ALLARD BEUTEL: To help us walk through what they're doing now with the crew,
we're joined right now by Col. Jim Dutton, who is one of our astronauts, part of the 2004 class.
Jim, thank you for joining us.
JIM DUTTON: It's great to be here, Allard, thanks.
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?
DUTTON: Okay, a little about me. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon. I joined the astronaut
corps about four years ago, as you said, May of 2004, with a class we affectionately call "the Peacocks."
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.
BEUTEL: You opened it up, I have to ask. This is what happens with crews and classes,
they give themselves different names. And peacock... why a peacock?
DUTTON: Well we didn't give ourselves that name, although I'll say we took it over an
alternative that we preferred peacock to the other one.
When we first came in, we were told as a class that we would not fly on the shuttle based
on the way things were going and how it looked with the number of crew members or astronauts who had not flown yet.
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,
so we were labeled peacocks because we're all show and we don't fly.
I think we can take pride in that now that we've got our first classmate on this flight, Aki Hoshide, Japanese astronaut.
And we're going to start seeing a lot more of our classmates on shuttle flights and they're trying to get actually
all the rookies in the office, the unflown astronauts, up in one mode or another, most on shuttle, before we retire the shuttle.
BEUTEL: As a way to get experience and be ready for obviously the Constellation program, the Orion capsule and spacecraft.
DUTTON: Exactly. We're going to have a five-year, roughly, delay between shuttle and bringing Orion online,
so we want to carry as much experience as we can over into Constellation.
BEUTEL: As a matter of fact, NASA is also right now actively looking, at least for another month or so, for a 2009 class.
DUTTON: That's correct.
BEUTEL: I think it's probably pretty safe to say that class will not fly on the shuttle.
DUTTON: That's true. They are being brought in to actually fly on station during the
interim before Constellation and then obviously carry on into Constellation.
So yeah, it's very exciting. It'll be a five-year gap, which is a very long gap.
It's going to be great to have some new folks in the office.