A Coming of Age Odysey Above the Karman Line w/ Lawrence Kuznetz #65

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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Now let's dive into the podcast.
The title of the program we're going to be discussing today is a coming of age odyssey above the Karman line.

(01:34):
And today, we have with us Lawrence Kuznets.
As always, we do a very brief bio.
This is one that's packed full too as others have been.
Lawrence was on the console, the mission control during Apollo 11 and introduced the Space Shuttle to the American people on a Johnny Carson Johnny Carson Tonight Show.

(01:55):
He helped build the Space Shuttle Columbia, was the life science experiment manager for the International Space Station, demonstrated that water could remain liquid on the surface of Mars, and is currently building the 1st spacesuit for Mars.
He holds advanced degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, has 8 patents.
And as I just found out a few minutes ago before we started, a book just came out.

(02:19):
I don't remember the name, so you'll have to give that to me in a moment.
But he's in a book call named Challenger, and Larry is Lawrence is chapter 8.
So one last thing before we get started, I don't know what Larry's gonna be.
Lawrence, I don't we call you Larry or Lawrence.
I I Lawrence.
I don't know what Lawrence is going to be talking back today.

(02:42):
We we don't go over the topic.
He and I have a brief inter call to find out what the topic is.
We talk about the top, that title.
We came come up with the title, and everything since then is on his own.
So if you've listened to podcasts, you know that I don't know where we're going.
I'm on the ride with you.
So let's get started with number 1, a a bull set of bullet points.

(03:03):
What are we gonna be covering today, Lawrence?
Well, the first thing that I would wanna talk about is, the 4 p's.
Four p's stand for passion, priority, perseverance, and putting yourself out there.
That's the formula that, looking back at my life, enabled me to be where I am today.

(03:25):
And and can I
Okay?
What's the second?
Why don't we get the bullet point to just hit a few, and then we can go into the details of them?
So number 1 is the 4 p's.
What's the
second that enabled me to get to mission control.
Okay.
Enabled get to mission Control next.

(03:46):
And then how that led to a PhD at UC Berkeley.
And next?
And that how that PhD at UC Berkeley and coming back to NASA, led to my introduction to the Space Shuttle.

(04:11):
Okay.
Next.
And how appearing on a Johnny Carson show and a space shuttle led to a 18 year relationship with a Japanese ski wear manufacturer that totally changed my life in unexpected ways, including making space from, from space technology.

(04:35):
Yeah.
I I've actually heard about that.
Number 6.
What's the next one?
And then how eventually living in New York and on a on a on a lawn a great lawn at Central Park, I decided to write a book about all these experiences and ended up teaching, back at UC Berkeley, right in the middle of, the Challenger accident.

(05:01):
And next.
And how that ended up, leading to one of the most astounding projects I can couldn't even imagine happening, which was building a full scale life-sized memorial, forward fuselage mock up of the Challenger on the great lawn of the Lawrence Hall of Science, that had 10,000 tiles on it and became a center of STEM learning for kids and, involved, like, over a 100 different companies and 10,000 man hours of people putting their life in blood, sweat, and tears to make this thing happen, which

(05:38):
Okay.
So what's the next?
We'll we'll get into the details.
And then, following that, a yearning came a post doc.
And a post doc at NASA Ames where just a chance meeting, I had to pick a topic, and I ended up picking a topic of designing a spacesuit for Mars.

(05:59):
And that led to finding all about Mars in ways that I had absolutely no idea.
It's just provided a pathway to, everything that I could possibly find out about the red planet, and that led to many other things that are still going on today, including the the, the road to Mars and, specifically, how do you build a spacesuit for that place?

(06:23):
And that, in in turn, led to a company called Planetary Protection, which then used that technology to build the next anti pandemic suit that will protect you on earth if a pandemic happens that's even worse than COVID.
So that kinda takes me almost to the end except where this is all going in terms of, today's, today's commercial space program.

