Even the name of the program kept shifting-Space Launch Initiative, Orbital Space Plane, Reusable Launch Vehicle. Concepts for a next-generation space vehicle, the shuttle’s eventual replacement, were becoming more confused each day, at least to outsiders. The heartbreak of the Columbia accident was only part of the problem. When they were done, Szalai, who at 60 was the youngest one there, thanked each participant personally and paid the group perhaps the ultimate compliment for engineers: “It was easy to see why everything you once worked on was successful.”Īt the time Szalai got his call from NASA, the agency’s space transportation plans were in disarray. Theirs was an old-fashioned meeting-no viewgraphs, massive handouts, or even laptops. If NASA’s Project Constellation, which aims to build a Crew Exploration Vehicle for reaching Earth orbit and beyond, revives the 1960s-style space capsule, at least some of the credit should go to the high-caliber panel of Apollo veterans who gathered for two days last year in Houston. ![]() And that opinion, along with more detailed engineering analyses now being conducted by NASA and its contractors, is figuring prominently in the new White House plan to send astronauts to the moon in the next decade. NASA wanted to know if Szalai, by then a private consultant, could lead a handful of veterans from the agency’s golden years in a study to determine if the Apollo space capsule, or at least the Apollo design, could be dusted off and turned into a vehicle for future astronauts. ![]() ![]() But he never got an assignment quite like the one he was handed in March 2003-five years after retiring from the space agency, and less than six weeks after the space shuttle Columbia accident. DURING HIS 34 YEARS AT NASA, KEN SZALAI had plenty of interesting work, from testing the world’s first digital fly-by-wire airplane system in 1972 to running the Dryden Flight Research Center in California in the mid-1990s.
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