nolan brown on a recent article the bipartisan antitrust crusade against big tech work saturday at 6:30 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> paul dye, the longest-serving nasa flight director, reflected on his life and career during this conversation at the virtual 2021 tucson festival of books. he wrote "shuttle, houston: life in the center seat of mission control." theoining us today for panel is paul dye. he has four take its of aviation aviation experience as an engineer, builder and pilot. he was the longest-serving flight director in history, the leader of several missions. he received the outstanding leadership medal, three exceptional service medals and the presidential medal. he is now leadership consultant and speaker as those former editor in chief of the magazine.

his book is "shuttle, houston: life in the center seat of mission control." paul, it's great to have you here by the way. >> thanks. it's great to. be here. >> excellent. talklk a little bit about the bk and how it came about. what can readers expect and why did you write it? >> well, i guess the first thing to say is we're getting a little echo here, but the very first flight director was chris craft back in the mercury days and a chris wrote a book about his days in the space program. on abf apollo. i kind of felt somebody needed to capture the view from the flight director and mission control for the program. we are seeing lots and lots of excellent books by mostly

astronauts about their years in the shuttle program. the thing i would like people to remember is that for every astronaut that flies, there are tens of thousands of people contributing to the program and there is a lot broader perspective than just what it's like to be in the cockpit or the cabin. as much as i enjoy the books because most of them are written by my friends i figured it was time to make sure we capture the viewpoints from the control center and it took a little time to write. we retired the shuttle in 2011 and i collected notes writing chapters and things like that over the years but i was very busy between then and last year with external airplanes and doing a lot of writing and flying and so it took my wife finally saying are you going to write the book or not. she really helped push that along. we got a very good publisher and

i have a wonderful editor who helped me take all of the material i put together and formulate how we wanted the book to look. one of the things i like to tell people right up front, the book covered the mercury program which was a couple of years and jeans book covered the apollo program going to the moon and that was a few years. the shuttle program lasted 30 years. the flight program lasted 30 years, the program 40 years. to try to tell the entire story of the shuttle program in virtually that was the first thing i had to wrap my head around when i got serious was to realize that all i could do is tell some stories from my point of view and i hope that a lot of books get written by people that were in the program to save the

history. that is what the book is about. hopefully the book will give people the views of the technology of the shuttle. the technology of the systems today would be considered quaint but it was very complex. i want people to understand the people that made it work, what the people that sat at mission control and did the planning and is set in this simulators and trained the astronauts, what they had to do to make it work and i want people to understand the process of what flying the shuttle was all about. it's more complex than watching star wars i will put it that way. then last, the dedication of the people and the fund that they had doing it because even though

it was an incredibly complex and many would say stressful job, if it wasn't fun, you were not going to last very long. so that is kind of the overview and what i hope people will take from it when they get the chance to read it. >> it's part history and part autobiography but it is in the entire history of the program as you said it is your window and it's not an entire autobiography, but we get a lot out of it. before i go any further, i was struck immediately because you talk about the people that came before were struck by the legacy of those flight directors and what a complicated set of forces

that created for you so can you talk about the notion of taking the center seat and particularly in light of the shoulders of the giants in which it rests. >> i was in aeronautical engineering student and i had a complex set of events i didn't think i would work in the space program and i sent in my application and got a note back saying such and such date and time. i had no idea what i was going to be doing. when i got there i discovered the people in the operations organizations asked for me and i learned later it's because i had been a pilot and was working my way through college as a instructor and technician so they figured i understood real-time operations. so i walked into the control center and i didn't have

preconceived notions of what i would see what i saw people sitting in the front room and i don't think that i recognized the flight director for what they were until a little bit later on. this is what we are going to do and how we are going to solve the problem and save the planet. they were not management and they were an inspirational leader and that is what the flight director turns out to be is a person that visibly takes control of things during a mission and i guess a little bit of that made me want to be the hero of the science fiction movies that you watch back then.

