so check your local jcc website. a lot more next few months so on that note, you are everywhere. we will see you. >> she's out there in cyberspace somewhere . >> thank you so much and we appreciate it and everybody stacy stay happy and we will seeyou next time . >> every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. funding for the least television companies to support us as a public service. >> welcome everyone. my name is, taylor and i'm owner of the bookshop in houston texas, we have people joining us from all over the country and what you. to be here with us to introduce ace icon of our

staff. we're so thrilled that they are going to be joining us tonight. so i will use our guest author and his conversational partner. and for, senior editor for our next, nasa and beyond. his former reporter for the file you historically, he is is the city residents over so thrilled easier to read in my decision with andrea lance brown, since my read and being in stacy here we have a lot to talk about. when it comes to space to turn this over to a position. on this question and answer

period. welcome andrea, thank you for coming. >> you down. >> is very exciting about your book i will have you started it off. right now we have so much happening in south texas with the source which now is in texas we learned today. but you know, it feels a little like maybe the cowboy days of the falcon one so i'm curious to, why you decided what similarities you see me must have a nap and then you. >> i will readers understand why we should care about this dinky low rockets that is so much is launching 50 years. agency. the way the speed at which space x moves the reality is that they had been successful with the falcon one rocket they finally lost in 2008 successfully never would have gotten to worry, they

continued. the company wouldn't exist today you understand is the way space x is today, although their dna was established back in this really times period from 2000 2008 when the start of the company with you on was hired with and succeed in this market, from scratch. and so you know, the fact that there in boca filling this crazy starship that one day make people to mars all down to what happened then. an interesting use another parallel.. in one from nowhere in this is so you fly from a july, is to again, like herself what really is all texas and nowhere you have a lot of

freedom to operate. in south texas in white line where foresight only and do what they need to move it to seize that he likes to move. >> but they will accept a small company and your book talks about how there's a handful of people working all thesehours . they were very hard there are companies so how do you release myself irritated designs where they cast and they say this. how can he doing? >> therefore a business is open nine that's what you want to use on your mission is this spring. and so that market really work they want to their keeping pace with thatvehicle won't successfully study his times . sunday was assessment that

you want to have success starships, then you want to any time soon. even going, not 500 some of their processes. images and control the last of a test challenges relaying ages. so all that out. they got this factory, self texas turn vehicle after vehicle thomas london. they will learn from each day move forward. >> when you be elected early this new ways to explore and when he was so excited, has on the things that you have is this is his wholecareer was designed to they're not doing . they're doing is on design doesn't feel the same way? >> is really interesting.

the way elon musk started the country is he hired more kids in their 20s just out of school or stillin right school, the best of the best . they didn't have families to go home to they basically were going to kill themselves in terms of working hard for the company and if you go down and visit boca chica, there's hundreds instead of dozens of engineers but they are still people in the mostly. usually years and they are running around, scurrying around and they don't have, where 50 hats like the people in the fountain one day and there no less of a see. that's again down to disk

drive that elon musk has to push it seems former as fast as they can go. >> i love you yearbook. if you're looking through just picture elon musk chuckling, i just love that detail i was a survivor fan, i know there shows where the islands so long. our interviews did it take to get these key details do you have one? >> is hard to figure 1. i spent 20 hours with elon musk and settings and lots of time with the other employees, each one to our interview go back for questions and clarifications get feedback from their. just to make sure i was like,

someone would tell the story a else to go with you about this. there i'll is this incident from 2002, actually after the companywas formed . mosque and some of the engineers were flying to some company to try someone go, tax. they had to be way obtain these chills and they stayed at the express one night and one morning got up and went to the breakfast bar and i guess it was the first time he had encountered. because according to the other people, the company were in the practice room, you looked at stare at and was fascinating by then proceeded to close it then instead of putting vertically they. they even existed his hands in to live out. burden himself says nice work