(06:52):
And
So I'll I'll label that last one tomorrow.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
You got it all.
So let's start let's start with the 4 p's.
Where are we going?
Let's start with the 4 p's.
Well, a lot of us have have no clue what we wanna be when we're growing up.
And, but you might think, what what am I gonna do with my life?

(07:17):
And I've I've gone maybe I've gone to college and I have a degree.
I'm not using it.
Maybe I can't get a job.
Maybe I don't have enough money.
But there's one thing that's common that everybody has, which is passion.
And that's the first of the 4 p's.
And what I discovered, whatever it is you do, passion's gotta drive it.
So if you take a piece of paper and you write down 10 things that you're passionate about, and you can't think about it, you just gotta put it right from the heart, that's that's the first one, passion.

(07:44):
And then if you look at those those things that are on that piece of paper, you can prioritize it based on possibility.
What's the most likely passion for you to achieve?
Like, like, if you want to be president of the United States, that's a lot of skill sets, that's a lot of money, or a or a orthopedic surgeon.
On the other hand, if you just wanna train cats and go on a show, take the cats on the road for a cat show, it doesn't take much money.

(08:11):
You just gotta be passionate about cats and audiences.
So you can you can order your passions.
And once you order your passions, 1 through 10 or 1 through 5, you then pick the most likely.
And and, by the way, ordering them also involves money.
How much time do you have?
How much money do you have to invest in any of these passions?

(08:32):
So you're looking at a realistic assessment of your passions as in terms of what's the most likely for you, what's the least likely for you.
And when you find the first couple of these that are the most likely for you considering your circumstances, and that's the prioritization, then you go to step 3.
And step 3 is perseverance.

(08:53):
Perseverance means you can't let failure get to you.
No matter how many times you fail, no matter how many times people tell you you can't do this, you have to be oblivious to that.
You have to be immune to that.
You have to keep on persevering.
And, and that and and you have to embrace failure.

(09:14):
That's the most important thing.
You must embrace failure.
It's not a negative.
It's a positive.
It there in other words, like, I think it was Thomas Edison said, there are 10,000 ways to do things.
I've I've failed that people would say you failed 9,999 times.
When are you gonna give up?

(09:35):
And all I would say to them, no.
I've just found 9,999 ways to not do something.
Now I'm at the 10,000.
That's how you have to look at it.
It's not failure.
It's not a stain.
It's not a negative.
It's you're you're honing down your possibilities.
And then you get to the last one, which may be the most important once you've gotten this far, and that's putting yourself out there.

(09:58):
And that means the only difference between good luck and bad luck is that good luck what good luck means is you've put yourself in a position so when the right time happens, you happen to be there.
Bad luck is what happens when the opportunity makes itself available.

(10:21):
You are not there.
And it may be you've gone into an interview 50 times, and you wake up in the morning and just don't feel like going to the 51st.
And your twin somewhere in a parallel universe gets up, and no matter how tired they are, they go to that 51st, they go to the audition, they get the part, you don't, and you say bad luck on my part, good luck on on their part.

(10:42):
And, and it's not true.
It's absolutely not true.
It's all about you and your ability and your desire to put yourself out there.
So I know all of this, David.
Well, so so let me ask you.
When when did you make your first list of 10?
Yeah.

(11:04):
I only figured this out late in life.
This is this is this is a road map that I figured out by looking back on my life and then looking at other people's lives.
So this I didn't know this when I was 20 years old.
Who the hell does?
I didn't you know, I'm I we all go through this predictive corrective thing where we we try one thing, it doesn't work.
We try another thing, it doesn't work.

(11:26):
You're saying woe is me.
But, actually, it's a process.
And only in only in hindsight can I look at the process that I've been through and say, you know what?
This is how it happened.
And that will lead to your second bullet point.
Like, how did I end
Well, wait.
Wait.
But I but I so going back to that because how do you answer this question then?

(11:48):
Because in life, if we look at the 8,000,000,000 people on this planet, there are plenty of people who don't have the opportunity to make this list to make their lives change in the same way based upon politics or environment or whatever it may be.
Stop you there.
Let me stop you there.
I co totally disagree.
Sure.
1000% disagree.

