conversation at the virtual 2021 tucson festival of books. he wrote shuttle houston, life in the center seat of mission control. >> today for the panel shuttle houston, four decades of aviation experience as engineer, builder, and pilot, retired from nasa in 2013, as the longest serving flight director in history and the leader of several missions. he received a nasa outstanding leadership medal, three service medals and the presidential medal. he is now a leadership consultant and speaker, former editor and chief of a magazine. his book is my life in the center seat of mission control. paul, it's great to have you here by the way. 123450 -- >> well, thanks, it is great to

be here. >> excellent. talk about the book and how it came about. what did readers expect, and why did you write it? >> i guess the first thing to say is that we're getting -- we're getting a little echo there. the very first flight director was back in the mercury days, and chris wrote a book about his days in the space program. and then another book was written "failure is not an option" about the years as a flight director for apollo. i felt somebody needed to capture the view from the flight director console and mission control for the shell program. there are now -- we're seeing lots and lots of excellent books by mostly astronauts about their years in the shuttle program, and the thing i like people to remember is that for every astronaut that flies, there are tens of thousands of people contributing to the program, and there's a lot broader perspective than just what it's

like to be in the cockpit or in the cabin. and so as much as i enjoy the astronaut books, most of them are written by my friends. i figured it was time that we captured some of the viewpoint from the control center. and it took a little time to write. i retired in 2013. we retired the shut until 2011. -- we retired the shuttle in 2011. i started collecting notes and writing chapters over the years. but i was very busy between then and when we came out with the book last year with experimental airplanes, doing a lot of writing and flying. so it took my wife to finally say are you going to write the book or not? and so she really helped push that along. we got a very good publisher, and i have a wonderful editor there, who helped me take all of the material that i had put together and formulate how we wanted the book to look. and so one of the things that i like to tell people right up

front is chris's book covered the -- flight director in the mercury program which was a couple of years. and gene's book covered the apollo program and going to the moon. that was a few years. the shuttle program lasted 30 years. the flight program lasted 30 years. the program lasted 40 years. to try and tell the entire story of the shuttle program is virtually impossible. that was the first thing i had to wrap my head around when i got serious about putting the book together, was to realize that all i could do was 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 of what everybody's [inaudible] looked like. that's what the book is about. hopefully the book will give people some inside views of the technology of the shuttle, which we tend to think of as extremely

high-tech, and it is, but it was very high-tech for 1970 and 1980. you know, the technology, the computer systems today would be considered quaint, but it was a very complex system. i want people to understand the people that made it work, what the people that actually sat in mission control and did the planning and sat in the simulators and trained the astronauts, what they had to do to make it work, and then i want people to understand some of what the process of flying the shuttle was all about. it's a lot more complex, let me put it that way. lastly, the dedication of the people and the fun they had doing it because even though it was an incredibly complex and many would say stressful job, if it wasn't fun, you weren't going to last very long. so that's kind of the overview of the book and what i hope people will take from it when they get a chance to read it.

>> i have read it and enjoyed it very much. thank you very much. it is part history and part autobiography, but it is clear not the entire history of the program. it's your window. it is clearly not an entire autobiography, but we get a lot of you out of it. i'm going to dig into a little of that. but before i go any further with that notion, i was struck immediately -- because you get into it immediately when you talk about the people that came before -- the two programs that came before, i was struck by the legacy of those prior flight directors, and i guess the complicated set of forces that must have created for you. can you talk about this notion of taking the center seat and what it entailed, particularly in light of the shoulders of giants on which it rest? >> you know, when i was given the opportunity to become a co-op student at nasa.

i was an aeronautical engineering student. a complex set of seventh -- complex set of events, i set an application, i get a note back report to houston at such a date and such a time. i had no idea what i would be doing. i learned later i was asked because i had been a pilot since high school and i was working my way through college as a scuba diving instructor and technician, and so they figured i kind of understood real-time operations. i walked in the control center. i didn't have any preconceived notion of what i was going to see. i saw a group of people sitting in the front room, and i don't think i really recognized the flight director for what they were until a little bit later on, and i describe it in sort of an odd sort of way.

