WEBVTT

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000


00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.000
ALLARD BEUTEL: To help us walk through what they're doing now with the crew,

00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:10.000
we're joined right now by Col. Jim Dutton, who is one of our astronauts, part of the 2004 class.

00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:12.000
Jim, thank you for joining us.

00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:13.000
JIM DUTTON: It's great to be here, Allard, thanks.

00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:19.000
BEUTEL: Well if you wouldn't mind, we've got a couple minutes before we see the crew,
why don't you walk us through -- you?

00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:24.000
DUTTON: Okay, a little about me. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon. I joined the astronaut

00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:31.000
corps about four years ago, as you said, May of 2004, with a class we affectionately call
"the Peacocks."

00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:41.000
My background is with the Air Force. I was a test pilot, and before that I flew as an operational pilot in the F-15 Eagle.

00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:45.000
BEUTEL: You opened it up, I have to ask. This is what happens with crews and classes,

00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:48.000
they give themselves different names. And peacock... why a peacock?

00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:52.000
DUTTON: Well we didn't give ourselves that name, although I'll say we took it over an

00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:56.000
alternative that we preferred peacock to the other one.

00:00:56.000 --> 00:01:01.000
When we first came in, we were told as a class that we would not fly on the shuttle based

00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:07.000
on the way things were going and how it looked with the number of crew members or astronauts who had not flown yet.

00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:14.000
And so there was also a lot of pomp and circumstance about our arrival because of the new vision for going back to the moon,

00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:20.000
so we were labeled peacocks because we're all show and we don't fly.

00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:28.000
I think we can take pride in that now that we've got our first classmate on this flight, Aki Hoshide, Japanese astronaut.

00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:34.000
And we're going to start seeing a lot more of our classmates on shuttle flights and they're trying to get actually

00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:42.000
all the rookies in the office, the unflown astronauts, up in one mode or another, most on shuttle, before we retire the shuttle.

00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:47.000
BEUTEL: As a way to get experience and be ready for obviously the Constellation
program, the Orion capsule and spacecraft.

00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:52.000
DUTTON: Exactly. We're going to have a five-year, roughly, delay between shuttle and
bringing Orion online,

00:01:52.000 --> 00:01:57.000
so we want to carry as much experience as we can over into Constellation.

00:01:57.000 --> 00:02:04.000
BEUTEL: As a matter of fact, NASA is also right now actively looking, at least for another month or so, for a 2009 class.

00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:05.000
DUTTON: That's correct.

00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:08.000
BEUTEL: I think it's probably pretty safe to say that class will not fly on the shuttle.

00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:12.000
DUTTON: That's true. They are being brought in to actually fly on station during the

00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:16.000
interim before Constellation and then obviously carry on into Constellation.

00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:20.000
So yeah, it's very exciting. It'll be a five-year gap, which is a very long gap.

00:02:20.000 --> 00:02:23.000
It's going to be great to have some new folks in the office.

00:02:23.000 --> 00:02:25.000