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As Boeing's director of space transportation Bill Rothschild is overseeing work on the US's next generation of space launch vehicles and is at the heart of a new culture emerging at NASA. He talked to Rob Coppinger.
These are troubled times for NASA. The space agency finds itself under scrutiny as never before following the publication of the accident investigation report into the Columbia disaster. How the organisation works, how it runs the space shuttle programme and its plans for the future will be subject to microscopic examination by the US House of Representatives over the coming months.
Congress will no doubt demand radical change from the space agency. However, Bill Rothschild, a 34-year veteran of the space programme, has already detected that moves are afoot within NASA to alter the way it operates. Rothschild's opinions are of far more than academic interest because, as Boeing's director of space transportation, he oversees the aerospace giant's work on new launch vehicles as part of its NASA Systems division.
At a critical point in the technological, commercial and political future of the US space programme, Rothschild is near the centre of the action. He leads a Houston-based team of 80 finalising the design for Boeing's tender for NASA's Orbital Space Plane (OSP) contract, which will undergo its first major design review during the Congressional hearings on the shuttle disaster.
Rothschild has many years' experience of the distinctive way in which NASA operates compared to, for example, the military. During a career that began in missile R&D for the US Air Force and later took in civilian technology giants Pratt & Whitney, Rockwell and finally Boeing, he has seen it from all sides.
'There is a lot of difference between the way NASA and the Air Force actually execute programmes. In the case of military space systems and missile systems...