if you have watched the science fiction movies from the 50s and 60s, there was always something threatening the survival of the planet. the politicians would be arguing about this. there were all sorts of people at the bottom, and there was always one strong leader who took charge and said this is how we will solve the problem and save the planet. they weren't management. they weren't worker bees. they were an inspirational leader. that's really what the flight director turns out to be. it's the person that visibly takes control of things during a mission and the planning for the mission, and i guess a little bit of that made me want to be the hero of those science fiction movies that you watched back then. if you watch the martian movie, titled "the martian", the flight director does a really good job in there, but he doesn't take anything from anybody including his administrator at the nasa who after his resignation, he said that's fine, we're going to

get these guys home first and then you can have it. but i started working with flight directors fairly early in my career. i kind of got fast tracked to the front room of mission control and started working with these guys, and i realized that they were made in the same image of the very earliest people, the first three flight directors, chris craft, john hodge, and gene cranz, and i was fortunate to work with both chris and gene a little bit, but gene a lot more than chris. chris was the center director at the time. i was just kind of in awe of him. but it really made me realize the responsibility that these people had as they took on their shoulders -- that they took on their shoulders, and at the same time, you are just doing the job. you are doing the job that needs to be done. they were very very impressive people. like you say, standing on the shoulders of giants, and more than anything, you don't want to let them down. you don't want to let history

down. you want to make darn sure that you do the best job you possibly can all the time. >> that sense really comes through in the book, and your mantra i think was preparation. but the sense i got was the people that sit in center seat, that are the conductor of the orchestra, if you will, and i think you used that analogy, that you are all high functioning generals. >> yeah. >> you may not be the smartest person on any one thing, but you might actually be the most knowledgeable broadly, at least you had the broad basic knowledge rather than in many cases the depth. can you talk a little bit about that? it's almost an [inaudible]. >> it is. as a flight controller, you had to be very very deep in your

system. you had to know every digital bit by its first name. and i'm not kidding when i say that. i mean, every bit had a name. you need to know everything about it. you had to know all the test data. you need to know everything there was about your system. you need to know everything about how it interfaced with the other system. so i was in charge at one time of the shuttle -- one of the things i was in charge for a while was the shuttle auxiliary power units and hydraulics system which provided flight control power. and the engineering manager of the apu knew more about the apu than i did, but he didn't know anything about the hydraulic pump that attached to it. the manager of the hydraulic pump knew everything there was about the hydraulic pump and not that much about apu. i needed to know everything about both of them. when you became a flight director, you needed to know a lot about all of those things. so yeah, we have been described many times as the conductor of

the orchestra. we have to understand -- we may not have the skill to play every instrument, but we know how they should sound, and if we're good enough at what we do, we're going to make everybody else in the orchestra think we know how to play their instruments as well as they do. we don't, but we understand where the questions are. we had a flight director who was chief of the flight director office when i was a young flight controller, tommy holloway who was incredible, because you could sit in a -- in a meeting with tommy explaining a technical issue. he sat there at the end of the table, you weren't quite sure whether tommy was awake or asleep. he would listen for hours to the arguments and what was going on, and at the very end, he would ask one single question that blew everybody out of the water. you understood that he not only heard everything, but he synthesized it all and came up with the one flaw in everybody's argument. and that's kind of an example of where the flight director lived.

