On CUE sat down with Norm Augustine, former President and CEO of Lockheed Martin, and presidential commission namesake. For more info on Norm: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_R._Augustine. He's also on the Chancellor's Strategic Advisory Council: http://www.colorado.edu/chancellor/norman-augustine.
On CUE Podcast Transcript
"Sooner or later, someone will go to Mars." - Norm Augustine - Ep. 4
Announcer
And now from the University of Colorado in Boulder, the College of Engineering and Applied Science presents; On CUE. Here’s your host Phil Larson.
Phil Larson
In some form or fashion Norm Augustine has advised nearly every president since the 1960’s starting with President Johnson. He’s served in various capacities in government and the private sector. He grew up in Colorado and became an aeronautical engineer eventually landing as the CEO and president of a little-known company named Lockheed Martin in the 90’s. The committee’s he’s lead for various administrations have tackled issues like NASA and space policy as well as looked at our national STEM education initiatives, are we doing enough in these arenas to stay competitive with the rest of the world? So, what’s fun is these committees tend to take on his name, at first President Bush had an Augustine committee and President Obama had an Augustine committee so there’s a whole list of awards and positions and things he’s helped lead on his Wikipedia page among other places on the web so I suggest you check it out to get a feel for what this guys accomplished. It was really an honor to welcome him to the CU Boulder campus and talk about the current state of play of these issues. What is the hot topic in D.C. around science and technology policy? Is there one or is there even a policy being discussed? So, I hope you enjoy the conversation.
So, we've got Norm Augustine here at CU on CUE. Norm it's great to have you.
Norm Augustine
Great to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation.
Larson
So, you've worked for every president since President Johnson. I had the fortune of interacting with you during the Obama administration. But your experience as a CEO is especially relevant and that's why I think you were brought onboard so many administrations. What do you think it would be like, you know there's so many advisory boards right now and there's some stuff in the news about CEOs on and off these boards? What would it be like to be a CEO in the country today.
Augustine
Well that's an interesting question. My career was one where I guess I really had four careers. I worked in government. I worked in industry. I worked in academia and I worked in the not for profit charitable sector and one of the things I've learned is that the fundamental qualities that you need to have a leadership role are the same in all four sectors I mean character a willingness to take prudent risks and so on but the demands of the jobs are totally different to all four sectors and the past record of CEOs and government has not been that good and vice versa. People for government going into CEOs. There have been some successes there have been some non-successes. I think the demands of the job are simply so different that a person has to have pretty broad skills to succeed particularly in government that from your experience of government is you know that you don't give orders and see things happen.
Larson
It takes a different skill set.
Augustine
I think it does. And as I say the fundamentals are the same but for example in a corporation most everybody wants to see the leader succeed because it’s of their own interest that the leaders succeed in government, but sadly, today half the people probably just soon see the leader not succeed irrespective of which party it is. And this is todays circumstances is totally different from any that I encountered in my career.
Larson
So, let's talk about today a little bit. What advice or what would you be doing as a CEO in this kind of political environment.
Augustine
Well I think first of all one has to have a certain degree of foresight of where things are going in my background as a CEO is mostly in defense aerospace and sad to say, human nature has been such over the two thousand years or so that humans have been on this planet. We don’t do a good job of getting along with each other and I doubt that will change overnight. And so, I think there will be a continued need for a strong defense of this country. It’s also a great time to live ones an engineer or a scientist because all the breakthroughs that were saying I think of 3-D printing I think of deciphering the human genome I think of what's going on and. Microsystems in informatics and its just time to be an engineer is just very fortunate. I lived through those times that I got out of I actually I started graduate school the week that Sputnik went up when I was an aeronautical engineer. And so, it was a perfect time to be able to get involved in these things and I think that's true today.
Larson
I won't ask you whether you would take a role in the current administration but what I will ask is you succeeded in serving your country in many different roles in the past. You know since President Johnson you know we worked together on the U.S. review of human space flight committee for President Obama in his first year in office which became of course colloquially known as the Augustine Commission but it was not the first Augustine Commission. How did you succeed across the political spectrum from administration to administration on issues of such national importance?
Augustine
Well, you give me more credit than I deserve. But you know we did work together during those years and you know I had I'm a fairly apolitical person. And what I am asked to take on a job on behalf of our government which has happened from time to time. I try to be very neutral and deal with the facts. And it served me well. I've got good friends on both sides of the aisle. I've generally treated very well by both sides of the aisle. And I try to keep personal views out of these things and to stick to the nitty if you will and if one just deals with facts and issues they're pretty nonpartisan. And that's certainly true in the science of technology area where I live we all use the same equations of motion and so on.