hollyexpressing wisconsin . another story that i like was when shotwell, she's the president of the company now. hired on as vice president of sales in 2000 you and she was really successful number of levels the flat four, she was in scotland a difference. and she was you know, it was after midnight there and she was sitting in the bathroom watching it on alaptop . and she had gone there to actually explain the customers the third failure when market. so this was super uplifting. as she's watching this all alone screaming in the bathroom, and she told me that before we lost, she

writes scotland's down in her shoes. so she's dating or scotland when they want. so i thought that was amazing to watch. >> it is nice touch. the main part of the book is usually on, they automatically-year-old working hard this grind is the reason why it was successful. there's a reason why some people left and i'm sure when you were talking, how does he describe this? all the other employees described uses planning and how he made them want to work so hard and all that led to the success being able to have as he sees himself as rising hard. >> you for sure, understands what he does the, he has an expectation that people who come to work for him arlington work hard because they believe in whatever he's doing. and the rare gift that he

gives them is theability to make a difference . because if you go to space x, you can be someone who really does hold the first orbital rocket privately developed. you can do a station that's going to go to mars. and it's not like you're going there waiting for a government contract to come through or your, the program is going to be canceled because congress changed. he has a track record of getting success done. one engineer who left, he said look. he 15 years, the best years of my life was a tray. it was a trade i was willing to make for theopportunity . so he realizes that but he also expected. he's just left, i don't want

to say he uses people up. but he expects people to give all. >> i feel like he has the same attitude towards regulators. early on you with had had with nasa and with a couple other regulatory authorities. how did that fearlessness i guess the beginning or can you talk about that? >> even before they launched their first rockets, space x sued roman, boeing and lockheed, the biggest competitors in the space industry. they protested nasa, to of the. this is the one writing some eggs on the way to space. and that is just sort of how he acts. if he feels he's been wrong, he will always suit him.

doesn't always help him because he comes across as brash and unreliable and he can your potential customers. for some people, it makes them uncomfortable to work with but in the end he typically does deliver and it really was his protest of a nasa contract in 2004 ultimately would save the company. this was a contract nasa awarded to a company called kistler to develop this transportation system to deliver cargo to the international space is an elon thought that was unfair and he said you shouldn't protest our most important customer, or potentially are most important. he said it's not right, we've got to do doing he is not being right because that protest basically for nasa to

withdraw or,: edition. they eventually led to commercial crews was one of those contracts that they got in 2008 at see the company from bankruptcy. so if you take the good and the bad. he's a fighter and he will fight when he thinks it's on his side, he will fight you. >> i know when i was reading the book, i even knew how he lost it. i felt like this is the one. i forget the term but there was this loss and the rocket just probably. when you're hearing these stories you think they call every card could have. >> they probably felt that way. it is interesting.

i mean, the book is ultimately flamed around the four lunches, the falcon one. and i think each of the failures are really interesting because they tell you something about the company, the people who work there and elon himself made some mistakes after the first one unfairly blamed on mission when in fact they left the vehicle exposed in this tropical environment for two long. that was in retrospect a pretty obvious mistake. kind of a rookie mistake, you might say. the second vehicle, they were aware of the potential problem with the second stage but fixing it would have required a lot of time. >> ..

that ultimately got him. there was lots of drama. before he started working on the project i thought i wonder if there's a full book to be told about this. when i got into it was fascinating because the people involved and sort of what they went through to get that rocket orbit is really a heck of a story. >> weaving all their back backs recently nicely. the turkish goulash, have you tried? >> it's great. one character in the book is from turkey, and so this group of people who really close because they were living, sometimes they would overnight on this tiny island the size of

a city block with a rocket was being assembled and they would cook like six or whatever. he had this recipe of turkish coal ash ends when the things i loved is i found out later on when he left the company in 2015, on the last day the cafeteria at spacex actually made the recipe. i thought that was so cool. i said it would put the recipe in the book? he said yeah, sure. so you could make it at home. >> when you were going through the process of interviewing and writing this book, what was that like? this is your first book, right? >> yes. >> what was it like taking, , hs been a journalist forever but taking that 500 500 words te book, what was a process like? >> odyssey was a lot of fun, andrea, because i can say that i wasn't even aware of spacex they launch the rocket. people in houston will remember september of 2008, not for the

