I wrote that report. I was the study director. We had a committee of about 12 people, half of them former astronauts including Fred Gregory, Dick Covey, Dick Richards (who gave me his Houston Rodeo tickets), Tom Jones, etc.
Very interesting project. OMB initiated it because they wanted to cut the NASA astronaut corps' budget. We were basically asked three questions: a) how many astronauts does NASA need? b) do they need the T-38s? c) what ground training equipment is necessary for the astronauts?
A was the most interesting and thorniest question. But the question of the T-38s was problematic because of a misconception that many people had that NASA used the T-38s to train to land the shuttle, and with shuttle retired, they no longer needed T-38s. That was wrong. When we got the draft report into review, that was one of the questions we faced from the reviewers.
So I pulled out NASA's T-38 training manual and started going through it. What I noticed was that the manual had not really been updated in a very long time. It did not really need to be. Except that the manual still said that they used the T-38 to train to land the shuttle, but NASA had stopped doing that many years earlier. They used the T-38s for Space Flight Readiness Training (SFRT). That essentially meant training non-pilots in how to operate correctly under high-stress, high-risk conditions. NASA might be taking a 40-year-old scientist who had spent their entire life in a laboratory and that person needed to understand the importance of making the right decisions every single time when alarms were blaring and air was blowing in their face and things were going bad. The T-38 was how NASA did that. So I rewrote that section of our draft report to emphasize SFRT, and I think I included a recommendation that NASA needed to update its T-38 training manual to emphasize how they used them.
Interesting study. Had some real impact (NASA was not forced to fire astronauts). Heard some really interesting stories, like the time the toilet broke on the shuttle.