>> knowing how to get right to the heart of an issue is a rare trait. that can lead to an enormous amount of information. >> it's what we look for. it does take a certain amount of courage and confidence to sit in the center seat. you have to -- first off, you have to show confidence, just like the captain of a ship, you can't show fear. you can't show that you are not on top of things because then your people won't have confidence in what you are doing. but what we learned is that you also have to submerge your ego. 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 either 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 you have done away with

preconceived notions because it is really easy if you've got a big ego to walk into a situation, be confident that you know it, you know the answers and not hear the real information and the real data. you have to be willing to let somebody sway your argument. going back to what you were mentioning earlier with your mantra being preparation. i keyed in on that in the book that i felt like you were making a very good case to be the most prepared person there, but not to be prepared with beliefs, but inclusions, to be prepared with the foundation for which you could draw conclusions. >> right, yeah. >> going into that, you know, this notion of being the best prepared person in the room seems like it was key to your success, and this is where the book to me diverts from being simply a history book or simply an autobiography.

it became a leadership book, a book on leadership, a book on followership, a book on organizational communication, and in some respects, for some younger people, it's probably a fantastic career planning book. >> you saw right through it, didn't you? [laughter] >> tell me a little bit about that, again going back to the notion of preparation was your mantra, but how did that impact your experience as a leader? >> yeah. you know, first off, you can never expect your people to do anything that you are not willing to do yourself, and that includes being the best prepared person in the room. if they learn something, you need to learn it. when i was a young flight controller, i moved down to houston. i had a one bedroom apartment. 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 the operations, on all of the dynamics. it had work book and training manuals on mechanics. it had work books and manuals on how to work all the hardware and software at mission 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 developed a habit early on of not taking lunch. i would sit at my desk and read a work book. when i finished my co-op tour, i was already finished with all the training manuals that they had available. so then i discovered that in 1978, when the first large astronaut class came in, they had -- and that stands for the

35 new guys, tfng's, and i'm sticking with it. anyways, they videoed all the classes that were presented to the tfng's, and they had all the videotapes. this was back before beta and vhs, big old sony video machine tapes. every thursday night i would have the machine reserved. i would go up and get the machine and wheel it to my office and spend four or five hours watching those videos. so a lot of it was just 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 that were out there doing the exact same thing, and it was a minority of people in the job. but you really needed to be so well prepared, and then what i

always told people is if you were -- the control center has the flight director who has about a dozen flight controllers in the front room. that's the room you see on tv as mission control working for him, and then each one of those people has a back room of people supporting them in their discipline. i always told and counselled young folks that if you are a back room flight controller, you ought to think like a front room flight controller. you want to thinking a level above of what you are doing so you know what your front room person needs, and you want 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. right? you want to know what does my flight director need? what doesn't he need? is it my turn to bug the flight director? or is the problem in the other discipline is way worse than my problem so i'm going to sit back and watch what's going on? 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. >> is it a case of not avoiding the rabbit holes and go broader, is it a case where you essentially have to go down every rabbit hole and you just have to put in the time? >> you have to put in the time. what you discovered in the shuttle, because it was a very complex system, you had a lot 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 just lost abc, you needed to know what did that lose you and also what did it lose you data wise? it looks like the computer is

off. it is not really off. we just don't have an indication that it's not on because of the telemetry. it was almost memorization, but i hate memorizing, so i had a lot of cheat sheets with the data. there were a lot of rabbit holes to go down. >> you were a flight controller before you were a flight director. when you were supposed to live in the rabbit hole and poke your head up enough to live in the flight director's job so you could one day take it. when it was at odds, particularly in the amount of time you spent preparing, how did you handle that or what was that shakeout with being in the controller's position really being narrowly focused as opposed to the [inaudible]? >> you made a lot of points with the flight director if you said i have this problem with such and such, but i know that they

over there have a much bigger problem, so why don't you deal with them first and come back to me. i will manage this problem for you, and we'll take care of it. and in doing that, you let the flight director know that you had that breadth of knowledge and you knew that 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 room operator, front room flight controller can't think about what's best for their system. they have to think about what's best for the mission. the back room flight controller thinking about what's best for their system, and then, you know, one of the toughest things to learn as a flight controller is, you know, to let your system burn up because it's -- you know, you can get what you need out of it, but they will fix it when it gets to the ground, right? and sometimes you would have to sacrifice your hardware in order

