Former JSC director George Abbey: Education, leadership key to human spaceflight

George Abbey, right, senior fellow in space policy at Rice University's Baker Institute, listens to an audience question while speaking on a panel moderated by John Charles, left, Space Center Houston's scientist in residence, at the Baker Institute on Rice's campus in Houston, Monday, March 4, 2019. The two were talking with author Michael Cassutt (not pictured) who just published a book about Abbey titled The Astronaut Maker: How One Mysterious Engineer Ran Human Spaceflight for a Generation. less George Abbey, right, senior fellow in space policy at Rice University's Baker Institute, listens to an audience question while speaking on a panel moderated by John Charles, left, Space Center Houston's ... more Photo: Mark Mulligan, Staff Photographer Photo: Mark Mulligan, Staff Photographer Image 1 of / 14 Caption Close Former JSC director George Abbey: Education, leadership key to human spaceflight 1 / 14 Back to Gallery

If NASA wants to get its human spaceflight program back on track, former Johnson Space Center Director George Abbey says the U.S. needs to redouble its education efforts.

"If you're going to be successful, you have to have the people with the background and education is part of it," Abbey said Monday. "This nation has a major problem with education and we need to address it."

Abbey spoke at an event Monday night discussing a new biography about him, "The Astronaut Maker: How One Mysterious Engineer Ran Human Spaceflight for a Generation," by Michael Cassutt. Cassutt was also in attendance.

Abbey, a Seattle native, started working at NASA in 1964, five years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped foot on the moon in 1969.

It was an exciting time, Abbey told the Houston Chronicle before the event Monday, and it was suspenseful every step of the way.

But NASA was able to achieve President John F. Kennedy's goal of landing on the moon before 1970 because it had great leaders who knew their stuff.

"We were blessed with great leadership," Abbey said. "Leaders don't just happen; they come up and learn from their mentors."

Since that time, NASA has struggled to keep up that strong level of leadership. And Abbey would know: he worked on Skylab, America's first space station, for example, and the Space Shuttle program, which launched humans into low Earth orbit for 30 years.

He eventually became director of flight operations in 1976, where he was in charge of managing the flight crew and flight control activities for all human spaceflight missions.

Abbey oversaw selecting the astronaut classes between 1978 and 1987, was involved in the development of the International Space Station and was named director of the Houston center in 1996. He held this position until 2001.

Cassutt called him "the most powerful individual in human spaceflight, before or since."

But Abbey laughs at that characterization. He sees his career differently.

"A lot of things just ended up happening," Abbey said. Abbey is now the senior fellow in space policy at Rice's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Looking back on his nearly 40-year career with NASA, Abbey said he's frustrated: NASA isn't spending its money wisely, he added, and that's hurting the country's human spaceflight program.

Space Shuttle should not have been canceled so soon, he said, and he doesn't understand why NASA is building three different capsules: Orion, the spacecraft being built to take humans back to the moon for the first time since 1972, and the two commercial crew vehicles being built by Boeing and SpaceX to take humans to the International Space Station.

"The capsules are like the ones we flew back in the 1960s, but they're not as good as the ones we flew to moon and yet we're building three of them," Abbey said. "I don't know why we need three."

He also thinks the Lunar Orbital-Platform Gateway, a mini-space station NASA plans to build orbiting the moon, is a waste of time.

"God gave us a space station and its called the moon," he said. "Don't build a space station to orbit a space station. And we don't have the moeny to do it."

Alex Stuckey writes about NASA and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her at alex.stuckey@chron.com or Twitter.com/alexdstuckey.