(12:10):
Anybody can make this list.
This list starts with passion.
If you don't know what you're passionate about, well, I don't know what to say.
I don't care who you are.
Well, I mean but I I know I know people are passionate about things that have driven them their whole family, their lives, and
so forth.
That's only the first step.
Step 2 is priority.
So if you really want the details, I can tell you the details.

(12:33):
You list all the passions 1 through 10.
Then you have a an Excel spreadsheet or a scaling sheet that for each one of these passions is what's your skill, how much money do you have, how much time do you have, and who do you know.
Now there are more you could put in.
But for every one of those, you put a number 1 to 5.

(12:56):
1 meaning the least that I have, 5 meaning the most that I have.
So, clearly, if if one of your passions is to be president of the United States, when it comes to money, you're down at a 1.
When it comes to how who you know, maybe you got a 2.
When it comes to how much money you have to book to for your political campaign, you might be a 1.
Right?
So every one of these things has a number.

(13:19):
You understand?
And when you add them all up
I'm listening.
They self scale, and they automatically tell you the highest number is the best opportunity for you considering your passions and who you are.
Anybody can do this.
I've I've done this exercise with with literally as I can't tell you how many people.

(13:41):
Well, I I mean, I I've I I think you've worked around the world some.
I've worked in places where, quite literally, they don't they don't have the means or the government doesn't allow them to do the things that they're looking for or they're in predict predicaments where their family is in need for some reason or they've got you know, there's there's a bunch of things that you can list on your passion.

(14:04):
David, let me stop you again.
I'm in I'm in Boulder, Colorado with some friends and relatives, and we're looking for something to do.
And one of them says, hey.
There's a cat show at the, convention center.
Let's go.
So we go to this we go to this convention center.
We see this cat show.
There are there's 3 women.

(14:25):
There's about 10 cats.
And in the next hour and a half, they proceeded to have everybody in hysterics.
These cats were doing things you would not believe.
So then so I'm talking to them.
Well, how the hell did you get on this?
Well, I love cats, said the lead of the 3.
And I didn't want these cats to go be euthanized because there was no owner for them.

(14:50):
So I brought home one cat.
Mhmm.
I brought home a second cat.
I met a friend and the friend said, hey, you know, maybe can you train these cats?
You know, they they're just from a shelter.
Well, let's let's try to train the cats.
So, long story short, they trained the cats.
They were able to get these cats to do things.
1 of them got a a third woman came along and said, well, why don't we do a show for our friends?

(15:12):
They did a show for their friends.
They got a van.
They started to to call schools.
They started to drive across the country.
Next thing you know, they have this unbelievable business.
It didn't take much money.
All it took was a passion.
Right?
That was their passion.
You don't have to be you know, everybody has passions, and you gotta be able to understand them and write them down.

(15:37):
And you you don't wanna choke them off because they they don't have a government agency working on their behalf or this working on their behalf.
The formula works for everybody or each within their own realm.
So so when did you make your first list of 10 even though it's later in life?
When did do you make yours?
I never did.

(15:59):
Oh, okay.
I never did.
I didn't I didn't have to.
I look back at how I ended up where I am and where I started, which is the next step in this process, And there's no way I could have anticipated anything like this.
It just didn't jive.
There were 400,000 people let's get to the second point.
There were 400,000 people Yep.

(16:20):
I might have in in able
to get them in control.
Almost a half a 1000000 people working on Project Apollo.
Right?
There were 1,000,000,000 watching the first moon landing.
There were probably less than a 100 people at mission control, and I was one of them.
So a lot of people would say, hey.
You had good genes.
You had good luck.
You had this.
You had that.
And that's not the case at all.

(16:42):
I just applied you know, I was I was working making needles at a needle company in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
I happened to apply to NASA at the peak of the Apollo program.
They were hiring like crazy.
I didn't know what I was gonna do.
I didn't have much of a of a of a specific background.
I certainly when I was hired, it was not to build space suits.