to make the mission work. that's what you did. i always joked that the jpl guys fly all these missions to mars and the like, and they never get their hardware back. they have very little attachment to their hardware. >> they probably approach engineering from a slightly different perspective with less literal and less figurative skin in the game. >> yeah, yeah. yep, yep. >> so i don't want to ask you a lot of yes or no questions. i haven't figured out how to word this one. everybody's in that room is auditioning for something except the flight director, or am i missing something? >> no, you know, it became kind of odd because for someone like myself, and my companions who became flight directors, we couldn't understand -- we didn't intuitively understand why everybody didn't want to be a flight director; right? but there were lots of people who just wanted to go to work

and do the best dog-gone job they did and they would go i don't want the responsibility. you have a heck of a lot of responsibility in the job you are in. you do realize that; right? they didn't want the -- they wanted -- i hate to say it this way, they wanted to have a family and kids and everything. a lot of flight directors were single people. but the flight directors also -- i was kind of unique, there was the reason i was the longest serving flight director in space flight history, and it was 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 shuttle program were former flight director of ours. or they wanted to be deputy director of the center or center director or deputy administrator of nasa.

i'm a field general. i absolutely love being right in the thick of the action. that's where i wanted to be. 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 just carrying it out. the truth of the matter is people want to move up in nasa so they can make policy. you are never going to make policy as a civil servant. politicians make policy. civil servants carry it out. you can get real disappointed if you get too high. i always tried to do the best job we could in the flight program. >> and knowing that that was -- you had found your place, and that place certainly is not for everyone. i think that's shines through in the book. moving back to the theme of preparation, is there anything you look back on and i know you look back on a lot because you do leadership consulting and training, that you look back

[no audio] :: the clerk: washington, d.c., july 8, 2021. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable tammy duckworth, a senator from the state of illinois, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: patrick j. leahy, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until 3:00 p.m. on monday, july 12, 2021. my leadership skills come fromy the more i realize that is where it came from.

and there are an awful lot of eagle scouts running around the halls of nasa. the astronaut office >> in the astronaut office and a flight director office. you touched on it but you learn that stop 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 i think that a large part of the kind of thing you had to learn was just how to put your nose to the grindstone and learn the technical aspects. p and then learning how to deal with people. we used to in my house we really loved watching the big bang theory. not just because we knew those people, it's because we were those people. >> that's exact same thing in my household.

>> yes. 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 there were people who thought i was flight director material, i was brought in to my managers office and he said, paul, 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 someone is going to kill you. that's when i realized you really do need to learn how to submerge that ego and need too let other people talk. you need to let other people err out what they want. >> and you are always tooting the skills that you have i felt like that was a tuneup question. >> that was a tuneup lecture. you have to change your attitude

from okay, i've got this technical stuff and really, really well. i understand the spaceships work and i understand how we fly spaceships. now i need to figure how to fly people. then i tell people that really crackerjack technical skills will get you a long ways, but you hit the ceiling until you learn how to work with, communicate, and understand other people. . that's we make the leap into a leadership role where people will feel good working for you. i really ended up in the role of institutional mentor for flight control skills. when i would do simulations they were not trying to train me i was part of the training team and helping the training team put in situations for flight controller so they would get the lessons they

needed and then the constant steady stream of flight controllers coming to my office who wanted to sit down and see what they can learn. host: you have some insight it is fascinating and it is fun aiming curious how important was it with your leadership style clearly what you are doing. >> watching perseverance land on mars was exciting because there was a story about how they encoded the jpl latitude and longitude into the parachute into ascii code and i thought that was so neat. somebody sent me a note to say

they have so much fun why were you are stick in the night when you flew shadow? i love the jpl guys they knock my socks off i think it is neat but the thing you have to remember is that they are not putting human lives at risk. the human lives we are putting at risk are those that knowingly and for a reason it's not a grim kind of thing but you learn it would really look horrible if you lost somebody and then they found out you were messing around so we were always very image-conscious. if you are sitting in a meeting planning and mission and somebody said wouldn't it be cool if?

