i am from blue willow bookshop in houston, texas. snag joining us today is paul dye.

paul dye has decades of experience as a pilot. he's a longest-servingir flight deck or in history. he received the nasa outstanding service medal and the presidential medal. he is a former editor-in-chief of --he but his book is "shuttle houston" life in the center seat of mission control. paul it's good to have you. >> it's great to be here. >> talk about the book and what should readers expect? >> well i guess the first thing i would say -- we are getting a little at go there but the very first flight director was chris kraft and chris wrote a book about his days in the space

program. and then dean wrote a book failure is not an option when he was flight director for apollo. i felt that somebody needed to capture the view from the flight director's console and mission control with the shuttle program. there are now, we are seeing lots of excellent looks by mostly astronauts about their years in the shuttle program and the thing that 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's a lot more broader perspective than just that from the cockpit or in the cabin. as much as i enjoyed thehe astronauts books and most of them are written by my friends i thought it was time to capture some of theme viewpoints from te shuttle. it took time to write. we started it in 2011 i started

taking notes and writing chapters and over the years between then and when we came out the book last year -- with the book last year through a lot of writing and flying, it came to the point where my wife would say are you going to write the book or not. we got a very good publisher and have a wonderful editor there who helped me take all a material that i put together and asked me how i wanted the book to look. one of the things that i like to people -- tell people right up front is being a flight director of the mercury program covers a couple of years in dean's covers a few years. the shuttle program lasted 30 years for the flight program

lasted 30 years and the program lasted 40 3 years. it tells an entire story of a program. that was the first thing at the rap my head around when i got serious about putting this book together 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 who were in the program through a stage of history of what everybody thought it looked like. hopefully the book will give people insight views of the tech elegy 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. the computer systems today would be considered quaint but a very complex system. i want people to understand the people that made it work and the

people that set in mission control and did the planning and sat in the simulators and trained the astronauts and what they had to did make it work and i want people to understand the process and what flying the shuttlee was all about. it's complex like "star wars," let's put it that way and then lastly the dedication of the people in the fun fund if they had doing it. even though was an incredibly complex and many would say a stressful job if it wasn't fun you are going to last very long. in the overview of the book and what i hope take -- people will take from it and hope they get a chance to read a. >> i have course have read it and i enjoy it very much. thank you very much. it's clear it's not the entire history of the program. it's not an entire autobiography but you get a lot out of it and

i'm going to do it again a little bit on that. before i go further with that notion i was struck immediately and you get into when you talk about the people that came before and struck with a legacy of the flight directors. and what a complicated set of forces that it had. can you talk about what it entailed come reduced -- particularly in light of the shoulders of giants for which it has >> i was in error not going to during student and a complex set of events and i'd applied to go to houston. i didn't think i would be in this. i had no idea what i was going to be doing but i got there and

the people in the operations organization asked for me and i learned later was because i was working my way through college as a scuba diving instructor in the technicians they figured i understood real-time operations. i walked into the center and i didn't have any preconceived notions of what i was going to see what i saw a group of people sitting in the front and i don't think i recognized theat flight director for what they were until later on. i describe it in an odd sort of way. if you've ever watched any science fiction movies from the late 50's and early 60s there is always something threatening the survival of the planet and the politicians would be arguing about this and there are all sorts of people and they were size runs strong leader who said this is what we are going to do is how we will solve the problem and this is how we will save the plan.

they were in inspirational leader and that's really what the flight director turns out to be is the person that physically takes control of things during a mission and planning for the mission and the gas a little bit of that made me want to be the hero of the science fiction movies that you watched back then. if you watch the martian movies a thing sean beam plays the flight director and he does a really good job in there because he doesn't take any guff from anybody including the administrator of nasa. but i started working with flight jars earlier in my career and i got backtracked in the front of mission control and started working with these guys and i realized that they were made in the same image of the earliest people in the first

three flight treasures were chris kraft johns hopkins in steve -- and i was fortunate to work with chris and jane and jane a lot more than chris. you really made me realize their responsibility that people had as they took it on their shoulders at the same time you are just doing the job. like you say it's standing on the shoulders of giants and you don't want to let them down. you don't want to let history down. you want s to make sure you do e best job he possibly can all the time. >> and your mantra i think was preparation. the sense i got were the people that sat in the center seat