(17:03):
They just happened to need somebody to build space suits at the time.
It could have been anything.
Anything.
So you started off you started off building spacesuits?
Was the overall job.
And when I that was kind of the job description.
But when I got to Houston, that's not what the job was.
The job was we have this really crude math model of a human in a spacesuit, and we'd like you to build on it.

(17:28):
And it was a simple you know, most engineers know what a node is or a compartment.
It was as about as simple as you can get.
It was a 2 node representation of a human and some clothes in an environment.
And, basically, I expanded it from 2 to 4 to 6 to 8 to 10, and eventually built it up to 41 separate compartments.

(17:51):
And then I built a little spacesuit compartment around it and an environment of it was strict straight engineering.
That's all it was.
And and I was sitting there building a model.
Right?
And that has really, on the surface, had nothing at all to do with, with Apollo 11.
Because we're talking 9 we're talking only a year and a half before Apollo 11 launched.

(18:15):
I just graduated.
I knew basically nothing.
Right?
And then it turns out that this model had the capability to predict in advance how much how hot a person was gonna get in a spacesuit.
And we didn't know how accurate that was.
I didn't know how accurate it was.

(18:37):
But if you knew that, if you knew how hot they were gonna get, you could also use that to predict how much life support they were gonna use.
This is directly related.
The hotter they get, the more life support you need to keep them cool.
And that uses up what we call consumables, which is what powers the spaces, kind of like gas in a gas tank of your car.
And it is also like a gas in a gas tank in a car that The harder you work, it's like putting your foot down on the accelerator pedal of your gas.

(19:04):
The harder you work, the faster you use up life support.
So so I was doing this in the dark for a division that had nothing to do with real time support of Apollo 11 until one day, my boss said, hey.
You know, mission control is has has got a position to to predict all of these things that you're doing with your math model, but we don't know how they're doing it.

(19:32):
And I said, okay.
Why don't we talk to them?
And so we went and talked to them, which is a comp like, it it's like a different department in a in a university.
It's like or a different completely different department in a big corporation.
They're the ones responsible for running the mission, and I was in an engineering director that had really nothing to do with running a mission.

(19:54):
Right?
But it turns out they said, oh, we've got our own people for doing that.
We don't need your help.
And we challenged them and said, look.
Why don't we do a little, experiment?
Why don't we do a showdown, a a test?
Why don't we take this this model that we've built that's called 41 node man and predict how much life support is gonna be used in a spacesuit, in a real test.

(20:20):
And why don't you use your your way of doing it in the same test?
And let's see who ends up being closer to the truth.
And you knew the truth because you actually could measure the amount.
These tests are I don't mean to to make it sound simple.
These are very elaborate tests and enormous vacuum thermal vacuum chambers.
And an astronaut or a test subject gets in and a space suit is running on its own life support and it's using up life support.

(20:46):
It goes in for a certain amount of time.
Mhmm.
Then he comes out and you measure the remaining life support.
So you know how much is used and you measure how hard he works.
So you've got ground truth.
Right?
So this this unlikely job of playing around with these this simple little model, only a year and a half before Apollo 11, actually came down to a showdown.

(21:07):
And in that showdown, the model that I wrote called 41 noed man won.
And that automatically got me a seat at Mission Control.
Totally unlikely.
By how how far off were they?
30%.
I I don't, you know, I don't remember.
It doesn't really matter.
I can't remember.
We're talking 1969.

(21:28):
I can tell you enough so that they said, okay.
You're in.
And they issued me this fabulous badge, that that so few people had, And I had an entry to get in there to actually measure the metabolic rate, which is the energy produced, and that was used to determine how much life support was gonna be used.
And I sat on every single Apollo mission from that point on making that calculation.

(21:52):
And, you know, I'm I'm I'm living proof that all you gotta do is be persistent and have a passion.
And here's the thing, I had the passion about that model.
And I had a passion about space suits and how they worked.
That was the passion.
I had a, you know, a passion about how do we get rid of heat?

