Oct. 28--CAPE CANAVERAL -- Leroy Chiao, a respected former NASA astronaut and engineer, was one of the 10 members on the White House committee that recently reviewed NASA's human spaceflight plans. Last week the committee submitted its final report, suggesting that NASA considering scrapping the Ares I rocket that the agency is developing to replace the space shuttle. The report also urged President Barrack Obama to consider using commercially built and operated rockets to take astronauts and cargo to low Earth orbit. Chiao is at the Kennedy Space Center for the test flight of the Ares I-X prototype rocket. He spoke briefly to Robert Block, the Sentinel Space Editor. Here is an excerpt of that interview.

OS: There is a sense that whatever happens today is going to have a big impact on the direction that Washington and the administration chooses to go in terms of its space policy. Do you that's necessarily the case?

LC: Well, I don't get the feeling that this test is going to influence the decision on Ares I or Constellation one way or the other. Unless -- the only possible way that there would be any kind of impact, I think, is if there were some kind of big failure with this test. And not that that would technically mean anything bad for the program, but just the perception. If there was a big catastrophic-like failure, that could negatively impact the decision-making. But my sense is that it won't.

OS: A lot of people looking at the Augustine Committee report have broken the argument down into it's Ares I vs. Commercial. Do you think that's the proper way to look at the issue? Is that really the issue facing the administration?

LC: Well, you have these different things like heavy lift and space station that were addressed separately and together in the report. It's an oversimplification to say it's Ares I vs. a commercial manned capability to low Earth orbit. Really what we are calling for in the report, if you go through it, is that you see we are saying, "Hey, commercial needs to be given a chance." And in at least several of the options we need to try to stimulate and encourage commercial space to step up and be able to do this and make a viable business out of it. But I don't see it as black and white, that it's either Ares I or commercial.

OS: Yes, but the supporters of the program of record are saying that if you get rid of us, what's going to replace Ares I? You saw the reception that Norm Augustine got on Capitol Hill when he appeared before Congress last month. There was a very strong sense that the committee was proposing to do away with Ares for untested commercial space rockets.