Andy Thomas, STS-114 Mission Specialist: What the last year has shown us, I think, is that if we’re going to continue in this great adventure of human spaceflight, we’ve got to do things differently. We can’t continue down the path that we had been following. I think there has to be a positive legacy of some kind to come out of the Columbia accident, and I think that positive legacy is that it will forever change the way this country approaches human space flight. It’ll be a change for the better, and it’ll make us more determined to undertake this great adventure with success.
How have you, as an individual, an astronaut, and now a member of this crew, of this return to flight crew, changed as a result of the accident, Andy? How do you approach your training every day, the methodology of getting prepared for human space flight? What’s different now?
Andy Thomas, STS-114 Mission Specialist: Well, for me, of course, being assigned to the flight late in the sequence and being assigned unexpectedly, for me it’s all very new. For the other members of the crew who had been assigned prior to the accident, of course, they were very much in the routine of being assigned to a flight and training for a flight and working towards it. For me, that aspect’s very new, because I haven’t been through a training flow in nearly three years. And it was a somewhat unexpected privilege to be assigned to this flight. And it’s an adjustment, I have to say -- it is a big adjustment to have to think in terms of understanding the technical problems, of assimilating all the technical materials, reading all the manuals, attending training sessions, participating in simulations, and so on. And that is a big adjustment. It’s one I’m enjoying, but it’s an unexpected adjustment -- I wasn’t expecting that I would be in this position, but I feel very privileged that I am, because I think this is a flight of great importance.
We all march to the tune of the accident investigation board in preparing for return to flight these days. I’m just wondering initially what your impressions have been over the course of the last six months or so of the findings of the accident investigation board, and the Implementation Plan that NASA is working its way through to bring everybody back into orbit via Space Shuttle.
Andy Thomas, STS-114 Mission Specialist: The thing the board was able to bring was that they had autonomy and independence, and no preconceptions. So, they were able to look at all the issues facing this agency that contributed to the Columbia accident with a clean slate, in effect, and really make some very strong determinations of what went wrong and why. And we determined, of course, that it was not just a technical accident, but there was some policy and managerial policies that led to the accident. I think that’s a refreshing view for us as an agency to be able to have that. The big challenge now is to correct the problems that they did with the return to flight plan. I think correcting the technical issues are actually very easy to do, because the technical problem was well understood and making corrections to fix the engineering will not be that difficult. I mean, there are challenges, but we can do that; we know how to do that. The big challenge facing this agency is the human challenge, which is to change the culture so that the flow of information required to avoid an accident like that is present and an accident like that won’t happen again.
We’ll talk culture again in a moment or two. Why did you want to become an astronaut in the first place? What was it about human space flight that lured you from academia, the matriculation that you had gone through, to want to do this for a living?
Andy Thomas, STS-114 Mission Specialist: Well, people of my generation, of course, were raised in the Golden Age of Space Exploration, if you like, when it first started with the first human space flights in Russia and in the U.S., and, of course, the spectacular undertakings of the Moon landings. And I, like many people, had my imagination captured at an early age with this great adventure and I just thought, wouldn’t it be extraordinary to be involved in that kind of program, and to go into those environments and do those kinds of things. And through a certain amount of hard work and dedication, I’ve been able to make that happen; I’m very fortunate that I’ve had the flights that I’ve had, and I’ve had the experience that I’ve had. It’s certainly been a very rewarding career
