollo really changed a generation because it inspired a lot of people. A lot of the people I talk to were like me. They saw Apollo and they were motivated. They were motivated to study engineering, to become involved, and not necessarily even in the space business, but to look at tough problems. Apollo taught us that it's not impossible to set audacious goals and Apollo taught us about the environment. The picture that the Apollo 8 crew sent back for the first time in color as they were coming around from behind the moon of the Earth, that is referred to by many people as a really defining moment in how we looked at the Earth and how much we appreciated the environment. So there are some really big things that I think affected a generation and our humanity. And then, of course, there are the lessons that we in the business learned because Apollo taught us those lessons. They taught us about fireproofing spacecrafts. They taught us about backup systems. There are engineering databases that the Apollo team generated that we still use. And then there's the people from Apollo. There are people in the Clear Lake area that worked on Apollo that we still call in from time to time and help us design the spacecraft and things for our testing programs. Milt Heflin was somebody I work with in the flight director office who started his career as a member of the Apollo landing and recovery team. And now when we're designing our system, our Orion systems, to operate in the water, we call him, and he's actually been on a recovery ship with us, and we learn valuable lessons from the people who flew Apollo. - [Interviewer] So it's actually the anniversary of Kennedy's moon speech in 1961 to Congress today. That's [pause] 56 years. I'm just wondering how helpful it would be to have some kind of really strong executive declaration about what NASA is going to do [brief pause] to really drive either the national interest or national debate or galvanize funding for a goal because you've got this plan out there for Mars in the 2030s, but it's nebulous. Is it a Mars flyby? Is it a landing on Phobos? Is it going to the surface of Mars? Can you even do it in the 2030s? I'm just wondering how important it is to have some kind of directive from the top. - It's very important to have support from our stakeholders, our Congress, our President. And right now I feel we have that strong support, at least in terms of the funding they provide. We were treated very well by the Congress in the appropriations of '17 and the President's budget that we just received. So I do think the President appreciates our mission and appreciates human space exploration. It would be great if we picked a goal and we had a single galvanizing goal, but right now, the President and the Congress are behind our mission, and we have the funding to do so so we will be able to move forward. - [Interviewer] Do you the program overall is healthy and on a good track? - I think the program right now is making great progress and we see the launch vehicle coming together, the Orion spacecraft comin' together, the ESA service module is comin' together. So the pieces are comin' together. We're limited by the amount of money. How fast we can go depends on the amount of money we get, but we're getting the money we need to execute our plans and the teams are performing. - [Interviewer] We've talked about how challenging the deep space environment is and the fact that no crews have been there since the last Apollo, Apollo 17. With someone like Elon Musk, he gets on a conference call and starts talking about sending tourists. He has two people who have paid to ride a Crew Dragon on a Falcon abbey around the moon and coming back. Knowing what you know, does that make you feel competitive? Do you kind of laugh at that? What's your reaction to that? - A couple things. First off, I am really amazed at what SpaceX has done. So when I hear things, you actually have to appreciate it because what they've done on their own in the launch vehicle and also the spacecraft business is really impressive. From my own experience, what we're doing with Orion, it's hard and it's taking some time. What's hard for me is you don't always know exactly what's being proposed or how it would be done so I don't try to make apples to apples comparisons. I appreciate what SpaceX has done. I know what the Orion team is doing, and I know the Orion team is doing great, and we're gonna get there, and we're gonna have a great exploration capability. So I don't worry too much about competition between the commercial world and the Orion program. - [Interviewer] What message would you offer for younger people out there, maybe of the college age, who are interested in getting into space or they're excited by the space station or they remember the shuttle launch or they're seeing what SpaceX or Orion are doing? What's your advice to people who are interested in following the footsteps of someone like yourself, who caught the space bug early and then got into the business? - First off, it's a really great time because we're just at the start of a variety of new space ventures. We have the exploration program that NASA's working on. We have the commercial companies, who are establishing a strong base for low-Earth orbit and operations. So I think there are a number of different opportunities for people who want to get involved. This is a really great time to come into the business. If your interested, pursue what motivates you, whether that's engineering or science or math because when you pursue that, you will accel at it and you'll be valuable if you wanna pursue a career in the human space industry. - [Interviewer] One other question, Mark, before we wrap up. Has there been anything as you've gone through this decade long process to design a vehicle that can go into deep space that has surprised you? And I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. When I think about, and I know Orion is not the vehicle crew are gonna go to Mars in, but one thing I would have never thought of is when you go to Mars, what are you gonna wear? Because you can't wash your clothes. It's not really easy to throw them out. You can't bring a wardrobe of clothes for a year and a half. So as you talk about sending crews for 21 days in deep space, is there anything kind of like that? Something that is actually a big deal, but people don't really think about? - One of the reasons that it takes a little bit of time to put together an exploration spacecraft is we have a team of engineers, and scientists, and doctors who think about all those things and I would say our process works such that we learn these things about the point in time where you'd expect to find them. We find things in design reviews. The surprises I see day in, day out is we run into challenges in manufacturing and we forget sometimes how hard it is to manufacture things or we learn something in our tests. Most of the scenarios, I think, are thought out ahead of time. I'm sure I'm forgetting one or two, but a mission thing or something we hadn't thought of, there are very few. Our process seems to catch that. - [Interviewer] Not so much surprises, but just something that's really hard about this. Like, the clothing on a Mars trip. Something about a deep space vehicle that people would take for granted. - Let's see. Where do we start? For example, one of the things in our design that you might not ordinarily think about, especially today, is how do you navigate? When I was a young boy growin' up we used to have maps. And today, if I asked my son to look at the map, he wouldn't know what I was talkin' about. Everybody has a GPS on their phone. And one of the things, for example we had to relearn with Orion, is how to navigate without a GPS 'cause we don't yet have a GPS around lunar orbit. So, again, we had to reinvent the navigation that looks at stars go determine where your positions and we used new technology, too. We now have optical navigation cameras that can look at the Earth and determine where our positions are just by the Earth. So things we take for granted. How do we get from one place to another on the Earth, and even in low-Earth orbit, don't work in a lunar orbit. The amount of effort that it takes to push things to the moon and back is immense. It's hard to get anything into space, but once you get it into space, we use factors called gear ratios. So, for example, for every pound I put into low-Earth orbit that I want to send to the moon and then return back to the surface of the Earth, for example, the crew module, we have a gear ratio for every pound like that. It takes about 12 pounds of supporting structure. Propellant, the tanks that hold the propellant, the heaters that keep the propellant within temperature limits. So the amount of weight, and mass, and systems that it takes to push things to the moon and back is one of the things that makes it challenging. Sorry, you stumped me there, Eric. - [Interviewer] I have just a really simple question. I'm wondering if there's a place, a position for AI? - Oh! Well.. Right now in Orion we have greatly expanded the amount of automation that Apollo had because the computing power and the software sophistication is much greater and the technology is much further. I don't yet know if we would call our computers AI, but I think the automation is really, really close. The Orion spacecraft can actually fly itself through most of the mission in backup systems. The Orion spacecraft has to be able to return itself from the moon without any communications from the ground, for example. So there is an incredible amount of automation in our software. I think AI would be the next step, especially as we journey to the moon. The sophistication and the automation, you would probably like to have. There's need for it. - [Interviewer] Could you take that line back one more time? - That's okay. The whole thing? - [Interviewer] Just the "I think AI has a place.." - I think especially as we journey further and further from the Earth and we have to depend less and less on Earth-based support, the sophistication and automation, and the artificial intelligence that you'd wanna put on a spacecraft increases.