Cabana Ready To Lead KSC Transition

Bob Cabana knows he faces a difficult job as Kennedy Space Center's 10th director, with the shuttle's planned 2010 retirement meaning thousands of local jobs could be lost.

"I'm coming into a job where in two years they tell me there's going to be 4,000 people out of work," Cabana said today during a question-and-answer session with reporters at the space center, at the end of his first week on the job. "I'm not going to be able to find 4,000 jobs in two years."

But by accepting that fact and getting to work on mitigating the losses, Cabana said, "there are things that we'll be able to do that can help it."

Cabana, 59, is a four-time shuttle astronaut and recent Astronaut Hall of Fame inductee who has held numerous NASA management positions, most recently as director of Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Miss.

He takes over from Bill Parsons, who left earlier this month to take a job with Lockheed Martin. Cabana earns about $164,000.

Cabana said Stennis, which operates as a "federal city" that houses other federal agencies and offices of state universities and private companies, could serve as a model to help KSC manage its workforce transition in the coming years.

"If we can utilize some of the facilities we have to draw in other work, it may not be the number of jobs that are going to be gone, but it's going to help," he said.

At KSC, Cabana now oversees a roughly $1.3 billion budget and the work of 2,200 civil servants and 13,000 contractors, in a role similar to a city manager's.

Cabana said his top priorities would be to fly remaining shuttle flights safely, manage the transition to the Constellation moon program and maintain the center's aging infrastructure.

Cabana first visited the spaceport on the eve of Apollo 13's flight, on a physics honor society field trip as a U.S. Naval Academy midshipman.

He toured the Vehicle Assembly Building and saw Saturn 5 rockets stacked for moon launches.

"I never dreamed I'd be an astronaut, let alone the director of the Kennedy Space Center one day," he said. "But it really made an impression on me."

A later experience at the space center had an even more profound impact.

Cabana was on the runway waiting for Columbia's crew to land in 2003, then as NASA's director of flight crew operations.

"I'm still having a hard time with that," he said of the disaster that killed seven astronauts.

Now as KSC director, he'll return to the landing strip for the first time for Endeavour's planned return two days after Thanksgiving.

He said any senior NASA manager should be required to inspect the Columbia debris now stored on the assembly building's 16th floor.

"I don't think anyone that gets put into a management position should be assigned without having to go over to that room and look at what happens when you make a mistake in our business," he said. "It's sobering, and I don't ever want to be in that position again."

IMAGE NOTES: Click on the images twice to fully enlarge them. Above, Bob Cabana's during a question-and-answer session with reporters today at Kennedy Space Center. Photo credit: Rik Jesse, Florida Today. Below, Commander Robert D. Cabana smiles as he returns to the crew quarters in the Operations and Checkout Building, despite a launch scrub of shuttle mission STS-88. Endeavour launched Dec. 4, 1998, for the first U.S. mission dedicated to the assembly of the International Space Station. Photo credits: NASA.