conducted the orchestra if he will and i think you use that analogy. it's a high functioning general. it might not be the smartest but mightany one day we the most knowledgeable and at least you had a wide and broad base of knowledge. tell us about that. >> as a flight comptroller you have to think very deep. you had to know every digital bid by first name and i'm not kidding when i say that. every bid had a name. you need to know everything about it. you need to know everything will there was to know about your system and not only that but everything about how it interfaced with the others but i

was in charge at one time of -- one of the things i was in charge at the time was the shuttle and providing micropower. the engineering manager knew more about it than i did but didn't know anything about the hydraulics attached to it or h that manager said tell us what you know about the hydraulic pump. i needed to know a thing about both of them and when you became a flight director you needed to know a lot about all of those things. we have been described many times as the conductor of the orchestra. we may not have the skills to play every incident that we know how -- and if we are good enough at what we do we are going to make everybody else in the orchestra think that we know how to play their ancient as well as they do. we'din don't but we understand where the questions are.

we have a flight director who is chief of the flight director office when i was young tommy holidays who was incredible. you could sit in a meeting with tom explaining a technical issue and you weren't quite sure whether tommy was awake or asleep. he would listen to hours at the arguments of what's going on at the end he would ask one single question that blew everybody out of the water. he not only heard everything but is synthesized at all and came up with the one flaw. that's his an example of where a flight director lives. >> knowing how to get to the heart of the issue is a rare thing and can lead to an enormous amount of information. >> it does take a certain amount of courage and confidence to sit in the center seat.

first off you have to show confidence is captain of the ship but he can't show fear that you aren't on top of things because then your people won't have confidence in what you are doing. what we learned is that you also have to submerge her ego. it does not do any good to stand up there and proclaim that you are this might mike this kind of room. you need to let people figure that allowed or not figure that out one way or the other. you have to learn to ask tough questions and you have to learn to listen to the answers. and then you need to make sure you've done away with a preconceived notion because it's really easy if you have a big ego to walk into a situation be confidente that you know the answers and not here the real information the real data. you have to be willing to let someone sway your argument. c going back to what we are

mentioning earlier i keyed in on that in the book. to be prepared without beliefs but conclusions. >> that person -- and this is where the book to me diverts from a history book or an autobiography. it's a leadership book. a book on leadership and the book on followership and communication and in some respects for younger people it's probably fantastic c career planning book. >> use all right. didn't you?

[laughter] spam comment about that and preparation was your mantra but how did that impact your experience as a reader? >> you know first off you can never expected people to do anything that you aren't 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 very young flight comptroller and moved to houston and i had a one bedroom apartment. i had my motorcycle and that was it. and i had work. what i discovered was that the room on the second floor of our building in the training library it had every war book on the shuttle's program on all the systems in all the operations and all of the dynamics. it had worked books and training manualsas and work books and

manuals on how to work all of the hardware and all the software it should see goals. i went in there every day and i got another look and i took it home and at night that's what i worked on. i would sit at my desk and read it and when i finished i was already finished with all the training manuals that they had available or that i discovered ind 1978 the first astronaut class and that stands for. >> i was going to say i'm not sure our listeners know. c that stands for the 35 new guys. i'm sticking with it. at any rate, dave videoed all the classes that were presented and they have all of those videotapes. this was back before beta and

vhs with these big old stony videos and every thursday night i had the machine reserved and i would go up to get the machine and will it to my office and spend four or five hours watching those videos. a lot of it was just because i wass 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 people that were out there doing the exact same thing.s it's a minority people that job. what i was told people is the control center has a flight director who has a dozen flight comptrollers in the front room and that's the room you see in the firm wrote at mission control in each one of those peoplen has background people ae disciplined.

i told folks if you're a backroom flight comptroller you need to think what different room flight control. you want to be thinking a level of what you are doing so you know what your front room person needs to interface with everybody. if you want to be at cracker jack for room operator you want to think like a flight director. you want to know what a flight director needs andnd what disney need? or herer that's a problem in the other discipline so i'm going to sit back and watch what's going on. you can tell from an early career who is trying to become a flight director and who was not and it was pretty obvious. you need to put in that dedication and you need to put in that work to get not only a a broad knowledge but a deeper one.

