carol began reporting on the secret service for the "washington post" in 2012. in the prologue of the book zero fail she writes that she started her coverage on the scandal in which agents brought prostitutes to their hotel rooms while making arrangements for president obama to visit columbia. we talk with her about her look at her new book subtitled the rise and fall of the secret service. looked at the career of entrepreneur speethirteen and the history of his rocket company in his new book "lift off." the blue willow bookshop in wiln houston hosted this event. >> welcome, everyone. i'm the owner of the bookshop in

houston, texas. people joining from all over the country and even beyond in the world. i'm thrilled to be here to introduce a staff icon. we are so thrilled they are going to be joining us tonight. i would like to introduce our guest author and his conversational partner senior space editor covering space x, nasa, everything and beyond. a reporter for the chronicle and as we know we are so thrilled that he is here tonight. in conversation with andrea, sspace reporter for the houston chronicle and here we have a lot to talk about. i'm going to turn this over to eric and andrea to have a

wonderful conversation and i will come back and help facilitate the question and answer period. welcome and thank you for coming tonight. so much happening in south texas withe the starship. it feels a little bit like the cowboy days of the falcon one so i'm curious what kind of similarity do you see between what is happening now and what was happening then? >> i want to help them understand why we should care about this rocket it's kind of ancient history.

they finally launched it successfully and they never would have gotten to orbit. it's back in this composter was period from 2002 to 2008 when they started with the company. when he was hiring the people he thought would help him succeed in this quest to build a rocket from scratch. so the fact that they are building this crazy starship that one day may take people to mars is down to what happened and it's interesting because they launched from the middle of nowhere basically in the central pacific ocean so if you fly from la to hawaii and then the same

distance to. i'm not saying in the middle of nowhere, but they do have a lot of freedom to operate in south texas where there is not that much oversight of the range. a handful of people have been working all these hours but there are bigger companies so how can they afford to keep doingg these kind of designs where they test and fail and fix. how can they keep doing that? >> they have their core business which is the falcon nine rocket and that's what they are launchingur humans on.

now it's flown successfully about 70 consecutive times. they are not trying to get to orbit they are just testing out some of the flight systems. they built this factory to kind of churn out vehicles at a relatively low cost and then they will learn from each mistake and move forward. when you talk to people does it feel like the early days when everybody was so excited like hands-on building things. one example his whole career

they were doing these hands-on designs. >> it's really interesting he hired a couple of senior vice presidents that had experience in the field and then most went out and hired kids in their 20s just out of school or in graduate school. they didn't have families to go home too. they were basically willing to kill themselves in terms of working hard for their company. if you go down to visit the same kind of energy there's more people, there's hundreds instead of dozens of engineers. the facilities are much bigger but it's still just people in their 20s. they ared running around and ty don't where 50 hats like the

people did but they are moving at no less of a speed. that is the kind of drive that he has to push his team forward as fast as they can go. >> i love the level of detail in your book. i can picture him like i just loved that detail and i remember they were working on the island and how many hours of interviews it gets. it's hard to pick a favorite one. i spend a long time about 20 hours in different settings and then lots of time with the other employees then we go back with questions and clarifications.

just to make sure because someone would tell me a story andme i would cross check with someone else. there's fun anecdotes, one i will pull out is an incident from 2002. they were trying to find someone to build the tanks that had to contain these. stayed at a holiday inn express one night and they got up and went down to the breakfast bar and i guess it was the first time he had encountered pop tarts because according to the company in the breakfast room, he looked at it and stared at it and was fascinated and then proceeded to toast it and

instead of putting them in vertically so they would pop up, he put them in horizontally and had to stick his hand in to pull them out and said some not nice words at a holiday inn express in wisconsin back in 2002. another story that i really like was when the president of the company now who was hired on as vice president of sales in 2002 and was instrumental in the success on a number of levels but she was in scotland at a space conference and she was sitting in the bathroom watching on a laptop and she had gone to explain why the rocket had failed so this was like this super uplifting moment as she's

watching this screaming in a scottish hotel she told me before we launched she writes scotland narrative so she's standing over scotland when they launch the rockets so i thought that was a nice touch. >> it is a nice touch. the big part of the book they had a bunch of 20-year-olds working really hard. this is the reason why it was successful. i'm curious when you were talking to speethirteen, how did he make them want to work so hard. does he see himself as -- >> he foreshore understands what he does to people and he has an