if you watch the martian movies, titled the martian, i think sean plays the flight director and he does a good job because he doesn't take anything from anybody including the administrator at nasa who says we will get these guys home first. but i started working with flight directors fairly early in my career i got fast tracked to the front of the room at mission control and started working with these guys and realized that they were made in the same image of the very earliest people off of the first directors and i was fortunate to work with both chris and jean although chris was the center director of the time so i was in all of him but it made me really realize the responsibility these people had and that they took on their

shoulders and at the same time you just are doing the job that needs to be done so they were impressive people and like you said standing on the shoulders of the giants and more than anything, you don't want to let them down. you want to make sure word that you do the best job you possibly can all the time. >> that comes through in the book and i think the launch was preparation but the sense that i got is the conductor of the orchestra if you will and i think that you even used that analogy that you were a high functioning general and might not be the smartest person but you might be the most knowledgeable in the broad base of knowledge in many cases.

can you talk a little bit about that? it's almost an archetype. >> it is. as a flight controller, you had to be very meek in your system, no every digital bit by its first name and i am not kidding when i say that. every bit had a name. you had to know all of the test data, everything there was to know about your system and not only that but you had to know about everything and how it interfaced in the system. i was in charge at one time the shuttle, one of the things i was in charge of for a while was the hydraulics that provided flight control power and the engineering manager knew more about it than i did but he didn't know anything about the hydraulic pump that connected to

it. he knew everything there was but not that much about the ap. i needed to know everything about both of them. when you became a flight director you needed to know about all of those things. we have been described many times as the conductor of the orchestra and have to understand we may not have the skills to play every instrument but we do know how they should sound. if we are good enough at what we do we are going to make everybody else in the orchestra think we know how to play the instrument as well as they do. we don't but we understand where the questions are. we had a flight director who was the chief of the office when i was a young flight controller who was incredible because you could sit in a meeting explaining a technical issue. he sat there at the end of the table and you were not quite sure whether he was awake or asleep. he would listen for hours and at the very end he would ask one

single question that blew everybody out of the water. you understood he not only heard everything but he synthesized it all and came up with the one flaw in everybody's argument and that is the kind of example of where the flight director lives. ... >> that what we learned is that you also have to submerge >> it does not do any good to stand up there and proclaim

that you are the smartest guy in the room. you need to let people figure that out or not figure that out, one way or the other. so you have to learn to ask smart questions and you have to learn to listen to the answers. and then you need to make sure that you've done away with preconceived notions. because it's easy if you've got a big ego and walk into the situation and confident you know the answers and not hear the real information, the real data. you have to let somebody off sway your arguments. >> and with your mantra being preparation and i keyed in on that in the book i felt like you were making a great case to be the most prepared person there and not prepared with belief and conclusions. >> yeah. >> i'm kind of going into that, you know, this notion of being

the best prepared person in the room seemed like it was key to your success and this is where the book to me diverged from being simply a history book or an eight autobiography, a book of communication and in some respects for some younger people, probably a fantastic career planning book. >> you saw right through it, didn't you? [laughter] >> and tell me a little about that going back to this notion of preparation was your mantra, but how did that impact your experience as a leader? >> yeah, you know, first off, you can never getting your people to do anything that you're not willing to do yourself and so, that includes being the best prepared person

in the room. if they learn something you need to learn it. when i was a very young flight controller, i moved down to houston. i had a one bedroom apartment and i had my motorcycle and that was kind of it and i had work. and what i discovered was this room on the second floor of our building, the training library, that had every work book on the shuttle program on all the systems, on all of the operations, on all of the dynamics, it had a workbooks, training manuals and workbooks and how to work the hardware and software and emission control and i went in there every day and i got another book and i took it home and at night, that's what i worked on. >> i'd sit at my desk and when i finished my co-op tour i was finished with the training manuals that they had available. so then i discovered that in