that would kill the idea you don't even need to hear it because we never did anything because it was cool. what we were doing was cool enough. were launching people into space for heaven sakes and bringing them back in a winged vehicle 200,000 pounds. this is amazing stuff this should be cool enough for you but we always had to be very careful not to appear frivolous in any way but at the same time we wanted to have fun so we did some cool stuff and what people wouldn't notice this would happen more often with the space station that if you have a good clear night in houston and flying a mission and fis right over houston and we knew it would rain overhead we would

designate one person to be the watch keeper everybody else goes outside and we would come back inside and call up the crew and say we watched you fly over. know if something bad had happened right at that moment when you were gone everybody's career would have been over. the flight director for sure so you have to be very careful but there were some fun times everybody got to fly a little personal preference kits. they asked to have things they take things for friends and family that they can bring back that this flew in space or whatever. and my lead cap, made sure

that staff got into the crew pd k and said i need stuff do you have anything? and walks into my office and on the wall was a minnesota golden gophers patch. it wasn't mine it was from my mother's letter jacket. i said here fly this. so he took it. the next thing i know, i see video coming down and the lockers and taped onto it is a minnesota golden gophers patch and all i could think of is when the crew open the book to see this purple and gold gopher and had no earthly idea what it meant and what it was

for but they taped it to the wall on the lockers of somebody would see it on the ground so we had fun things like that. i will give you two more stories. we would do rendezvous simulations. closer you get the slower you want to go coming up on your target so at 1000 yards he went to go the speed if you got to the thousand yards then that's great and you always want to fire breaking games and if you are faster than you would really hotdog it.

we had friday breaking gates for simulations. you going to the control center all week and it is three in the afternoon and things are going slow. and somebody would simply say friday breaking gates and then that spacecraft would go on network speed. which the outpost was the local bar. if you ever saw the movie, the right stuff it was ponchos bar. it was called the outpost the only thing keeping the outpost from falling down that the termites were holding hands. the place eventually burned down. fortunately the fire department and people in the place at the time understood the value of all of the mementos on the wall and said

let the structure burn get everything out. pitchers, patches, no wallpaper or paint it was all mementos at all got saved. and then the last story i would tell you is that it was not uncommon for the control center for them to grow and have a beer together and then meet at the outpost but at 3:00 a.m. the bars were close so for a long time they would meet in the parking lot of the rec center. and then they just have a beer and then go home. but then ahead of center operations called us up and

said you need to do something so i smoothed over was security and here is what we will do. the saturn five building on display they build the building around the rocket it was her condition for the tourist. so call this number at the chief security desk and then to turn on the lights and air-conditioning and you can go drink to your hearts content there all night. but then you go out there and drink underneath the f1 engine of the saturn five. it was like drinking in church. and there is something always really wild about that. so they got a call from the flight directors littleton up

and turn the air conditioning on for us. it was great. host: if you look at the questions then you can upload the ones you want to answer first or most likely. >> i'm not out of questions yet but we seem like we have a little bit of a narrative going. i love the inside baseball stories with the notion because eventually you become a senior mentor. you have been around the longest. have things changed at nasa by then? and with that mission changing at nasa does it change the

organization? >> it dead. i am a real traditionalist and i am an idealist i learned from the best and the guys from the other flight directors and i want to make sure we didn't lose those lessons. that nasa changed. the problem with the show program that nasa was a research organization. it was not designed to be running an airline. and then to turn the shuttle over to contractors but it's like hiring a contractor to

fight your work for you if you are a nation something should be under the direct control of the people who don't have profits in mind and are there to serve the good of the people. so once we started flying lots of missions and then to 550 missions a year, that is one a week you cannot do it with the staffing we had. it was impossible that we do 512 in one year and it got busy. so we got into the mode to systematize everything that every flight controller would see the exact same set of failures in their training and when they saw them and we always had problems with it because they were not developing the basic