>> you essentially have to go down every rabbit hole. >> yes to put in the time. what you discover in the shuttle because it's a very complex system you have lots of different electrical buttons and electrical places where things were connected in a lot of different data gathering and commanding that all intertwined. the electrical guy said hey we just lost adc and you needed to know what it'll lose you beta wise. it's not really up but we don't really have an indication that it's on. there's a lot of memorization if you will although i hate memorization. they all gave me a cheat sheet with the data. >> would the dude do because you

were a flight comptroller before you were a flight director who lived in the rabbit hole and poked her head up into the flight director's job see good when they take it. c you made a lot of points to the flight director if you said i've got this problem with such and such that i know the officer were there has a much bigger problem so white you deal with him first and come back to me. i will manage this problem for you and take care of it. and if you do that you get to let the flight director nothing of the wrath of knowledge and he knew that you were thinking about what was going on and that you were acting in the system

not just somebody sitting down there in their own discipline worrying about what's best for their own discipline. for room flight comptroller can't think about what's best for their system. at the think about best for the mission. the backroom flight control has to think about, one of the toughest things to learn as a flight comptroller is to let your system burn up because you can get what you need out of it. sometimes you have to sacrifice your hardware but you did. i was joked that the jpl guys fly out these missions to mars and the like and they never get their hardware back. they have very little attachment to their hardware. santa fe approach engineering from a slightly different perspective.

with less literal skin in the game. >> yes. >> i want to figure out how to word this without a yes or no. [inaudible] >> it became odd because for someone like myself and my compiled race who became flight directors we didn't intuitively understand why everyone didn't want to be a flight director, right? but there were lots of people who thought it was the best dog gone job there was and they'd say i don't want the responsibility. when you have a heck of a lot of responsibility a lot of responsibility the job you're in you realize that. i hate to say this it this way but they want to have a family of kids and everything and a lot

of flight directors are single people. i was unique. there'srs a reason i was a long serving flight or in history. it was 20 years and that's because i absolutely love this 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 program manager. the last two program managers wanted to be a standard tractor deputy director at nasa. i absolutely love being right in theld thick of the action and that's where i want to be. it's true the line of the move from top gun. the truth of the matter is people move on from nasa so they

can make policies. politicians make policy. i always try to do the best job in the flight program. >> knowing you have found it and it certainly is not for everybody. that rings true in the book and links back to the theme of reparation. is there anything you look back on i know you look back at a lot in mission control but did you look back in your own preparation like keystone that was your flexible -- you're replaceable and getting that unique sense of balance? >> first off one thing you had to bring into, think you had to bring it in with you to operations was leadership

skills.. i have spent most of my life in leadership positions and i am still not convinced, i'm not certain about whether leadership is inherent or learnable. we can train skills and we can explain to people what good leadership is. i learned leadership when i was a boy scout and the more i looked back on where my leadership skills came from the more i realize that that's where it came from. there are an awful lot of eagle scouts running around the halls of nasa. the at passion of the flight director office. you learn that stuff there. a lot of people who learned leadership in military organizations or in sports or

clubs in college so you bring that in with you. and then i think a large part of the kind of thing you had to learn was how to put your nose to the grindstone and learned technical aspect and then learning how to deal with people. inin my house we really loved watching the big tanks very not just because we knew those people but we can as we were those people. spent that's the exact same thing at my house. >> and you discover that you had to figure out how to work with people so after admin is senior flight comptroller it was clear that people who thought i was flightr director material, i was brought into the manager's office and he said paul you are

one of the most incredible operational engineers we have seen but if you don't learn how to work better with people somebody's going to kill you, you know. that's when i realized you really dude needs to learn how to subvert that a go and let other people talk and you need to let other people talk about what they want to give got to do that. >> it sounds like it was a tuneup lecture. >> it was a tuneup lecture and you had to change her attitude from i got this technical stuff down and i understand how spaceships work and now i need to have, figure out how to fly people and i tell people crackerjack technical skills will give you a long ways that you will hitho his ceiling until you learn how to work with