1978, when the first large astronaut class cfng's came in, they had -- and this stands for the 35 --. >> i was going to say i'm not sure if our listeners what in cfng's. >> that stands for the 35 new guys and i'm sticking with it. anyway, they videoed all the classes that were given to them and this was before beta and vhs so big old video machine tapes and every thursday night i had the machine reserved and i did not go home, i'd go up and get the machine and wheel it down to my office and spend four or five hours with those videos. a lot of it was because i was fascinated by all of it and what i learned later on is that

i was setting the stage to become a flight director just like the other few people out there doing the exact same thing and it was a minority of people on the job, but you really needed to be so well-prepared and what i always told people is if you were -- the control center, the flight director who has about a dozen flight controllers in the front room, that's the room you'd see on tv as mission control, working for him and each one of those people have a back room of people supporting them in their discipline and i always told and counseled young folks if you're a back room flight controller, you ought to think like a front room flight controller and you ought to think a level above what you're doing and now what your front room people needs and you ought to be working the interfaces with everybody. if you want to be a crackerjack front room operator, you want to think like a flight director. you want to know what does my flight director need, what

doesn't he need, is it my turn as the flight director or the problem and the other discipline is way worse than my problem so i'm going to sit back and watch what's going on. so you could tell from an early career age who was trying to become a flight director and who was not. and it was pretty obvious that you need to put in that dedication and you need to put in that work to get not only a broad knowledge, but a deep knowledge. >> and is it a case of not avoiding the rabbit holes and trying to go broad or you essentially have to go down every rabbit hole and you just have to put in the time. >> you just have to put in the time, what you discovered in the shuttle, because it was a complex system, you had lots of different electrical places where things were connected and a lot of different data gathering and command interfaces that all intertwined

and so if the electrical guy said, hey, we've lost bus abc, you needed to know what did that lose you hardware-wise and also, what did it lose you data-wise so, hey, it looks like the computer is off. it's not off we just don't have an indication that it's not on because at that telemetry was gone. kind memorization. >> you were a flight controller before you were flight director and you were supposed to poke your head in the rabbit hole and learn the flight director's job so you could one day take it. what's at odds, particularly the amount of time you were preparing, how did you handle that or what was that shakeout with being in a controller

position and really being narrowly focused? >> you know, you made a lot of points for the flight director if you said, i've got this problem with such and such, but i know that the prop is off and why don't you come back to me, i'll manage this problem for you and we'll take care of it. in doing that, you let the flight director know that you had that breadth of knowledge and he knew that you were thinking about what was going on and that you were acting almost as his assistant, right, not just somebody sitting down there in their own discipline worrying about what was best for their discipline. front row, they have to think about what's best for the mission and the back room controller thinks about what was best for the system.

and one of the best things to learn as a flight controller is, to let your system burn off, because it's, you know, you can get what you need out of it, they'll fix it when it gets to the ground, right, and sometimes you'd have to sacrifice your hardware in order to make the mission work, so that's what you did. i would joke that the jpl guys have the missions to mars and the like and they never get their hardware back, they have little attachment to their hardware. >> no, they probably approach engineering from a slightly different perspective from a less literal and figurative skin in the game. >> yeah, yeah. >> so i don't want to ask you a yes or no question and haven't figured out how to word this without a yes or no, everybody in the room is auditioning for somebody besides the flight director or-- >> no, no, it's kind of odd.

for someone like myself and my come padres who became flight directors, we didn't understand why everybody didn't want to be a flight director, right? but there were lots of people who just want to go to work and they would do the best job and go, i don't want the responsibility. i said you've got a heck of a lot of responsibility in the job you're in, and you realize that and they didn't want the-- i hate to say it this way, they wanted to have a family and kids and everything, and a lot of flight directors were single people. but the flight directors also-- i was kind of unique. as the longest-- there was a reason i was the longest term flight director in history in 20 years, that's because i absolutely loved the job. there was no other job in the space program that i wanted. most people spend five to seven

years as a flight director and then they go off and become a program manager, i mean, the last two program managers in the shut program were former flight directors of ours and they wanted to be in deputy director of the center or center director or deputy administrator of nasa. i'm a field general. i absolutely love being in the thick of the action and that's where i wanted to be because i do joke a little bit, but it's kind of true. there's an old line from that movie top gun about we don't make policy we're carrying it out. and the truth is people want to move up in nasa so they can make policy. you're never going to make policy as a civil servant. politicians make policy, and you can get disappointed if you get too high so i was always in the flight program. >> and you had found your place and that place is certainly not

