"This is going to sound strange," Mike Leinbach warns me. It’s two days before Discovery’s launch on the 123rd space shuttle mission. That means there are just 10 flights left before the program ends. Leinbach, the shuttle launch director, is in his office at the Kenendy Space Center, looking out at the seaside launch pads.
Despite the cavet, Leinbach doesn’t mince words when he tells me what he thinks has been NASA’s greatest accomplishment during his 24-year tenure.
“I hate to relate to accidents in a positive way because they obviously aren’t … weren’t,” Leinbach begins. “I remember Challenger. I was standing out there on the mobile launch platform. I had pretty much just hired in so I didn’t understand the flight regime, but then for Columbia, I was launch director for Columbia.
“To see the agency and the astronaut corps bounce back from those catastrophes I think is probably the highlight,” he says. “That we were able to rebound from them because it was so devastating, as you know. It was just so devastating.”
Like many 50-somethings, Leinbach’s affinity for space dates back to NASA’s earliest years. He remembers being on a car trip with his family at age 8 and his dad pulled off the road and turned on the radio. “We’re going to hear history be made today,” Leinbach recalls his dad saying. It was May 5, 1961, and Alan Shepard was blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the first American in space.
“At the time, I didn’t think anything of it, other than ‘That’s kind of cool,’ but when I look back on it, I firmly believe that’s what got me hooked into the space business -- at the age of 8,” Leinbach says. “My love of the agency goes back a long, long way.”
It’s a relationship that has preserved in good times and bad. “There were some really dark times,” Leinbach recalls. After the 1986 Challenger accident, for example, NASA just wanted to press ahead, not look at what had gone wrong, literally bury the issue -- and the wreckage.
When tragedy struck again in 2003 with the loss of Columbia, Leinbach, now a senior manager, recognized an opportunity. He spearheaded a program to make salvaged hardware from Columbia available to researchers.
“I don’t know whether it was a result of a shift in the country’s attitudes or a conscious decision on NASA management’s part to get out in front of the public with the facts of the accident as best we knew them,” Leinbach said. “It was much more open: ‘Here’s what we did wrong; Here’s what we did right’ as opposed to ‘We’re going to forget about that and move on.’ ”
“We’re always kind of held up as these stodgy engineers who have no emotion,” he added. “We do. We have emotion.”
I ask him if NASA is ready to take on more daunting risks, like going to the moon.
“Absolutely, 100 percent,” he assures me.
“Even if it means lose of life?”
“Yes, yes -- as terrible as that sounds,” he says.
“There’s no question that we are America’s explorers. There are other explorers across the country too, but as a government agency, we are the explorers. I really firmly truly in my heart believe that the country wants us to explore. I just wish we did a better job of telling what we do and why we do it.”
Part of the problem, Leinbach explains, is that NASA has gotten out of the exploration business by operating the space shuttles in low-Earth orbit since 1981.
“The shuttle program has done some tremendous things but we’re getting old, a ‘been-there, done-that’ kind of attitude on the public’s part and rightfully so, in part,” he says. “We need to do a better job as an agency of explaining why we’re going back to the moon and on to Mars.”
I take that as an invitation. “And why is that?”
“It’s the human spirit," Leinbach says. "It’s the spirit of adventure and discovery and moving on, moving beyond what you have, wanting more and getting more, whether it’s tangible or philosophical or emotional, just wanting more out of life."
“You know the Mars lander up there now?” Leinbach says. He’s referring to the Phoenix probe, which touched down on the northern polar region of Mars on May 25 to sample the planet’s water and determine if it was ever suitable to support life.
“Just imagine what’s going to happen if we find the evidence of life, past or present,” Leinbach says. “Good lord. That’s what it’s all about. And then one day to send men up there it’d be just outstanding. I hope I’m around to see it.”
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