philosophical skills but checking off dix on - - bits and pieces but not getting the subjective part so we do evaluations they have the training objectives met but not subjective zen fail. so that's when guys like me would help to mentor them on those of the soft skills to do the job. we try to create and assembly-line it was not in assembly-line product it's like custom boats not production line boats. and you really need to know of the big supporter of the commercial space program guys elon musk and commercial programs because nasa should be in the business of

fundamental research and the exploration and should go to the moon they shouldn't be figuring out how to get people back and forth to the space station. we have that knowledge. the predecessor to nasa would be an aca but the airline structure came out of that research but they did not try to run an airline. host: but that's based on my limited view of an airplane though there but not to your level that nasa is the source of all things research. >> yes it would be an aca stuff and that's inside baseball. i work with a lot of guys that actually worked at an aca then

transferred to nasa they always say nasa but they always said the and aca. host: like it has a bad connotation. >> i don't know but the guy that came out always call that the and aca. >> you answer the question but i will read the questions how do you feel watching the space x control room? >> it is a little different. it is a younger crowd. they have a different set of search. but just as we lost two

shuttles and their crews and 135 flights it will happen to elon musk. how they treat the business will reflect on them when they do if you treated frivolously then you will have a problem but i have seen them be very serious at what they do i've seen them do a lot more cheering which is cool because they should be enthusiastic about it but always remember i don't think they need to remember but people watching need to know they take the job seriously. let me put it that way. if you take a look at any post wedding celebration with apollo of guys waving flags and smoking cigars, they were letting off steam.

host: it seems clear to me that with your perception that it's the understanding they are on the shoulders of giants. >> i think they do. it's a neat place to go work. i had a chance to visit blue origin and space x and virgin to talk about flying people in space. the senior management me and astronauts and other flight directors i got a call from one of the companies that basically said my guys are working there and said we are getting ready to fly our first humans i need you to come put the fear of god into these people we need you to tell them how serious it is and what they are about to do.

i did that and they appreciated it. >> what is the best on the job as well as the worst? >> the worst has to be losing a spacecraft. i was a flight controller at the time we lost the challenger. i was not on that mission i was on the next one we were going to a meeting to work on a checklist. we stopped to watch the launch and we knew instantly when we saw the forked tail smoke that it was over and no help. columbia i was a flight director for years. flying every emission so the last mission of columbia was not going to the space station it was a receiver on - - research mitch - - mission but

i was not working directly. i was not even paying attention to it. i don't know what happened to columbia they said it's coming down and pieces all over dallas they know sooner said that my pager went off and i was headed into the control center to set of the emergency operations center so just to put pins in the maps where you are finding debris and with that aircraft we were using for search and recovery.

for credit went to make light of that but that by that time i'm flying aeronautical flying machines and spacecraft and i had gotten very used to that happening. you don't ever learn to like it. so that they stay in a controlled center is every day. and the best time in the control center was when the team was absolutely clicking. one example. we flew a radar mission where we were mapping the entire planet. we had to be absolutely ready to go every time we came feet dry but we went feet wet and had to pass a 53 minute launch

before we had africa and we lost altitude control thrusters and we had trained for this over and over again. my team collect. everything. absolutely click to the point where it took us back where we were watching a good flight control team and professional people click like that, i had to do was stand back and stand out of the way. it was fabulous. when it comes together. >> . host: what about mission control quick. >> everyone that goes to the space center wants to be an astronaut when they get there. i went to the astronaut office

and went to the selection process i finally reach the point i was flight director already. i got the call to say we before we put you in an interview what is your uncorrected vision? they already knew because they have all my medical records they had been taking care of me for my whole career. but by that time so it would have been really fun to do a single flight and then just ten years to get ready for that one flight but i had a pretty good career the way it was. >> . >> you probably have the