(22:15):
And, how hard do we work to do a certain task?
And what's it like on the moon for God's sake just because it costs you so much energy to open a screw and climb up the stairs on earth doesn't mean in one sixth gravity it's anything like that.
I had a passion for all these things.
Right?
So once I had the passion, that led to everything else.
That's what I mean about you've gotta start somewhere.

(22:38):
Well, I I I wanna go.
When you were growing up Did you have a passion for Beyond Finance?
Yeah.
No.
You bet.
You
a person
here.
Sure.
Sputnik in 1957 tickled my fancy.
Even before that, while I was in school, just, War of the Worlds, man, scared the bejesus out of me.

(22:59):
It's my favorite film even to this day.
And it's about Martian invasion and h g Wells and Orson Wells on a radio show.
And then on on TV, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and Captain Video and all these yeah.
This this is what I was passionate about.
And from the time I'm, you know, 7, 8, 10 years old.
You gotta have a passion.

(23:21):
I'm not you you know, I don't I can't emphasize it strong enough.
If you don't have a passion, you're not human.
You know, I I'd love
And you can and you can harness that passion.
People.
I've gotta believe you met people who you who don't have passion.

(23:43):
I've gotta believe with your personality and our conversation, I think last time was 2, 3 hours.
I gotta believe you've met people who've said there's just no life in them.
Well, you know, I have met people who said that they're rare.
They are very rare.
And and and in talking to them, they do have a passion.
They just don't know it.
Passion's a passion's an interesting thing.

(24:06):
If I tell you, hey.
Here's a piece of paper.
In less than a minute, tell me what you like.
I don't have to say passion.
Just tell me what things you like.
Don't think about it, and don't tell me what you like the most.
Don't tell me what you like the least.
Just tell me what the hell it is you like.
You like riding a bike?
You like doing somersaults?
Do you like, getting on a stage?

(24:27):
I don't care what it is.
You like sex?
Just what you know?
These are human beings, David.
Come on.
I I I understand that.
I'm I'm trying to figure out how your model works.
I'm asking questions.
The the I've it's tough to kind of put it in this framework because my wife doesn't like when I say this, but I've met a lot of people who, at 35 years old, they've stopped growing.

(24:54):
They've stopped building.
They've stopped creating.
Well, that's a delight
from me.
Look at the difference.
They
move forward.
They have circumstances that are high they're they're they're are hiding.
They're they're not a kid anymore.
They've lost their their lust for life.
That does not mean that they don't have any likes anymore.
Of course, they have likes and dislikes.

(25:15):
Okay.
Well,
that's so it it I like this.
I like I like the improvement.
What we're talking about when we say passion is not passion, but write down the things you really like, which can define where your passion is.
Alright.
Well, that's semantics.
To me, it's semantics.
You can you can say one thing, it's another.
Yeah.
I'm I and, unfortunately, Lawrence, you don't know me that well, but I am very much a words person in not not a writing person, but I listen to words.

(25:43):
And sometimes, like, I know it gets my words blame it.
Frustrated.
Thank you.
But words mean something to me.
So if someone says last
You heard it last.
I'm very sorry.
I didn't mean last.
Everything literally too, and it's very difficult when somebody takes literally.
They don't see the gray matter.
They don't see the the subtlety of suggestions, you know, with the different

(26:06):
The interesting thing is she's the writer, meaning she went to Newhouse School of Communications.
She's, a writer.
I am not.
I'm just trying to be very I'm I'm very present with the person I'm with.
So the word means the word.
And if I didn't know what the word meant, well, then I'm not understanding what
the word meant.
Okay.
Well, then they haven't explained it to you.

(26:28):
We could get into an hour discourse on this.
No.
No.
I love this, though.
I love this because what you're saying now, I can get put down a list of things you like, and inside of there, you'll start to identify some of the possibilities of the things that will drive you.
Now you had a passion already, like space.
And so NASA, when they were putting up this job op opportunity, you were ready to jump on.