falcon night nine and spar hurricane ike. what i remember about that storm was like we saw it coming more than two weeks before it made landfall. they were just days and days and i was doing forecasting for the chronicle at the time, tracking that storm every day all day. and then it made landfall in mid-september and it had this devastating storm surge, and didn't like i was done,, exhausted, and so i, you know, it wore me out. september of 2008 is a complete blur. writing a book with lots of fun because i knew i allotted of spacex from about 2010 to the present day but i knew almost nothing about 2002-2008. for me it was really kind of an exploration to go back and find that out just like the reader

would. things that were new and interesting to me i think it would be new and interesting to other people. there were other people who were familiar with the story, but i was able to talk to people who really had never talked like this before. and yet there's their story so there's lots of detail and stuff that has never been told before. someone brought a gun to the airbase. >> you talk about how eager they were to tell their stories and share their early years in particular, and why do you think that was? >> first of all the engineers and technicians who pulled this off are incredibly proud of their achievement because it really was against all odds to do it. that little amount of money with a brand-new technology and uprooted from you thought you're going to launch from california to so specific and dealing with

all the logistical challenges of that. so first of all i think they felt they were proud of it and the felt it was time to tell the story. and elon when approached him in early 2019 basically said okay, i think it is time to tell the story and he's like, so basically sent a green light to people that it was okay to talk now. >> i have to ask, from ap style, how did you feel that using the oxford comma, did it kill you a little hard to ge's right into it? >> when i came in 2015 they were like huge proponent of the oxford comma. after having not used it for 15 years i had that beaten in my head so i i was okay with tha. it was weird when i got the book because went through an extensive copying process. when i got it back, all the

numbers, like 50 were spilled out. this is and how it's done, but i guess i don't know i learned that. >> i guess there's anything else you want to tell the readers or the people who are buying this book just about all that went into it or everything that you hope they get out of it? >> i would just say it's a hell of a story. it's like everything was on the line for elon musk and for spacex, and basically they really had a profound impact on the space industry and it could have all come not if that launch had taken place. it was really touch and go. there was an eight-week period between a third and fourth flights where it was a crisis every day, and they just really pulled together to make something special happen. it was super fun to tell that

story. >> these are great, great stories. we have some questions, and i am just going to ask you, eric, one of the ones that i think is hilarious and it's had a lot of likes is because you had some behind-the-scenes access, what's the funniest thing you have seen in someone's lab on their desk? >> there was a cheap propulsion engineer and one of his lieutenants was kevin millar and spacex, and around about 2011 elon started talking about building this heavy rocket which was taking three falcon nines and sticking them together, , so you at 27 engines. kevin millar on his desk, sometime back in 2012 or 2013 at taken like one of the early schematics drawings of that and

sort of britain on there, retire before this happens. this is an engineering challenge, he didn't retire so i thought that was funny. >> all right. another question from david. your favorite story that was great but you had to cut it from the book? >> boy, you know, i put in a lot of stuff that i thought, i mean everything i really wanted to have been there about the falcon one was in there. i did catch some information about the falcon nine, the first couple lunches of that because i really just wanted the book to be about the falcon one. so when the last chapter i glossed over it but the launch director for the falcon one and the falcon nine told me this funny story which really resonated and kind of tells how elon is always looking, his eyes and never really on the president. he's always looking at the future. there's an anecdote in the book