for everyone and that shines through in the book and moving back to the theme of preparation, is there anything you look back on. and i know you look back a lot. and you were consulting and training. did you look back in your enown preparation if you feel like a keystone or basically forming that fairly unique set of balance? >> you know, the firstoff, i think one i think this that you had to bring into-- i guess you had to bring it in with you to nasa and into operations was leadership skills. i have spent most of my life in leadership positions and i am still not convinced-- i am not certain about whether leadership is inherent and whether it's trainable. and we can train skills and we can explain to people what good leadership is.

i learned leadership in scouting when i was a boy scout. and the more i look back on where my leadership skills come from, the more i realize that that's where it came from and an awful lot, there are an awful lot of eagle scouts running around the halls of nasa. in the astronaut office and the flight director office. and no one talks about it, but you learn that stuff there. a lot of people who learn leadership in military organizations or in sports or in clubs in college, and so you bring that in with you. and then, you know, i think that a large part of the kind of thing you had to learn was just how to put your nose to the grind stone and learn the technical aspect and then learning how to deal with

people. so in my house, we really loved watching the big bang theory not just because we knew those people, but because we were those people. >> that's the exactly same thing in my household. >> and you know, you discovered that you had to figure out how to work with people. so after i'd been a senior flight controller and it was clear that there were people who thought that i was flight director material, i was brought into a manager's office and he said you're one of the most incredible operational engineers we've ever seen, but if you don't learn how to work better with people, somebody's going to kill you. you know? and that's when i realized that, you really do need to learn how to submerge that ego and you need to let other people talk and you need to let

other people air out what they want so you've got to do that. >> and you're always tuning the skills that you have and that was a tune-up lesson? >> that was a tune-up lecture. so, you had to change your attitude from, okay, i've got this technical stuff down really, really well. i understand how spaceships work and i understand how we fly spaceships, now i have to learn how to fly people. and i tell people really crackerjack technical skills will get you a long ways, but you'll hit a ceiling until you learn how to, would-- work with, communicate and understand other people and that's when you're going to make that leap into a leadership role and people are going to feel good working for you. i really ended up in the role of institutional mentor for flight control skills and tasks.

i mean, it got to the point, when i was doing simulations, i was part of a training team and helping the training team put in situations for my flight controllers so they would get the lessons they needed and then i had constant steady stream of flight controllers coming through my office when we weren't in the control center, wanted to sit down and see what they could learn. so that was kind of fun. >> and i want to come back to that message shift. you have some inside baseball stories in the book that were fascinating and fun and i'm curious, how important was it as part of your leadership style and as part of what you did, to have some fun and some diversion, clearly what you were doing was serious. >> yeah, so, watching perseverance land on mars the other day was exciting because there was this new story about how they encoded the jpl motto

and the location of jpl, latitude and longitude into the parachutes using ascii binary code and they said these jpl guys have so much fun. why were you such stick in the muds when you flew the shuttle. >> i love the jpl guys, and i flew payload for them and knocked my socks off, incredible stuff so i think it's neat, but the thing you have to remember is that, they are not putting human lives at risk. and the human lives we're putting at risk are people who are putting their lives at risk knowingly and for a reason. so it's not a grim kind of thing. but you learn that it really would look horrible if you lost somebody and then people found that you were messing around.

and so we were always very, very image conscious. if you were sitting in a meeting planning a mission and somebody said, hey, wouldn't it be cool if-- that killed that idea. you didn't need to hear the idea because we never did anything because it was cool. what we were doing was cool enough. we're launching people into space, for heavens sake in a winged vehicle that weighs 200,000 pounds, right? this is amazing stuff. this is cool enough for you, right? so we always had to be very, very careful not to be -- not to appear frivolous in any way, but at the same time we wanted to have some fun. so, yeah, you know, we did some cool stuff and maybe some of these were in a book and some aren't. what people wouldn't notice is sometimes -- and this would happen more often with the