communicate and understand other people.th that's when you will make that leap into a leadership role or people are going to feel good working for you. i really ended up in the role of institutional mentor for flight control skills. he got to the point where when i would do simulations they were trying to train me. i was making myself part of the training team and helping the training team put in situations for my flight comptroller so they would t get what they needd and then i had a steady stream of flight comptrollers coming through my office who wanted to sit down and do that. .. : 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 so, there is a news story about how they encoded the location and jpl latitude and longitude into the parachute using ascii code using a binary code i thought that was so neat. somebody sent me a note saying these guys have so much fun, light in the world regards such stick in the muds when you flew the shuttle? i love the jpl dies they are just doing amazing things.no i flew for them, they knocked my socks off it was incredible stuff. the thing you have to remembert

is they are not putting human lives at risk. in the human lives are at risk for people putting their lives at risk knowingly and forho a reason. it's not a grim kind of thing. but you learn that it would really look horrible if you lost somebody and then people found you were messing around. and so we were always very,o very image-conscious. if you were sitting in a meeting, planning a mission and somebody said hey, wouldn't it be cool if?f? that killed that idea. you did not even need to hear the idea because we never did anything because it was cool. what we were doing was cool enough. we were launching people into space for heaven sakes and bringing them back in a winged vehicle that weighs 200,000 pounds right? this is amazing stuff this is cool enough for you, right?

we always had these to bebu very, very careful not to appear frivolous in any way. but at the same time he wanted to have some fun. so yes we did some cool stuff. may be some rna books some are not. but people would not notice is sometimes, this would happen more often with the space station nowadays than the shuttle, if it was a clear night in the middle of the night in houston and you're flying a mission you're going to have a path that flies right over houston and we knew it would go right overhead, we would designate one person to be the watch keeper everybody else would go outside. e we'd abandon the watch center and watch the space capsule overhead we'd washed outside and we go back and say hey we watched you fly over. now if something bad had happened right at that moment when you're gone, everybody's career would have been over

that was involved for the flight director for certain would have been in trouble you i'd be very careful. there were some fun times we have. every asked her to fly a little personal preference kit. and usually there be a couple things they would take. they would have to have things -- they would take things for friends and family they can bring back and say hey, this watch fob flew in space. or this whatever. i had a mission work i was the lead flight director and my capcom was in charge of making sure stuff got into the crews pd case. semi called me up and saidre paul i need stuff for the pdk. did you bring anything walking to my office ath look from my office and on the wall was minnesota golden gophers patch i was a university of

minnesota graduate. this patch was not mine it was from my mother's letter jacket. she was a graduate of the minnesota gophers. i took it nonsecure fly this. and so he took it. the next thing i know, i see some video coming down from the spacecraft i see the lockers and taped onto it is this minnesota golden gophers patch. and all i could think of was the crew open up the book and found this purple and gold gopher, felt gopher and had no earthly idea what it was, whatat it meant or what it was for but they taped it to the wall haof the lockers so somebody sit on the ground. and so we have kind of fun things like that. i'll give you two more stories. one was we would do simulations when you are

flying a rendezvous and you're getting in close to the space station for your target, the closer you get the slower you want to go. so we hauled called breaking and gates atrg 1000 year old you wanted to be going the speed. and if you got to that yards he had to make she read that speed of 5-yard she wanted to beat slower yet. 100 yards when we slower yet. those are called breaking gates he always want to fly your breaking gates. and if you work faster than your breaking gate were really hot dog. we had such a thing is friday breaking gates for simulation. you've been in the control center all week. week.n the cockpit all it is 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon and things are going slow, somebody would simply say friday the 19th gates. that spacecraft go into the

space craft and dock at warp speed. we'll meet everybody at the outpost for the outpost was a local bar. you ever saw the movie the right stuff, there was ponchos bar out in the middle of the desert. it was called the outpost. the only thing keeping the outpost was falling down was the termites were holding hands. the place eventually burned down. fortunately the fire department and the people who are in the place at the time understood the value of all of the mementos on the wall. they basically said let the structure burn let's get everything out. we have pictures we have patches, there was no wallpaper or paint it was all mementos all the stuff got saved. in the last story i will tell you, it was not uncommon after shift in the control center for folks to want to go out and have a beer together.