inside view on that. >> will have to see if i'm offered a discount. i have been a pilot my whole life and i do a lot of experimental aviation in a lot of the fun stuff. if i didn't have a chance to get into an airplane every other day i may think differently it may be fine to fly the space shuttle. >> . >> do you think the shuttle program ended or be discontinued? >> i don't work for nasa anymore we retired it when we did but it was to service the

space station that was the fundamental view of it. once we finish the space station we retired the shuttle. that was a political decision. i colorado loss of national will. if you pulled individual people are citizens we have a majority of support the politicians did not want to keep going. i wish we would've flown it longer it was designed to service the space station we could have continued building and it would be a much bigger thing. i think we retired the shuttle early but i would like to continue to see it fly. host: do you feel the program was underappreciated by the public? >> we are a victim of our own success.

the shuttle went up again. so wet. then people stopped paying attention is not exciting anymore but it was exciting for us. >> but we would bootstrap a lot of space programs and a lot of the knowledge that we learned would then be applied. and then we give away what we learned because that we were tasked to do we take public money and put the knowledge out there for people to use. it always pays for itself. host: it strikes me that going

to and from orbit. and then go back into the exploration business? >> i stay well-connected with my friends and houston and the newest generation of flight directors. they know what's going on and they are working hard. i would rather see a robust lunar presence before we go to mars to make sure when we go to mars we can do it tuesday. we need to practice on the moon. >> how do you deal with stress?

but so much of that weight was on your shoulders. >> that if you are given to react to stress in a negative way you will not qualify as a flight director. and before admission i would get and my airplane and fly to unwind but that word center me and relax me of that. once you get in the middle you are so busy you don't have time to be stressed. plow ahead. >> one last question. you are and extremely strong writer i have experienced it firsthand.

obviously you have gone on but what degree in your personal journey at nasa was writing? >> i think that writing and communication are the same thing verbal or written. without a doubt, the ability to formulate your thoughts to write them down in a secede manner to pass them up the line get you noticed. to have a well thought out sustained and meaningful essay and one page on a topic that spells the reasons why something should be a certain way that will get you noticed, no question. >> it is not just a not a

biography but but i would like to encourage all listeners you will see a big green button that says buy the book and you will do very well to do so and by the book. what else would you like to say? >> i just want to think tucson festival of books for asking me to come talk. it has been fun. the last couple of chapters in the book are lessons we have learned over the years on leadership and the way we can be more successful in complex operations.

i'm glad you recognize that and that was the intent. thank you so much for having me here and for everybody >> thank you. a little bit of, i have to switch screens here. a little bit of my -- so that is it for us today, everyone. i thank you to fall for your participation today. i thank you all, leaders come from attending. if you get the chance and can make it to the tucson festival of books, we would love to have you sign up for the festival newsletter. and again thank you to every engineering and technology for being the sponsors this afternoons program. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's stories and on sundays booktv brings

you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including buckeye broadban broadband. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ buckeye broadband along with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. >> this afternoon president biden will talk about the progress of the u.s. troop withdrawal from afghanistan. according to the pentagon it's about 90% complete under ideal the cushion and and a former president trump watch live coverage of president biden's remarks at 1:45 p.m. eastern on c-span2. >> tonight on booktv, technology and e-commerce.

>> booktv is tonight starting at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span2. >> up next new yorker writer nicholas schmidle on the creation of the space tourism company virgin galactic. the stories of its test pilots, engineers and leaders. this is hosted by vroman's bookstore in pasadena, california. >> hello, everyone. my name is mac and i want to thank you all on behalf of vroman'san bookstore. were happy to have nicholas schmidle will be conversation with buzz bissinger discussing his new book "test gods: virgin galactic and the making of a modern astronaut." tonight he that does include a q&a portions or if you like to ask nicholas a question, you can click the ask the question at the bottom and we'll get that went into the the event. t lastly if you want to purchase