about during the fact the launch of the first falcon when he is very aggressive conductor and pressing him. this is like 20 minutes before liftoff asking him about ordering aluminum for the falcon five, a bigger rocket which ultimately never got built. it's like yet never launched a rocket before and this is crunch time and here he was sort of -- so on the night before the first falcon nine launch in 2010, he and buzz had gone out to the launchpad because there was this issue with the storm and prerogative and damage than it need to be fixed before the first launched the tent. they they were driving back and tim sent to the hotel about four in the morning, and elon was just, his mind was on the future. like, he wanted to talk about landing the falcon nine. he wanted to talk about reusing them. if it's just like, for them at

the time this huge rocket falcon nine, totally revolutionary booster, and he was always just looking far beyond the next day the five or ten years down the future. really interesting insight into his psyche. >> so we have a question, your love of rocket space. i know your parents are on the chat on this call because they said they were very proud of you. >> thanks, mom and dad. [laughing] i would say when i was a kid, and this would've been like 1978, 79, so i was young, five or six. i don't know if it was a project in class or what but road to nasa. i guess it was johnson space center. i was living in michigan at the time and i'm interested in space and want to know more and they sent me back this envelope with

these pictures of like taken by the voyagers of planets in the solar system. they were beautiful like eight by ten photos with some press release information for each of the planets that voyagers had discovered and i was just like so cool and so eye-opening. i think it speaks really to the power of nasa to really draw in people. it worked for me and i've had a lifelong interest in astronomy and space ever since. >> phyllis wants to know if you have any sense how the culture spacex differs from other private companies, and you mention blue origin and a lot of people want to know your answer to that. >> so the cultures of those two companies is vastly different. and it is because it is drawn

from musk. he sets the tone which is extremely demanding workplace, and the phrase is used in the book is he wants to make the impossible possible. so yes, he asks great things of his people but gives them the freedom to go out and do that. he moves really fast and that is in direct contrast to a lot of the companies including blue origin. blue origin hired a ceo, bob smith and he was from honeywell aerospace, and jeff bezos hired him to come in as the company moved from this hobby shop development company to an operational company flying missions into space and winning nasa contracts and working with the department of defense. smith has made blue origin a lot more like a traditional aerospace company, much more closer to a boeing or sierra nevada or a a lockheed martin thank you a spacex. it's interesting there some

parallel history. 2006 elon musk hired his first ceo, a guy named jim mazer from sea launch which was a large company partly owned by boeing. so a traditional launch company, and he was very much a traditional ceo sort of coming in, being the adults in the room you go from startup to a bigger company. he lasted nine months because it didn't fit in with the culture. people on the floor were wearing shorts and t-shirts and flip-flops, which elon doesn't care about. he's like get your job done. as i say he and elon clashed and he was gone but he quickly. >> all right. this is from bruce. our world is deeply divided today with space and space travel. why is that?

well, i think the one thing about spaceflight is, it can be a very unifying space. at the outset it was clearlyd war type thing. it was the soviets and the united states and we're both trying to show the supremacy of our various forms of government. but since the 1990s, 1980s we worked with the soviets and the russians in space, and so it has been a unifying adventure. the last decade as our relationship with russia has grown worse, nasa has gone right along trucking with the international space station and working with russia very closely. but most of the last decade americans got in space russian vehicles. i would agree that space could be a competition but it also is way of bringing us together and there's some hope that if we do

ultimately end up doing a human mars that it would be a global endeavor. so would be the united states, your traditional partners but also russia and potentially with china. that would be a pretty nice counterpoint to the deficiency on earth that we could all come together to do something greater, which would be to set foot on another world. >> that leads us to the next question that michael asked. our u.s. astronauts more likely to return to the moon on nasa or spacex? >> great question. spacex is going to play a role in the architecture one way or another in getting humans back to the moon mid to late 2020s. my guess ultimately would be they would launch on a spacex rocket. nasa has been building this expensive vehicle called space launch system which, back when i