that worked great. you can meet at the outpost or meet at the singing wheel or whatever thing -- but if you get off at 3:00 a.m. the bars are closed. and so for a long time they would meet in the parking lot of the rec center. and somebody would have a cooler in their trunk of their car they pull out of beer and have them before they went home. and then security did not like that. they would get calls or steeple out in the woods drinking a beer at three in the morning. and ahead of their operations at security working u for us called us of is a look i know you guys need to do something. i've smoothed it over security here's what we're going to do. there is a saturn five building. we had a big old saturn five on display three and a 60-foot tall rockets. they built a building around it was air-conditioned for thehe tourists. he said on nights you guys want to blow off a little

steam, called this number it is the chief security desk. they'll go out an hour before, turn on the lights in the air conditioning in the building you guys can go drink your hearts content there all night. and you would go out there and be sitting there drinking underneath the f1 engines of a saturn five. it was like drinking and church. this is like a cathedral and there was always something really wild about that. it was something we enjoy doing the got a call from the flight director, they open it up and turn the air conditioning on forest. >> that is awesome. i want to imagine who are the lockers and listeners putting your questions and we will get to them. if you take a look at the questions there you could upload the ones you want to be answered first or most likely.

i am not out of questions yet but we will get to those questions. i have not been sprinkling them throughout seems like we have a little bit of that narrative going. i love the inside baseball stories. kind of along with that notion of being center seat is as you said to become the mentor, eventually become the senior mmentor. you are the one who has been around the longest. you are the one everyone looks up to. have things changed nasa by then? and with that mission changing at nasa, will that change the organization? >> i am a traditionalist. i'm a real traditionalist. when i learn something i deal with it. i learn from the best, i will learn from the guys who luke, who took us to the moon for a

learn from jean krantz i learned from these early flight directors. i wanted to make sure we did not 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 renter run an airline. we were always caught in this dichotomy of we want to keep flying the shuttle there were attempts to turn the shuttle over to contractors. this kind of like hiring a contractor to fight your work for you ifli you are a nation. some things should be under the direct control of the people who do not have profits in mind they're just there to serve the good of the people and serve the constitution. and so, once we start flying lots and lots of mission, the

early program we were going to flight 50 missions a year the load a week you couldn't do it for shuttles in the staffing we had was impossible. that we did flight 12 in one year. i got really, really busy. so we got into this mode of trying to symphony eyes everything every flight conclude see the exact same set of failures, and their training they saw him all the ready to be certified. we always have problems with that they were not built in the basic philosophical bills. they're checking off the bits and pieces but they were not getting the subjective part of the thing.ti we would do an evaluation, that all their training objectives met but they did not have the training's objectives met. that is been guys like me would come in and try to help mentor them and the soft skills.

you know, we tried to create an assembly line and it was not an assembly line product. we were building custom one offs. it was like custom boats not production line boats. and you really need to know, you need to be honest about what your real goals are. this is why i am a big supporter of the commercial space program guys, eli and the guys these programs. nasa should be in the business of fundamental research and exploration. be going to the moon and pray they should not be trying to figure out how to get people back and forth to the space station be done that would got that knowledge we can give that to somebody. the predecessor to nasa was the national by three committee aeronautics.

most of the things that create the modern airline structure came out of basic naca research. but naca did not try to run an airline. >> nasa companies on my limited view as an aviator and airplane builder, not to your level. nasa is the source of all things research. you want to learn about airflight let's get nasa data. >> there is it inside baseball. i work with a lot of guys who actually worked at naca that transferred to nasa per they always said nasa but they never said napa. they always said napa. >> i don't know what that means, but the guys like chris , the guys that came of the naca that always called the

naca. >> they also said. >> airfoil. >> as we saw who knows. you certainly answered a question that was asked on the q&a. i will read the question so you can see if there's anything more you can add. how do you feel the control room versus masses control to them from the iss? >> it is a little different, it is a younger crowd. they've got a different set. i've always said, just as we lost two shuttles and two shuttles and their crews and what her 35 flights for it is going to happen to elana. and how they treat the business will reflect on them when they do. if you treated frivolously then you have a problem.