space station now days than with the shuttle. if you're going to have a good, a clear night middle of the night in houston and you're flying a mission and you're going to have a path that flies right over houston and we were it was going to be right overhead, we'd designate one person to be the watch keeper and everybody else would go outside and we'd abandon the space center and watch the space capsule overhead and we'd call up the crew, hey, we just watched you fly over. now, if something bad happened right at that moment when you were gone, everybody's career would have been over that was involved. the flight director for certain would have gotten in trouble so you had to be careful to pick that. there were some fun times we have, so every astronaut got to fly a little personal preference kit, ppk. and usually there would be a couple of things they'd take, ask to have things for -- they'd take things for friends and family that they could bring back and say, hey, this

watch fob flew in space or this whatever. and i had a mission where i was lead flight director and my lead cap com was in charge of making sure that stuff got into the crew's ppk's and somebody calls you up and they say i need stuff for their ppk. have you got anything? and he walked into my office and i looked around my office and on my wall was a minnesota golden gopher's patch. this wasn't mine, it was from my mother's and she graduated golden gophers and i said, fly this. he took it. the next thing i know i see video coming down from the spacecraft and i see the

lockers and on it is taped the minnesota golden gophers patch and all i could think they opened the book and found the purple and gold gopher and had no earthly idea what it was, what it meant and taped it to the wall to the locker so somebody would see it on the ground so we have fun things like that and then, i'll give you two more stories. one was we would do rendezvous simulations and when you're flying a rendezvous and you're getting close to the space station or your target, the closer you get, the slower you want to go. and so we had what we called breaking gates. so at a thousand yards you wanted to be doing this speed and if you go the to that thousand yards and you weren't, you'd brake to make sure you're at that speed and 500 yards you wanted to be slower yet and 100

yards slower yet. those were called breaking gates and you always want today fly your breaking gates. if were faster than your breaking gates then were you hot dogging it. well, we had such a thing as friday breaking gates for simulations. you know, you've been in the control center all week, guys have been in the cockpit all week and it's three in the afternoon and things are going slow and somebody would simply say, friday braking gates and man, that spacecraft would go into the space station and dock at warp speed. it would leak, boom, we're out of here, everybody i'll meet you at the outpost. that was the local bar. if you ever saw the movie "the right stuff", there was poncho's bar. we had the outpost. the only thing holding it up

was termites were holding hands. the place eventually burned down and fortunately, the fire department and the people inside at the time understood the value of the momentos, they basically said let the structure burn, let's get the momentos out. >> it was all the momentos that were saved and the bar was gone. the last story i'll tell you, it was not uncommon off a shift in the control center for folks to want to have a beer together. that worked great and meet the outpost or the singing wheel or whatever except that at 3 a.m. if you got on console, the bars were closed. and so for a long time, people would meet out in the recreation, in the parking lot of the rec center, and somebody would have a cooler in the trunk of their car and pull out beer and have beer before they

went home and then security didn't like that because they'd get calls there were people out in the woods at the rec center crinking drinking beer at 3 in the morning. and they said i've smoothed it over with security and we had a saturn five building, it was air concerned for the tourists and he said, on nights when you guys want to blow off steam. call this number, chief security desk they'll go out an hour before turn on lights and air conditioning in the building in the saturn 5 building and drink to your hearts content all night. >> i love it, turn a museum into a bar. >> and you'd be drinking under the engines of saturn 5.

it was like drinking in church. this is like a cathedral and just always something really wild about that, but something we enjoyed doing so if they got a call from the flight director console, they would open it up and turn the air conditioning on for us, it was great. >> fantastic. i want to mention to our watchers and listeners that you've been doing a great job putting your questions in and we will get to them. and if you take a look at the questions there, you can upload the ones you want to be answered first or most likely, and i'm not out of questions yet, but we will get to those questions so please-- i haven't been sprinkling them throughout because it seems like we've had a narrative. love the inside baseball stories and kind of along the notion of being center seat, eventually as you said you've become the mentor and

