Donna Shirley Interview (page: 7 / 7) Mars Exploration Program	Print Interview

When will we be able to go visit Mars?

Donna Shirley: That's a tough problem. When can people go to Mars? It's a matter of money. Right now the entire NASA budget is being cut every year. It's just not seen as important. It doesn't have the kind of political constituency that gets votes. Even people who support the space program have other issues. And there's this belief that a lot of money is going into space.

It's a very small amount of money, compared to the money being spent for welfare, for instance. The military budget has declined, but the military space program is much bigger than the NASA space program. Even the commercial space program has now surpassed NASA in the amount of money that it spends. NASA's budget is about $12 billion now, down from around 14 at the peak. That's a pretty trivial amount of money as government budgets go.

The Mars program is about $200 million a year, so it's about the cost of producing one major movie per year, or less than a dollar a person, in the country per year. But people still say, "That's a lot of money, why should we be going into space?" So we don't have the political support to really thrive.

The second problem is that the space station is running over budget, costing a lot of money. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that the cost of it was underestimated, which is very common in these big programs. Either you just don't estimate it right, or somebody gets real optimistic and says, "I think I can do this," and they forget all the things that they can't do. In some cases they just plain fib. I mean, "buy-in" is a time honored government contracting problem.

Anyway, the space station is having budget problems and it's taking all the money. In fact, we just lost $50 million out of our program to be transferred into the space station. The second problem is working with the Russians. It was a foreign policy decision. When the Soviet Union collapsed you've got all these scientists and engineers and if you don't want them building nuclear weapons for Iran, or Iraq, or the North Koreans or somebody, you better put them to work.

We paid for the Russians to build one module of the space station, and they said they would build another on their own money. Well, the Russian economy is in a shambles. There are incredible problems over there. They're not paying the workers, and the workers aren't getting the job done. So the module that we paid them to build is fine. The module that they're building on their own nickel keeps slipping, because people aren't getting paid.

It was a perfectly rational foreign policy decision, but the schedule for the space station keeps slipping. If we're going to build the module ourselves because the Russians aren't going to make it, that's going to cost more money.

Also, a lot of decisions are typically made to keep the first costs down, that is to keep the capital cost down, the up front money, which means that it may not be as cheap to operate as if you designed in the operations things now. It's just like, if you buy a car and you put all the environmental protection pollution control equipment on it, it's going to cost more. So a lot of people are out there buying sports utility vehicles, great big ego gratification gas hogs that don't have good pollution control equipment. They won't pay the extra $100 or $200 to put in the pollution control equipment, so somebody gets to spend a lot of money cleaning that out of the air. People don't think about the operations costs.

If the space station is up there and working, you need it to train and test people for a three-year trip to Mars. It's a year to get to Mars roughly, and two years to get back. Now we've had people stay in space for a year. Shannon Lucid was up for six months and came down and walked off the shuttle and within a few weeks she was fine. Others have had to be carried off. We now know that people can survive in space for up to a year, but we don't know about three years. We don't know what's going to happen.

So you need the space station so people can go up and practice living in space for three years, before you ship them off to Mars. It would be very embarrassing to get them to Mars and discover on the way back that they get completely incapacitated.

In order to get the costs down it's going to be a lot cheaper to take modules of the space station and make another one and send that off to Mars than it is to invent it from scratch, so we need the station for that. So the station's in the way of us going to Mars. At some point the station will get built, it will be operated, we'll have the technology and we'll know about the people and then a budget wedge will open up so we can start to design the systems to take us to Mars. Even if the NASA budget doesn't get cut anymore, that's 20 years down the road.

Do you believe the opportunities you've had would have been possible in other countries? Do you feel like America makes your life possible?

Donna Shirley: The United States is at the forefront of giving opportunities to women, I don't think there's any question about that. Although it's interesting that other countries have had a female chief executive, and the U.S. hasn't even come close. I think we're very conflicted in this country. We have the current division between radical right and radical left, and centrist people. I'm a centrist person myself.

Our university system is certainly superior, as evidenced by the fact that so many kids from other countries come here to go to school. I just go an honorary doctorate from the University of Oklahoma, right in the middle of the country, and there were 106 flags carried in the ceremony. There's 106 different countries represented by the students at the University of Oklahoma. Our higher education system is the envy of the world. The kind of education we get here is really key to people being successful in these high-tech fields. That's why our economy is so strong; it's based on our education system.