i have seen them be very serious about what theyhe do. i seen them do a lot more cheering and that kind of thing, which is very cool because this should be enthusiastic about it. people watching it needs no interim or they take the job seriously, let me put it that way. with apollo the guys waving flags and smoking cigars where's the spacecraft was done and you could do that what is your perception? i think there's a very big sense of they understand this semi- on the shoulder giants as well. >> if they need a place to go work, i have had a chance to

visit spacex and blue origins, and virgin and all this people have talked about flying people in space. there is senior management had me and some astronauts and other directors come by and visit. i got a call from one of the companies that said one of my former guys was working there they called me up said were getting ready to fly our first human. i won't say what company it was less they said i need you to come up with the fear got into these people. we just need you to come and just tell them how serious it is and what they're about to depart i have done that. is really fun and theyt appreciated. >> on that note the most popular question the q&a right now, can you show your best day on the job as well as your worst? >> the worst of a job has to be losing a spacecraft. interestingly enough i was a flight consort the loss of

challenger. i was not on the mission i was on the next mission. i was training for the next mission we are going to a meeting to work up the checklist and we stopped to watch the launch. we know instantly we first tale of smoke that it was over there is no hope. columbia, i had been a flight director for years. i was flying every mission. so the last mission of columbia was not going to the space station producing research mission, it was my mission off it was one mission is not working directly. i was not even paying attention to it, to a certain extent i really took it off i gone to the airport that morning to fly and the weather sucked i got out there and it was foggy i just headed home and stopped at an auto parts store to get some face on my flight jacket and asked me what happened to compass and i

don't know they said it's coming down pieces all or dallas. no sooner had they said that my pager went off my phone started ringing, i was at the control center and set up her emergency operation center which was a liaison with the rest of the world. try to put pins in the maps in east texas. i spent two months in east texas during the interwar managing a whole bunch of aircraft were using first and recovery. it was a bad day. and who do not ever want to make light about that there's nothing to light to make about it. but in that time i lost friends and flying machines. and i've gotten very used to that kind of thing happening. you don't learn to like it you should never learn to like it pretty do everything you can to avoid it.

and then you know the problem with the best day in the control center, every day. the worst day and a control center was better than the best in the office anytime. the best times in the control center was when a team was salute clicking. i will give you one example. he flew a greater mission over mapping the entire planet. we had to be absolutely ready to go, every we came we went to miss stuff. we would feet wet only at this path of 53 minutes long before she dry on africa. we lost our attitude control thrusters. we had trained this case over and over again. my team clicked. everything catholic clicked to the point where we had just met with most all that time we were actually back before he

needed to be watching a good flight control and professional people click like that, all i had to do with invective there the way was fabulous. not that there are no problems, you solve the problems. >> right. >> very, very good thinking on that. you ever wish you were on the flight rather than standing in mission control? [laughter] quickly through the matters everybody who works that the nasa space center must be in after that when they get there. sure, i moving up in the selection process i finally reached a point i was a flight director already and i got the call saying, for we get an interview what exactly is your uncorrected vision, paul? of course they already knew because that all of my medical records and taking care of me for my whole career.

but by that point in time, the crews were all working for me when we were flying. it would have been really fun to do an single flights say you did it. but it is a long haul to be an astronaut office and spend years getting ready for that one flight. it would've been great to fly that i had a pretty good career the way it was. >> lot of space tourism available? >> probably not in my budget range. >> you might have an inside deal on that. >> will have to see if somebody offers me a discount. [laughter] my advantages i d had been a pilot my whole life. i done a lot of experimental aviation do a lot of flight testing i do and offloaded that fun stuff. i did not have a chance to get an airplane every day or every other day might do little bit differently it would've been fun to fly the space shuttle.