eventually the senior mentor, you're the one that has been around the longest and looks up to. have things changed at nasa by then and was the mission changing at nasa, did that change the organization? >> it did. i'm a traditionalist, i'm a real traditionalist and when i learn something that's a tradition and i'm an idealist, i learned from the best. i learned from the guys who flew apollo, who took us to the moon. i learned from gene krantz and from the early flight directors. i wanted to make sure that we didn't lose those lessons, but nasa changed. the problem with the shuttle program was nasa was a research organization. it was not designed to be an operational organization. it was not designed to run an airlines. and we were always caught in

this dichotomy of we want to keep flying the shuttle and there were attempts to turn it over to contractors, but it's like kind of like hiring a contractor to fight your war for you if you're a nation. some things should be under the direct control of those with profits in mind. and serve the will of the people and serve the constitution, so to speak. and so, once we started flying lots and lots of missions and the early programs, there was assessment. we're going to fly 50 missions a year or a week and you could never do it with four shuttles and couldn't do it with the staffing we had, it was impossible, but we did fly 12 in one year and it got really, really busy. so we got into this mode of trying to put-- to systemize everything.

every controller would see the same set of failures in their training and when they saw them all then they were ready to be certified. we had problems with this, they weren't developing the basic philosophical skills. they were checking off bits and pieces, but they weren't getting the subjective part of the thing. so we'd do evacuations and they had their training, but they didn't have their training subjective and they'd fail the cert and that's when guys like me would come in and help mentor in the soft skills of doing the job. you know, we tried to create an assembly line and it wasn't an assembly line product. we were building custom one-offs. it was like custom boats, not production line boats and you really needed to know -- you need to be honest about what your real goals are. this is why i am a big

supporter of the big commercial space guys. elon and the guys that are doing all of these commercial programs because nasa should be in the business of fundamental research and exploration. nasa should be going to the moon. they shouldn't be trying to figure out how to get people back and forth to the space station. we've got that knowledge, we can give that to somebody. the predecessor to nasa would be naca, the national advisory committee for aeronautics and most of the this i think so that created the modern structure came out of basic naca research, but they did not try to run an airlines. >> and nasa, we've done my limited view as an aviate and airplane building. nasa is the source of all things research. you want to learn about an air

foil it's going to be-- >> it's naca stuff. >> yeah. >> and there's an inside baseball for you, i worked with a lot of guys that actually worked at naca, and then they transferred to nasa sort of thing and they always said naca, but never said. naca n-a-c-a-. >> it has a-- >> the guys like chris, and krantz, out of naca they called it "the n-a-c-a-"and say an naca air foil. >> so who knows. you sort of answered a question that lawrence asked, and on the q & a, i'm sorry. and i'll read the questions and see if there's anything more you can add. >> how do you feel watching

spacex control room versus nasa going to the iss? >> it's different, a different crowd. a different set of social mores. just as we lost two shuttles, we lot two shuttles and their crews in over 200 flights. it's going to happen to elon and how they treat the business will reflect on them when they do. and if you treat it frivolously, then you're going to have a problem. but i thought i've seen them be very serious over what they do. i've seen them doing a lot more cheering and that kind of thing which is very cool because they should be enthusiastic about it, but you also need to always remember that -- and i think -- i don't think they need to remember it, i think that people watching it need to know and remember that they take the job seriously. let me put it that way.

and you know, if you take a look at any post landing celebration from apollo, guys waving flags and smoking cigars, they were blowing off steam and they can do that because it landed. >> and what your perception is, i think there's a very big sense at that they understand they're standing on the shoulders of giants as well. >> oh, i think they do and that's the place -- it's a neat place to go work, now. i've had a chance to visit spacex and blue origins, and virgin and all of those people and talk to them about flying people in space. their senior management has me and some astronauts and other flight directors come by and visit and i got a call from one of the companies that basically said that, some of my former guys were working there and they called me up, paul, we're getting ready to fly our first