expectation b the gift he gives them is the ability to make a difference because if you go to -- you can be someone who really does build the first orbital rocket. you can land the rocket on a boat, build a spaceship it's going to go to mars. it's not like you are going and waiting for a government contract to come through or the program is goingng to be canceld because can congress change. he has a track record for getting success done so as one of the engineers told me he said it was a trade i was willing to

make for the opportunity. and so, he realizes that but lealso expects it. i don't want to say that he uses people up, but he expects people to give their all. >> early on in the book they went head to head with a couple of other regulatoryho authoriti. canyo you talk about that some? >> before they launched their first rockets, -- sued northrop grumman, lockheed and boeing, the biggest competitors in the space industry. they protested the department of defense. this is someone who's breaking some eggs on the way to space.

that is just how he acts. if he feels he has been wronged, he will fight back. and it doesn't always help him because he comes across as brash and may be unreliable but in the end he typically does deliver and it really was the protest of a nasa contract in 2004. to develop the system to bring car go to the space station. he thought that wasn't fair. they saidfa you shouldn't protet the most important customer, potentially the most important

customer. they forced nasa to withdraw and hold an open competition with the commercial cargo, the dragon spacecraft and then eventually it led to the commercial crew. it was one of the contracts that they had at the end of 2008 to save the company from bankruptcy. i can't be like this is the one with such terrible luck. i forgeter the term.

they caught every rough car that they could have. >> they probably felt that way. the book is ultimately framed around the four launches, the three failures and the fourth one was just success. i think each of the failures are interesting. they tell you something about the company, the people that work there and speethirteen himself -- that was an obvious mistake you might say and the second vehicle they were aware of the potential problem but to fix it would have required a lot of time and it would have been run up against performance limits and they really needed to

fly again. the third one was just heartbreaking because they had tested the engine. this new engine and they haven't seen this bit of thrust that came on right at the end of the burn and that ultimately got them. before i started working on the project i thought i wonder if there is a full book to be told about the falcon and when i got into it it was fascinating because the people involved in a sort of what they went through is one heck of a story. >> i have to know the turkish gulags -- >> one of the characters in the book isk from turkey so this

group of people grew really close because they were living on this tiny island the size of a couple of city blocks and they would cook steaks. one of the things i loved about that is i found out later on when he left the company on the last day of the cafeteria they made that recipe and i thought that was so cool so i said put the recipe in the book so you can make it at home. now taking that what was that process like? >> it was a lot of fun because i

can say i was aware when they launched that. people in houston will remember we saw it coming more than two weeks before it made landfall so there were days and days and i was forecasting fori the time tracking the storm every day and then it made landfall in mid-september. i was done. i looked exhausted. it wore me out. september of 2008 is a complete blur. writing the book was a lot of fun because i knew a lot from about 2010 to the 2 present day, but i knew almost nothing about 2002 to 2008.

so, for me it was kind of an exploration to go back and find that out just like a reader would. 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 sort of get their stories and details and stuff that had never been told before. i don't think it's ever been reported that they brought a gun to an army base. you talk about how eager they were to share the story. why do you think that was? >> first ofnk all, the engineers and technicians were incredibly proud of their achievement because it really was against all odds to deal with the

brand-new technology and that sort of uprooted from what we thought we would launch to the central pacific and dealing with all of the logistical challenges of that. so, first of all i think they felt they were proud of it and then when i approached him in early 2019, basically said okay i think it is time to tell the story and he was like okay he basically set a green light to people that it was okay to talk now. >> i have to ask from the ap style did it kill you a little bit or did you just ease right into it? >> they were huge proponents anf so i after having not used it for 15 years i had it beaten into my head so i was okay with

that. it was weird when i got the book it went to an extensive copy. all the numbers like 50 i thought this isn't how it's done. it's a hell of a story. everything was on the line for elon musk and they had a profound impact on the space industry and it could have all come for not. it was really touch and go. there was an eight week period

where it was a crisis every day and they pulled together to make something special happen and it was super fun to tell that story. these are great stories. we have some questions and i'm just going to ask you one of the ones i think is hilarious is because you had some behind the scenes access what is the funniest thing you have seen? >> one was kevin miller in the space ask. around 2011, elon musk started talking about building a heavy rocket which was taking three of the falcon nine's and sticking them together so you had 27