was covering this seven or eight years ago, it was in competition with the falcon heavy, like which rocket would launch first. falcon heavy launched in 2018 and we're still waiting for this rocket. now the competition between sls and starship, and it's very much open question now that starship will reach orbit before sls everything starship as a pretty good chance. that rocket is bigger, much cheaper, reusable, all the things the sls vehicle is not. it starship a successful i could see that become the baseline architecture for human landings on the moon. that's all to be determined. the biden administration looking into this. there's not even any of nasa administrator in place so we will see. >> we have a question from croatia. asking a technical -- who at the

moment has a final say in approval, faa, ivr, for colonization? >> okay. so the question is, if elon, spacex once to send a settlement of people to mars come who gives permission for that? the fact of the matter is, it would be the u.s. government. so the faa would probably launch, license the launch. that u.n. would probably not have much say at all in that. itar just governs the transfer of u.s. secrets and technology to other countries including space stuff so that really wouldn't play a role. the fact of the matter is licensing a human launch to mars is going to be a tricky endeavor and its not ready for geopolitical reasons, although that could be a factor. it would be more along the lines

of is the life on mars currently underground we don't know about, small microbes, not talking about martians but like little life under the ground couple was their past life, and woods sending humans to their sort of interfere with whatever martian ecosystem there is? it's called planetary protection. spacex, elon musk, he really doesn't care, like he, if life is underground he doesn't think humans on the surface are going to disturb it, and even if he did he would be like they're just microbes and humans need the settling at undergoing in the cosmos and starting with a mars, and that's a problem? at the our people in nasa and scientists and environmentalists who would raise very serious concerns about that. ultimately it spacex does good to mars they would go hand-in-hand with nasa which would help them address some of those issues like planetary

protection. >> we have a question from somebody that of league you know whose name is dwight. i think you both know him. god forbid this should happen but how do you think spacex would respond to a disaster whether with loss of life for the astronauts? and how would musk tension with the faa plant? >> it would be an issue with nasa and with the u.s. congress which would be deep into the knickers of spacex if that happened. that would be a terrible tragedy. it's something possible. there are no guarantees with human spaceflight whatsoever. there are some pretty good safety precautions with the falcon nine rocket which has an excellent record in terms of getting to orbit. the newest version has never

failed, as i say after about 70 attempts. and if it does fail, unlike the space shuttle it has a large escape system. if something went wrong for the space shuttle on ascent, there was no way for the crew to safely get back to earth really. with dragon there is a launch escape system such that if something goes wrong with the rocket within a fraction of a second, it is very powerful thrusts as i can i can pu. theoretically the loss of group probabilities that one in 240 mission so it is definitely not zero, but the space shuttle loss of crew was about two in 135 south theoretically at least it's lower than the space shuttle. that would be an extremely serious issue and raise all sorts of questions about whether all the promises of commercial space really are coming true. so there's a lot of effort obviously being taken to protect against that for many reasons, that being one of them. >> we have a lot of questions. i know people, we will not be

able to get to all of them as time goes on and we don't want to take too much of your time. what lessons, if any, should the larger aerospace industry take from spacex? >> i might want to bring any injury to get thoughts in on this, too. i had an interesting conversation last december about this. we were talking about the fact that what they're doing done in south texas really is remarkable in terms of how fast it moving. it is unprecedented to be building a rocket ship every two weeks, which is what they're doing down there launching him for weekly during this program. i said we think, what do you think the rest of the industry thinks that this? she said look, we're not trying to show anybody up but we think

the space community deserves better, right? you should wait ten or 15 years for a rocket to develop it and should happen faster so they're trying to show a a different d better way. i think they're leading by example and they've had an incredible forcing function on the industry over the last decade. not only in the u.s. but rocket groups in europe, , china, japan come everywhere is sort of scrambling to catch up with cost and reusability as well. >> could you repeat the first part of the question? >> the question is, i will get back to it, but it's what can elon musk and spacex teach the larger aerospace industry? not may be just the rocket industry but i'm talking, this question seem to be encompassing