Larson
So, it's one of those it's like saying you know we're all entitled to our own opinion but maybe not our own facts which is being maybe tested.
Augustine
Well this is obviously a different time and support for science and to a lesser extent support for engineering is very much under challenge today and that worries me a lot. I am a bit of an optimist and I think I took a little different view than most people when we saw that budget for science this year. My view is that the budget that went over to Congress was perhaps fortuitous in the following sense. It had a budget gone to the Congress that had a 4 percent cut in it. Under today's circumstances I could imagine that people would adopt that. On the other hand, the cuts were so Draconian that in my view they would be a nonstarter and that the Congress would put together a prudent budget. That's my hope. And it seems to me things are trending in that direction.
Larson
So, kind of like Senator Lindsey Graham said dead on arrival. Let's start from square one here.
Augustine
Yeah. Fundamental principles. I think you're right. The cuts eliminating RPE, huge percentage cuts in various departments. NASA of course did reasonably well but cuts like those are just basically I think not likely to be sustained. So, we'll wait to see what happens we may well get a continuing resolution that will make all this moot.
Larson
It's true. What advice if any you know would you give the current administration as they're starting to kind of put people in place put policies they obviously have their budget but you know the Office of Science and Technology Policy sits fairly vacant, no science adviser. We may soon have NASA leadership to go along with some of the other science and tech personnel. What advice would you say what importance to those positions, you know like Dr. Holdren had you know how important is that to our government.
Augustine
Well obviously, Leadership counts for a lot. And an organization can be worse in its leadership but its whole can be much better. So, I happen to think getting the right people in the right jobs matters a great deal that the challenge of course as you observed yourself those jobs have such a broad spectrum of demands. You mentioned the Office of Science Technology Policy or just science policy or engineering policy. In that case, one needs to have a reasonably good sense of public policy one needs to be a decent manager. One has to understand science or engineering or both. And one has to be a leader and not a lot of people have all those qualities and I think it's very important to get people in government at a high position to get experience. And I think that's hopeful. By the same token, I happen to think that running a business is a very demanding thing and you learn certain skills and that's very helpful. On the other hand, you know what people the business world where I spend most of my career are inclined to say well if we just ran the government like a business everything would be great. Well the fact is that our Founding Fathers I guess are there were no founding mothers but anyways the founders of our country really didn't want our country to be run on a business-like fashion and they went to great ends and were willing to pay for inefficiencies to be sure that you didn't have a CEO of the country that could run into like a CEO could run or ruin or improve a business. Well we've got to get used to that idea.
Larson
And there probably were a lot of Founding Mothers.
Augustine
I'm sure there were many many and were the country to be founded today there will probably be a majority of the founding mothers.
Larson
That's right. That's right. So, let's talk about space. And you were you know celebrating maybe 20 years, I don’t know if celebrating is the right word. Twenty years since your retirement as CEO of Lockheed Martin we're also up on the eighth-year anniversary of that Obama commission on human spaceflight that you chaired you know the space shuttle retiring. What do we do next. What do you think. What do you think of the results of that report. It's implementation. You laid out many options for the president, President Obama to consider alongside NASA administrator Charlie Bolden and others. We've come a long way. Eight years ago, private space flight and private trips to the space station with cargo and back and tourism was a glimmer in the national space policy ethos. What do you see as some successes? What do you see as maybe we didn't get as far as we wanted?
Augustine
I think by and large the report did have an impact. I've worked on so many reports some of which had zero impact and unfortunately probably should have. But I think that particular report the administration embraced and implemented by and large the big failing was to do all the things that we propose required about three billion dollars a year in the human spaceflight program and that didn’t appear of course. And so, we tend to be trying to do more than we could afford to do and that you can't sustain that approach for long. But we have a heavy lift vehicle underway we have a capsule that one could work with we have a commercial space industry that’s very vibrant at this point. So there are a lot of changes that happened. I think one of the great challenges for NASA is if the budget is not going to be increased by say another three billion dollars in the human spaceflight part of NASA then choices have to be made and one of the tough choices we had to make was that if we were to continue to operate the shuttle as we had been there was no money for anything new. And in our view NASA's about doing things new not about space trucking. I don't mean to demean that I spent much of my life in that field. But we concluded we had to shut down the shuttle we couldn't keep that. Well today we're about to face that same kind of issue with the space station and we can continue to operate the space station. I'm sure learned a lot from it. That would be very useful. But Just doesn’t have the money to have new programs and have a space station also. I happen to be and enthusiast for humans on Mars and I think that's a program that we're prepared to undertake. Technically there's still some challenges yes but nothing insurmountable. I think that is a real challenge there will be political support, funding and willingness to stick with the plan that's been put together.