>> i have one if you want to test flight. >> i will do that. [laughter] this is another question that came in, do you think the shuttle program ended when it did or should have continued? >> i can say this happens i don't work for nasa and more. i really do believe it was a shame we retire the shuttle we did with the goal of the space shuttle was to build and service the space station. as the fundamental view of it. once we finish the space station we retire the shuttle. that was really a political decision. i called allow loss of nationalal will. if you polled individual people and citizens, we had a majority of support.

they did not like the risk. i think we should've continued flying the shuttle for quite a bit longer. because it carried a whole lot of stuff up and back as it was designed to service the space station probably could have continued building onto the space station will be a much bigger thing. i think we retired the shuttle early. and i would've liked to continue to see it flight. >> you answer the other questions to fill the program underappreciated by the public? >> you know, where a victim of her own success. are you the shuttle went up again. well did that six times this year, so what? when you become successful people stop paying attention it's not exciting anymore. i will play what was really exciting every time there was no trash like it was never boring. >> no doubt. you think the shuttle inspired

some of what goes on around the rest of the world with different space programs? >> aptly did. the bootstrap a lot of different space programs. in the knowledge we learned was stuff that would then apply it was a research organization again. we gave away what we learned because that is what we were tasked to do. who take public money to get knowledge out of knowledge of the for people to use. so yes it always pays for itself. >> it strikes me probably going to handle the milk runs to confront orbits, definitely not with the capacity to bring much back. do you think nasa is going back to a little bit of its roots, going back into the exploration business? >> i hope so for a state very well connected my friends in houston the newer generation of flight directors.st

i know it's going on and they are working hard to get back to a lunar presence prudent person would rather see it really robust lunar presence before go to mars just to make sure we go to mars we can do it to stay. we need to practice on the moon we are only three days from earth rather than get to mars for your half a year from earth and have a problem. >> one of the last questions, how you deal with stress particularly along the role where so much of the weight of what was going on was on your shoulders. >> pat answer to that is if you are 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 of go outcome get in my airplane and fly bunch of

medics to unwind. that would center me and relax me a a bit. once you get right into the middle you are so busy, you do not have time to be stressed. you just plow ahead. >> we are almost out of time. i'm going to hit you with one last question. it conceals my very strong opinion, you are an extremely strong writer. it shows in the book. i have experienced it firsthand we built the same kinds of airplanes. obviously gone on to be editor-in-chief and you're still an editor at large. what degree in your personal journey of nasa are you writing d from? >> think writing and communication are the same thing verbal or written. without a doubt the ability to

formulate your thoughts, to write down in a sissy manner and passive the line gets youou noticed. if you can write a well thought out, assisting and meaningful sf in one page on a topic that's the reasons why something should be a certain way, that is going to get you noticed, there is no question about that. >> i like to again reiterate the book is extraordinarily well written. it is not just history, it's not just an autobiography. next are in a book on personal development. the mention earlier career planning, i'm going to fix up later for organization i'm involved in that does just that. like to encourage all of our watchers and listeners, you

will see a big green button that says buy book. you will be very well to be buying this book i think. so what else would you like to say? probably down to seconds is not just a minute. lex i just want to thank tucson festival books to ask me too come into his really been fun. and yes the last couple of chapters in the book are the lessons we've learned over the years on w leadership in the ways you can be more successful in complex operations. and so yes i'm glad you recognize that, that was the intent. thank you so much for having me here and for everybody who was watching. >> thank you. a little bit of, of gupta's which screens here.

that is it for us today, everyone. thank you for coming today i thank you all for attending. if you get the chance can make it to the tucson festival of books.org, who loved to have you sign for the festival newsletter. we again thank you to engineering and technology, for schneider to be the sponsors of this program. >> tonight tv technology and e-commerce, we start with the author of a biography of amazon founder jeff bezos' dennis senator josh hawley on his book the tyranny of big tech. also a conversation on the winners and losers from e-commerce but the author of the book, fulfillment. book tv is tonight starting 8:00 p.m. eastern on cspan2. up next year writer nicholas schmidle on the creation of