a larger space. >> i think reusability has been key. that is what brought them cost. as we talk more and more about debris in space, being able to reuse something instead of just use it up there, it's something that is then focus on in a lot of different fields. i think reusability is one aspect that spacex has pushed for an agenda and that is being considered pretty broadly. also there have been at the start of this year multiple announcements of human spaceflight missions that don't involve nasa that everyone are on a spacex rocket and a spacex capsule or the starship and whatever that does launch people. i also think, obviously it's not really affordable or attainable to most of us and bless you get one of those lucky tickets, but also think they are pushing the boundary to bring you more people in the space. we haven't seen that since some tourists went up on the sole use a long, long time ago.

i think people, seven people, eight mission something like that. i also think spacex is driving this agenda forward but it's just going to be a while to bring down the cost but it is put usability and getting humans up there at a broader level? >> andrew raises a great point, that for a lot of these activities things like tourists in orbit, space hotels, doing interesting things with private space stations, none of that could happen until you had a lower cost reliable way to get people up there. $15 million a seat i would ever spacex is charging to commercial customers is not cheap. the fact of the matter is with the space shuttle, that opportunity wasn't there. with so we use you can get one tourist up at a time. in dragon you can flight four

people and against it there for three to four months if you go somewhere to the space station. this is opening up opportunities that didn't exist and i frankly have been surprised by already a number commercial tourism, commercial missions that event announced. suggests to me that are more on the way and it will be, again that's all down to sort of having this lower cost system put in place. >> i will ask one more question and there's just so many but i don't know which to choose from. so i think i will go back up to this -- i don't think we got this. i know we haven't asked this. without spacex do you think we would have the other launch companies active in the pipeline? because spacex launched this in

the early 2000. >> so one of the many beneficial things spacex has done for the industry is they had shown other investors there's money to be made in space. it makes it a lot easier if you are start up company, you can sort say hey come with the next spacex because of xyz. we have a similar growth plan, this is a vision, they realized access to space. we're going to revolutionize whatever. if you look since about 2010 comes after the first falcon one success come the first falcon nine success, the amount of funding went into private equity space companies has gone up a lot. spacex has shown in terms of just launch companies that have show that you can be successful with a commercial vehicle, and so rocket lab has followed and then literally dozens of other companies are trying to do the

same thing. many will fail but some will succeed sort of on the backs of spacex. >> these are five pillars questions. i appreciate everyone joining us tonight. andrea, eric, kathy is in the background, our coordinator. she's not too far from where i was in 1969 when the first man landed on the moon. just amazing what has happened, and eric, , you have brought ito life for us. really also which are done and i'm hoping everybody will appreciate this is, like you said, some of these things were happening with other major things were happening and maybe we didn't get as close of attention but now you're bring it back and telling as the history of it and helping as kind of form a base for how to go forward in our reading. andrea, we really appreciate all the reporting you do for chronicle and reporting on the space industry.

that means so much to us here in the greater houston area. eric is going to be back to sign the rest of his books and when he does, we are going to get them out to you. this has been such a thrill tonight to meet both of you, and to talk with both of you. as i said at the beginning, eric is our god. we can't live without it. i'm just so thrilled that both of you are here tonight and i thank you for taking the time to talk to all the people who joined us and i'm sorry we couldn't answer all the questions but hopefully you will be able to contact them on social media and ask your questions. yes, it says eric, you are a rock star and i believe it. andrea, thank you so much. eric, we appreciate it so much.

>> booktv on c-span2 every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. funding for booktv comes from these television companies who support c-span2 as a public service. >> here's a look at some books being published this week.

>> find these titles this coming week wherever books are sold and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> my name is isaac shub at i work in the reference department. her with the library marian huggins. we're joined by professor gerald horne. professor horne grew up in st. louis, did undergraduate work at princeton, , earned a lw degree from uc berkeley and received his phd from columbia. he holds the professorship of history and african-american studies at the university of houston. his new book which we will talk about today as part of a book sandwiched in series