Larson
So, do you, what do you think. You know Mars is a buzzword it’s a… people like to talk about it as the ultimate goal. Journey to Mars for NASA. What do you see as that ideal make up for how do we actually approach going, you know, and pushing the envelope of exploration like we haven't done before in decades.
Augustine
Well it's true. I think at the time we were as a nation landing on, landing humans on the moon. Neil and Buzz and Mike in orbit that most all of us would have thought we would have been to Mars by now. And we've not only have we not been there we’ve not even started to go there with humans. And sooner or later someone will go to Mars. It may be an American or it may not be. Time will tell. The challenges I think to define a program as you ask what would be the approach. There are a number of factors to get into this one is it has to match a realistic budget and that may mean it takes more time than one would like. That there's problems to change the technology and so on. Also I think the public patience with an approach that says send us x billion dollars and in thirty years we will land a human on Mars. I don't believe the American public will support that. And if you simply say well let's go back to the moon which many people say as an objective. I think the particularly among the younger generation the comment tends to be that “my grandfather did that.” And so, we have an issue here not only of technological importance and scientific importance but we've got to recognize the political and economic realities. And that says to me and I said to the commission that you and I were involved with the plan for humans on Mars has to be a step-wise one both for technical reasons but even more so for political reasons whereby every few years we have an accomplishment and that accomplishment may be including a landing on the moon on the way to Mars but not the balloon as it ended itself. It may include docking with an asteroid it may include going to a LaGrange point it may include circumnavigating Mars, it may include orbiting Mars it may include landing on Phobos or Deimos and then eventually landing on Mars. So I think it's important we have a program that's done piecewise and adequately funded or the technical challenges will be irrelevant.
Larson
We have milestone based payments for commercial maybe we need milestone based exploration as a whole.
Augustine
Great way to say it.
Larson
On that point what do you view as you know we instituted when we doubled down on Alcott's like approach for low-Earth orbit. What do you see as the next version of that. Or, you know what is the next steps for growing these partnerships?
Augustine
You know I start by thinking back to the I guess the 1930s when there were a large number of airlines in this country all sub critical mass most going broke and the government stepped in and said we will give you contracts to carry the mail and well guarantee you so many pounds/dollars a month. That really that infusion of stability was what made I think commercial airline airlines possible at least of the time period they evolved. And I think something like that is going to be with the government. We've seen the first step of that. Some of the carry payloads to the station. So this will have to be a government industry partnership but I will also add academia. Those are really the three legs of the stool and academia brings in new knowledge the new science the new people terribly important role. Industry could build things and make them happen and government could provide oversight policy management, resources, monitoring. And so I really do view this as a triumph… if we were to be triumphant. It's sad to say this country in recent years those three groups have tended to drift more apart than together I'm afraid and that's something we’ve got to turn around.
Larson
You talk about the private sector being allowed to innovate. We're seeing that with rockets landing now. Re-usability, do you view that as the future?
Augustine
You know that's a step of the future. And it's of course hard to see what lies beyond the horizon that we could look at with some predictability. But I do think that we'll see more technical breakthroughs. I think hypersonic flight will begin to take on much greater importance, space travel. I have long believed that the thing that will change space is commercial space travel.
Larson
As in tourism?
Augustine
As in tourism.
Larson
Getting more people to experience it.
Augustine
Much like the airlines once you get more people you got to fly the cheaper the flight, the tickets cost or the more tickets you could sell the cheaper it is to operate an airline and you get this happy, just the opposite of the death spiral that some people talk about. So I think that there are a lot of people today, and I don't mean billionaires, who would pay a fair amount of money to uh… I don’t mean just go up on a rock and come back to L.A. I mean go into orbit for a day or two and look through telescopes and have lectures on space, experience weightlessness and get to get sick and all these great things. But I do think that that will be the change agent. I don't see anything that's going to reduce the cost of space transportation by a factor of 10 other than a much higher volume.
Larson
It does seem that humans when we were able to find something were extremely interesting that were watching once or twice. You look at Apollo 11 it captivated the world in front of their TV screens. By Apollo 13, 14, 17 the public had sort of disengaged. Nixon was what's you know focused on what's next politically for space. And so, I do view as you articulated like this is that era where we need people going to space people experiencing feeling building cube sats creating whole new industries just like we had the Homebrew Computer Club in our garages that led to a computer revolution. I do see is maybe at the precipice for that and it's needed for the public support… I would argue.