humans i don't recall what company it was, i need you to come and put the fear of god into these people. we just need you to come and just tell them how serious it is and what they're about to do. and i've done that and they appreciated it. >> and the most popular question on q & a. can you share your best day on the job or the worse? >> the worse day on the job has to be losing a spacecraft. interestingly enough, i was a flight controller at the time of the loss of challenger and i was not on that mission, i was on the next mission so i was training for the next mission and we were going to a meeting to work on checklists and we stopped to watch the launch and we knew instantly when we saw the fourth tail of smoke that it was over. there was nothing, there was no hope. columbia i'd been a flight director for years and i was flying every mission to the

space station and every mission, mir. at last mission of columbia was not going to the space station, it was a research mission, it was my mission off. it was one mission that i was not working directly, and i wasn't even paying attention to it to a certain extent i really took it off and had gone to the airport that morning to fly and the weather sucked and it was foggy and headed home and i stopped at an auto parts store to pick up something and saw my flight jacket and they said what happened with columbia and i said i don't know what happened with columbia. i don't know, it came down in pieces over dallas and no longer said that and my pager went off and phone was ringing, and i set up the center liaison with the rest of the world something like out of the map

and mapping where the pieces were in texas and managing a whole bunch of aircraft we were using for search and recovery and stuff. and it was a bad day. but and i don't want to ever make light of that because there's nothing light about it by that time i lost a lot of friends in flying machine. aeronautical flying machines and spacecraft and i'd gotten very used to that kind of thing happening. you don't ever-- you don't ever learn to like it you should never learn to like it do everything you can to avoid it and then, you know, the problem with the best day in the control center is every day in the control center was -- the worst day in the control center was better than the best day in the office anytime. the best times in the control center was when the team was absolutely clicking. so i'll give you one example. we flew a mission, a radar

mission where we were mapping the entire planet and we had to be absolutely ready to go every time we came feet dry or we were going to miss stuff and we went feet wet off and a pass of 53 minutes long until we were feet dry on africa and we lost our altitude control thrusters and we it simmed and my team clicked, it took us most all of that time and we were absolutely back in attitude than before where we needed to be before we came on africa. watching the team click like that, all i had to do was stand back and die outof -- stay out of the way. >> the best day is when you solve the problem. >> very, very good thank you on that. did you ever wish you were on the flight rather than standing

in mission control? >>. [laughter] >> the truth of the matter is almost everybody that chose to work at johnson space center wanted to be an astronaut when they get there and i kept aflying to the astronaut office and moving up in the selection process in terms of-- i finally reached the point i was a flight director already and i got the call saying, you know, before we put you in interview, what exactly is your uncorrected vision, paul? and of course, they already knew because they had my medical records because they had been taking care of my my whole career, and so by that point in time, the crews were all working for me when we were flying, so, it would have been really fun to do a single flight just say you did it, but it's a long haul to be in the astronauts office and spending years getting ready for that one flight.

yeah, i had a pretty good career. >> probably a lot of space tourism is going to be spabl at -- available at some point. >> yeah, not at my pay range. >> and you could have the inside deal on that. >> see if somebody offers me a discount. my advantage is i've been a pilot my whole life and a lot of experimental aviation and flight testing. and do that fun stuff. if i didn't get a chance to get in an airplane every day or every other day then i might think differently gee, it would have been fun with the space flight. >> and this is another question that came in. do you think that shuttle program ended when it did or should it have continued? was it a reasonable end? was it more political and

policy than operation? >> i can say this now because i don't work for nasa anymore. ending the shuttle when we did. the goal was to build the space station and once we finished the space station we retired the shuttle. it was a political decision, i call it a loss of national will. if you polled individual people and citizens we had the majority of support, but politicians didn't want to keep going and they didn't like the risk. so i think we should have continued flying the shuttle for quite a bit longer and because it carried a whole lot of stuff up and back and it was designed to service the space station and we probably could have continued building onto the space station and it would have been a much bigger thing. no, i think that we retired the shuttle early and i'd like to see it continue to fly.