engines. kevin miller on his desk sometime back in 2012 or 2013 and taken one of the early schematic drawings of that and had written retire before this happens. i have another question from david. i put in a lot of stuff that i thought, i mean, i really wanted to have about the falcon. i did cut to some information about the first couple of launches because i just wanted the book to be about the falcon one but then the launch of director told me a funny story that resonated and it kind of

tells how his eyes are never on thed present he's always looking to the future. there is an anecdote that during the first launch he gets very aggressive and this is 20 minutes before liftoff asking about ordering aluminum for the falcon five. he never launched a rocket before and then here he was. on the night before the first launchnc in 2010, he and buzz hd gone out to the launchpad because there was w this issue that needed to be fixed before the first attempt so they were driving back he said he stayed until about four in the morning.

his mind was on the future. he wanted to talk about landing the falcon nine and he wanted to talk about reusing them. for them at the time this huge falcon nine was a totally revolutionary booster and he was always looking far beyond the next day to five or ten years on the future. that's a really interesting insight into his psyche. i know your parents are on the chat, on this call because they said that they were very proud of you. >> thanks, mom and dad. when i was a kid, this would t have been 1978 or 79. i don't know if it was a project in class but road to nasa

interested in space and they sent me back these pictures taken by the voyagers of the planet solar system. they were beautiful eight by ten photographs with some press release information that the voyagers discovered and that justed was so cool and eye-opening. it speaks to the power of nasa to draw people in and it's and i had ae lifelong interest in astronomy ever since. >> if it differs from other private companies you mentioneda blue origin and we've had a lot of bites on that one, people want in answer to that.

>> it is vastly different and it is because it's drawn from he sets the tone with his demanding workplace and the phrase in, the book he wants to make the impossible possible so he has great things of his people but then he gives them the freedom to go out and do that and he moves really fast. that is in direct contrast to a lot of the companies including blue origin. he was from honeywell aerospace. jeff baize owes hired him to come in as the company returned from this company to an operationalio company flying russians in space and working with the department of defense and smith made blue origin more like a traditional space company

more closer to boeing or nevada or lockheed martin and it's interesting there were some parallels in history in 2006, he hired his first ceo from a launch company owned by boeing. a traditional launch company and he was very much a traditional ceo coming in is kind of the adult in the room you go from start up to a bigger company. and he lasted nine months because he didn't fit in with the culture. people were wearing t-shirts and flip-flops which he doesn't care about. he's like get your job done. as i say, they clashed and he was gone pretty quickly.

space and space travel and story, why is that? i think the one thing about spaceflight it can be a very unified experience at the outset it was clearly a cold war type of thing. it was the soviets in the united states and we were trying to show the supremacy of the various forms of government but since the 1990s or 1980s we worked with the soviets and russians in space and so it has been a unifying adventure over the last decade as the relationship has grown worse we've gone right along with the international space station. for almost the last decade if americans got into space on the russian vehicles.

so i would agree space could be a competition but it's also a way to bring us together and there is some hope that if we do ultimately end up doing a human mission to mars it would be a global endeavor. it would be the united states traditional partners but also russia and potentially even china and that would be a pretty nice counterpoint that we could all come together to do something greater. that brings us to the next question are they more likely to return to the moon on nasa or space x? they will playe a role in the md to late 2020s. my guess is they would launch.

nasa has been building this expensive vehicle called the space launch system back when i was covering the seven or eight years ago it was in competition with the falcon heavy like which one would launch first. now the competition is between sls and the larger rocket and it's very much an open question now if it will reach orbit before sls and i think it has a good chance. it's bigger, much cheaper, reusable. if it is successful i could see that becoming the baseline architecture. that iso b all to be determinede administration is looking at this there's not even a new administrator in place.