But our lower education system is crumbling and we've got to do something about it. We could build our whole economy around foreign students, but that's probably not a smart thing to do. We've got to get to the kids who are in grade school and high school.

The second thing I think of is the culture of entrepreneurship, of freedom. "Hey, you can do what you want to do." I think that Horatio Alger's spirit is very much alive in this country. Right now it seems to be reflected solely in money making that seems to be the value that's valued above all others. It's good to have billions and billions of dollars in personal wealth, and people admire that. It's good to be a sports star and get paid millions and millions of dollars a year, and people admire that. Those are the kind of people...people look up to.

I don't particularly think that's necessarily a good thing, but that's the way it is. But on the other hand, that same spirit also says people can go out and accomplish things, and people admire that. They don't try to tear you down. In general, people like that. I think that's another big opportunity.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The feminist movement, the women's movement in this country, has been very powerful for people like me. The whole language, the whole environment, has changed so much in the last 35 years while I've been doing this stuff. I mean, when I first came to JPL it was de rigeur for everybody to smoke cigars. And, we literally had our meetings in cigar smoke-filled rooms, and that was a very macho thing. You know, you lit up your cigar and all this sort of stuff. And, there was just a lot of macho around the Cold War. The Cold Warriors were very macho. And now, you know, Vietnam and the '70s and the women's movement and everything, there's just a whole different climate about the opportunities for women. Aerospace is still one of the weaker places in opportunities for women, but Silicon Valley...I mean, they are so desperate for talent that they don't care what sex you are. You just go in and do it.

[ Key to Success ] The American Dream

So I think I've gotten a lot of support out of the changing climate in this country. We're on the forefront of that, I don't think anywhere else in the world has as positive a climate for women, even Europe, Australia, New Zealand, especially Japan. Those places have very well developed economies, but they still don't have the same equality that we and Canada do. I'm a Senior Fellow at the UCLA School of Public Policy this year and Kim Campbell is another one of the Fellows. She's the former Prime Minister of Canada. So Canada is even more forward looking than we are, they've had a woman prime minister.

You mentioned Antarctica a while ago. What's your interest there?

Donna Shirley: Well, I would like to take one of the expeditions to Antarctica before it melts. The ice shelves are falling off. It's really interesting that people aren't relating that to global climate change. Now there are cruise ships that go down there. I'm on their Advisory Council of the Planetary Society, which is sponsoring a trip to Antarctica.

But more germane to what I'm doing, the dry alleys in Antarctica are the best earthly analog for conditions on Mars. So a lot of scientists, Chris McKay from Ames Research Center, in particular, are going to the dry alleys of Antarctica and doing experiments to see how things really operate down there. . There's a lake in one of the dry valleys called, Lake Vostok, which has been covered with ice for thousands of years.

The moon of Jupiter called Europa is completely covered with ice, and looks like it may have a liquid ocean underneath, because you can see where things have melted, and then shifted, and then gotten back into position. One of my colleagues, Joan Horvath, is running a little study to look at going and drilling down through the ice in Lake Vostok and simulating a mission to Europa that would drill down through the ice and see what's under there.

Now, there are problems, because Lake Vostok has been developing its own ecology for thousands and thousands of years. So if we penetrate that ice barrier, are we going to introduce organisms down there that would be deadly to the ecology? Of course, the drug companies are extremely interested, because if there's a whole new ecology down there, there may be things that would be useful as the basis of drugs and antibiotics. Right now there's a lot of...of going back and forth. How do we do this? How do we protect the lake? How do we finance it?

Finally, the stations in Antarctica, like nuclear submarines, are great metaphors and models for human habitats on Mars. If somebody has spent years down at the Pole in this terrible climate, living with a few other people and surviving and making that work, maybe they're excellent candidates for Martian colonists. So the human element of it comes into play too. So we think Antarctica's a fascinating place for exploring Mars.

You'd like to go there yourself?

Donna Shirley: Yeah, I'd like to take a cruise. Probably next year, before all the penguins are dead. The penguins aren't doing well because the water's warming up.

I hope you get to go. It's been wonderful talking with you.

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