>> you answered one of the other questions. do you think the program was underappreciated by the public? >> i think people, you know, we're a victim of our own success. oh, yeah, the shuttle went up again. well, it did that six times this year, so what, all right? when you become successful and people stop paying attention, it's not exciting anymore. i tell you what, it was exciting every time you looked at those shuttle engines, it was never boring. >> no doubt. do you think shuttle inspired some of what goes on around the rest of the world with different space programs? >> oh it absolutely did. we boot-strapped a lot of programs, and what applied and that research organization again, we gave away what we learned because that's what we were -- that's what we were tasked to do. we'd take public money, get knowledge out of it and put the knowledge out there for people to use.

so, yeah, it always pays for itself. >> so, it streaks me that probably going to handle the milk runs, now, to and from orbit, and definitely not with the capacity to bring as much back. do you think nasa's going back to a little bit of its roots with going back into the exploration business? >> i hope so. and i stay very well-connected with my friends in houston and the newer generation of flight directors and i know what's going on and they're working hard to get back to a lunar presence. i personally would rather see a robust lunar presence before we go to mars to make sure that when we go to mars, we can do it to stay. and we need to practice on the moon where we're only three days from earth, rather than get to mars where you're half a year from earth and have a

problem. >> yeah, one of the last questions, how do you deal with stress? particularly and i'll add this in. you were in the role where so much of the weight of what was going on was on your shoulders. >> the pat answer to that, if you're given to react to stress in a negative way, you're not going to qualify as a flight director. i can tell you that before a mission if i was getting spun up, i would get in my airplane and fly a bunch of aerobatics to help me unwind and relax a little bit. once you're in the middle you're so busy you don't have time to be stressed. you just, you plow ahead. >> i love it. i love it. so we're almost out of time, but i'm going to hit you with one last question and it's -- it conceals my very strong

opinion. you're an extremely strong writer. it shows in the book. i've experienced it firsthand in, you know, we're on the same aircraft forums because we built the same kinds of airplanes, but i'm curious about -- and editor and chief of a magazine and editor at large. and what degree in nasa did writing take place? >> i think that writing and communication are the same thing, verbal or written and without a doubt the ability to formulate your thoughts to write them down in a suscinct manner and pass them up the line gets you noticed. if you can write a well-thought out suscinct and meaningful essay in one page on a topic that sells the reasons why something should be a certain way, that's going to get you

noticed. there's no question about that. >> well, i'd like to again reiterate that the book is extraordinarily well written. it's not just history, it's not just -- it's not just an autobiography, it's an extraordinary book that's developed. and i mentioned earlier on career planning, hit you up for an organization in reno called pathways to aviation, i'd like to encourage all of our watchers and our listeners, if you look below our faces you'll see a big green button that says buy book. and you'll do very well to be buying this book. and so, what else would you like to say? we're probably down to seconds if not just a minute. >> well, i just want to thank tucson festival of books for asking me to come and talk, it's really been fun and yes, the last couple of chapters in

the book are really lessons that we've learned over the years on leadership and the ways that you can be more successful in complex operations and so, yeah, that -- i'm glad you recognized that and that was the intent. so, thank you so much for having me here and for everybody who is watching. >> thank you. >> a little bit of -- i've got to switch screens here, had a little bit of my -- so that's it for us today, everyone. a thank you to paul for your participation today, thank you all the readers for attending. if you get the chance and can make it to the tucson festival of books or we'd love to have you sign up for the festival newsletter and again, thank you for engineering and technology and lynn and lenny snyder for

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and then tyranny on a book task. book tv is tonight, starting at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span2. >> ♪♪ >> the secret service was founded in the aftermath of the assassination of abraham lincoln. it wasn't until the death of john f kennedy that the presidential protection service began to get closer attention from the american people. carol lennox began reporting in 2012. in the prologue of her new book, zero fail, she started on hooker gate in which agents brought prostitutes to their hotel room while making arrangements for president obama to visit colombia.

>> and listen at c-span.org/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪♪ >> up next, new yorker writer, nicholas schmidle on the formation of the virgin galactic, and this is hosted by roman's bookstore. >> i'd like to thank you all for roman's bookstore. we are lucky to have nicholas schmidle, his new book "test gods", and it does contain a q & a, so if you want to ask a question, click the button at the bottom and if you'd like to purchase the book, click the green button. and with that out of the w