>> who at the moment has a final say and approval? [inaudible] or colonization? >> if they want to send people to mars, who gets permission for that and the fact of the matter is itt would be the u.s. government. so, the faa would probably license the launch. the un wouldn't have much say at all. we govern the transfer of the u.s. secrets and technology to other countries including space so that wouldn't really play a role. the fact of the matter is

licensing is going to be a tricky endeavor and it's not for geopolitical reasons although thatal could be a factor. it would be more along the lines of is their life on mars currently underground we don't know about and what is sending humans sort of interfere with whatever ecosystem there is? it's called planetary protection and he really doesn't care. he -- even if he did they are just microbes and humans need to be settling out into the cosmos and we are starting at mars. what is the problem but there are people, there are scientists and environmentalists that would

raise concerns about that and so i thinkma ultimately if they doo 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 i believe you know. how do you think that they would respond to a disaster where there is loss of life for the astronaut? and how would this continue to play out? >> that wouldn't be an issue so much as it would be deep in space x if that happened. that would be a terrible tragedy. it's certainly 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 orbit after 70, 70 attempts. and it does fail unlike the space shuttle it has a launch escape system so if something went wrong there was no way for the crew to safely get back to earth. there is a launch escape system in the fraction of a second it was powerful thrusters that could push it away so theoretically it is about one in 240 missions, so it's definitely not zero but the space shuttle loss was about 235 so theoretically lower than the space shuttle but that would be an extremely serious issue and it would raise all sorts of questions about whether the promises of commercial space are coming true. so there's a lot of effort being

taken to protect against that for many reasons, that being one of them. >> as the time goes on we don't want to take up too much time. aaron is asking what lessons if any should the larger industry take from spaceom x? >> i had an interesting conversation last december about this. we were talking about the fact that what they are doing in south texas is remarkable in terms of how fast they are moving. it's unprecedented to be building a rocket ship every two weeks which is what they are doing in this test program and i said we think the rest of the

industry -- we are not trying to shore anybody up, but we think the community deserves better. you shouldn't wait ten or 15 years for a rocket to be developed. it shouldop happen faster so thy are trying to show a better and a different way. i think that they are leading by example and they've had an incredible function over the last decade not only in the u.s. but also rocket groups in europe andn china, japan scrambling to catch up in terms of cost and usability. >> can you repeat the first part of the question? >> the first part is what can they teach the larger aerospace

industry? not just the rocket industry but encompassing the larger state. a. >> i think the usability has been key. it brought down cost and as we talk more andro more about debrs and being able to use something is something that we focus on in a lot of different fields. the usability is one aspect that they've definitely pushed in the agenda and that is being considered broadly. also, there have been at the start of this year multiple announcements that don't involve nasa or starship and whatever launch people. it's still not affordable unless you get one of those lucky tickets but i think they are

also kind of pushing the boundary into bringing more people into space. we haven't seen that since a long time ago. i also think it is driving the agenda forward but it's going to be a while to bring down the cost but it definitely puts humans up there at a broader level. >> for a lot of these activities, t things like orbit, space hotels, doing things with private space stations, none of that could happen until you have a lower cost way to get people up there and $50 million a seat or whatever they are charging to commercial customers is not cheap, but the fact of the matter is with the space

shuttle, that opportunity wasn't there. you can get one at a time and for people autonomously and they can stay for three or four months if you go somewhere to a space station. this is opening up opportunities [inaudible] it suggests to me that there are more on the way and again that is all down to having this lower-cost system. >> one more question. there are so many i don't know which to choose from.

without space x, do you think that we would have these other companies active in a the pipele because it launched in the early 2000's. >> one of the first things they've done for the industry is they've shown other investors that there is money to be made in space and so it makes it a lot easier if you can say we are the next space x because of xyz and we have a similar growth plan. they revolutionized access and whatever so if you look since about 2010 after the first falcon one a success, the first falcon nine, the amount of funding going into the private equity for space companies has gone up a lot and they've shown in terms of just launch companies, they've shown you can

be successful with a commercial vehicle and so there are literally dozens of other companies trying to do the same thing. many of which will fail but they will succeed is sort of on the backs of space x. ..

>> and reporting on the space industry. eric will be back to sign his book and when he does we will be here this is a thrill to talk with both of you and as i said at the beginning we can't live without it at the shop and we are just glad the both of you are here tonight and thank you for taking the time to talk to all the people that have joined us. butta hopefully you can contact the authors and asked the questions.

you are a rockstar thank you. thank you so much we appreciate it from the blue willow bookshop here in houston texas.

outstanding leadership metal and the presidential medal. now a leadership consultant and speaker and former editor-ich