Augustine
I think it's a good argument and it's interesting you mentioned it. I happen to be at the cape for the first 10 shuttle launches in the first two or three launches during the countdown the place was definitely silent and everybody was holding their breath until the launch vehicles, the shuttles, were well out of sight. By about the fourth or fifth launch, I was stunned during the countdown people were yelling “ten, nine, eight” just like you were at a football game. They were all cheering when the ignition occurred and before the shuttle was out of sight people where I would say half the crowd was turned around and leaving. We had even come to separation yet which is kind of a big event. The crowd was leaving. Because as you say this was old stuff and that was it.
Well if you've got friends on there like I did and you did its very big stuff and of course you are responsible for building a lot of it. You would view it as big stuff but the public became an inert they like to do new things new things.
Larson
Especially when there's only so much. There's only so many hours in the day and minutes in the day for folks to engage on things that isn't their daily life.
Augustine
Exactly. And if we can get people involved, and I think we can, in tourism it will make a lot of difference. I've had the good fortune to, I'm kind of an amateur explorer or whatever and I've been to the South Pole three times and the North Pole once I've rafted the Grand Canyon and I you know you go through this long list of stuff. And people say well you know not many people want to go into space. Who would want to do that? Well I think back when I rafted the Grand Canyon I think there were 14000 people a year going through the Grand Canyon on a raft at that time. If you’d ask Wesley Powell the first person to do if, what 75 years later 14000 people will be into the canyon he would say you're crazy if you'd asked the Wright brothers that the population of Detroit gets on an airplane every day and complains because they've already seen the movie and the food's bad. The Wright brothers would have thought you were bonkers or something. You know there are many other examples one can go through of that kind of thing and people do want to experience these things and I think that will be the biggest change agent of all.
Larson
Real quickly in 2005, well actually one more space... What do you say to the folks who just want you to you know want NASA's budget doubled.
Augustine
Well the first thing I say is that isn’t going to happen. And the second though is that we need to have a space program that fits the budget and that's been one of our failings in the past. And my hope is that the importance of space the promise of space not just technical and not just economic but as an inspirational factor. I recall during the depths of the Vietnam War the impact of Neil and Buzz landing on the moon around the world. It was just enormous. And space permits us to take on those big challenges. I've often been asked would I rather spend money to cure cancer or go to Mars. If that's the only choice I would spend the money to cure cancer if I had a reasonable chance of course of doing it. But that's not the right question the right question is, look at our entire budget and how it is spent. What's the least impactful element in the budget. Then you compare that with whatever it is you're considering that you do an analysis and that approach to space turns out I think fairly well and the current budget suggests that might be the view also of people at home might be.
Larson
I think that's probably right… 2005 and you updated in 2010 a really prescient view of you know the global economy and competitiveness rising above the gathering storm report. Kind of a final question. What would you… What would you call today? Today's storm update weather report on our STEM education on our competitiveness as a country on our workforce and how are we playing in the global economy.
Augustine
When we did the gathering storm report we thought a lot about what will be a good title. And that was the title and frankly I stole it from Churchill's book but we don’t confess that. Well also I didn't want to be called the Augustine Commission in case it failed. So that was the title. And then when we did the update you mentioned five years later we needed a title and we called it approaching Category 5 or something like three and or category 4 I guess it would be. And I've not thought about what would be the current title but the evidence suggests to me that we're further behind today than we were in terms of international competitors. Than we were at the time we did the original gathering storm report and it's not so much because we have a bit laagered although in some areas we have it's because others are getting better. Others have been copying what we did to have such great success and we have not been doing so adequately in the two major findings of the gathering storm report first had to do with education. And interestingly at that time the focus was K through 12 education. Because our universities in this country were in strong positions. Clearly the dominant universities in the world and the second major finding had to do with the fact that we were underfunding basic research particularly of universities. And today one of the things we absolutely did not foresee and probably the most important thing we didn’t for see that our universities would be in danger. And today we have our states many states disinvesting in higher education and we have the federal government investing in research. And those were the two most important things we cited where we had an edge and if we let those two ages get away I think we won't like the outcome.
Larson
I think you’re right and I think we're seeing that debate happen right now and it's great to have voices and intellect and experience like yours as part of our national conversation. So, I just want to thank you. Thanks for being… Thanks for recording this. But thanks for your patriotism and for being really a national treasure in science and technology and engineering for our country.
Augustine
Thank you. Thank you for what you are now doing at a university that means a lot to me. This is my home state and for what you did in the government. As you know those are not high paying jobs the rewards come in other ways so but anyway it's fun talking to you. Thanks.
Larson
Thank you, Norm.
Announcer
This has been On CUE. For more information. visit Colorado.EDU/engineering.
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