(26:55):
Yeah.
But I had other passions too, David.
I had this you know, as a maniac for guns, I used to walk around with with twin Hopalong Cassidy 6 shooters, and and, I I got BB guns.
If you know that that thing, a Christmas story, with y'all don't shoot your eye out.
I lived that.
I sold $20 of Christmas cards.
Christmas cards, a Jewish got kid, selling Christmas cards so I could get a Daisy Eagle lever action BB gun.

(27:19):
Let me tell you, and I would shoot the lights out from my home, like, from the second story.
So we all have passions.
You know?
We all have crazy things.
It's not just NASA.
None of us are 1 dimensional.
So, you know, at the rate we're just we're having this discussion, we'll be here tomorrow.
So I would suggest Well,
I I as long as your phone lasts,

(27:41):
I'm good.
Gonna last that much longer.
I mean, it's gonna last, but it's not gonna last that much longer.
So I suggest we move on because there's a lot to talk about.
Okay.
Move on.
So where are we moving to?
So where you're at your priority and then I'm
putting yourself out there.
You know what?
I I And
then you're at Mission Control.

(28:02):
So now you're at Mission Control, and then you got your PhD.
What happened was people said, hey.
You've you've got the stuff you wrote to make this 41 note man do what it did.
That's the stuff of a PhD thesis.
And I'd already been out to Berkeley a couple of times.
I I, you know, said, this is a place I wanna go.
It was a happening place in the sixties seventies.

(28:23):
So I ended up here.
And not only did I end up here, but I ended up being able to use my my p my work at NASA for a PhD thesis.
So it was crazy because they paid for my, they paid for my graduate school.
They paid their per diem.

(28:44):
They paid a salary, and, it's unheard of stuff today.
They they actually and and I got had a great professor who loved what I was doing.
That's a whole other story I could spend hours on about that crazy set of incidences.
But I would but this is all taking place in the middle of the Apollo project.
I would go back and forth between Houston and California twice a year because every time there was an Apollo mission, I'd have to be back at mission control, and I would go back to Houston.

(29:13):
And, finally, PhD sit stands for piled higher and deeper.
It's an endurance project.
It's really as you gotta so many obstructions.
Some people spend 10 years on a project, others spend 2.
You know?
And and and because I done
I've never heard that.
I've never heard that
as a Russian deep breath.

(29:34):
Yeah.
It it really is an endurance thing.
So it it all you've gotta have again, again, what comes to pass is this word of embracing failure.
I had so many failures in my attempt to get the PhD.
It wasn't funny.
I had failures learning to drive.
I failed my driver's license test 4 times because they wouldn't take 16 year olds.

(29:55):
And I failed my my oral exams in front of 5 professors.
The worst nightmare imaginable.
You got 5 guys in a small room quizzing you about everything under the sun and trying to catch you.
And I failed that a bunch of times.
And to the point where they said, hey.
We think you should go to UC Santa Barbara.
There's a professor there who'll be you'll be better off with.
You should go there.

(30:17):
And, I I went there, and I pa took the exam there.
I passed there when I was all ready to start there.
And then, like, you know, as time get marched on to actually getting closer to the start date, I said, what the hell?
Who are these guys to tell me I've gotta leave and tell me that I I I can't do this at Berkeley?
You know, screw them.
And so, in the middle of all in the middle of all of that, I went back to Berkeley, and I insisted on doing this one more time, and I passed.

(30:44):
Maybe it was a transcendental meditation I took to stop being so nervous.
Or maybe it was one of the professors who said, you know what?
You never should have failed in the first place.
They're trying to screw you.
Or maybe it was the fact that there was more money to support graduate students when there wasn't enough money and they had to get rid of somebody back with back in the day when you were doing this.
It's all kinds of maybes.
You have no control over that.

(31:05):
The only thing you have control over is perseverance.
Perseverance that comes after passion, embracing failure.
I'm the living epitome of that.
I know what it's about to fail and how it's important.
I've been writing a novel since 1991.

(31:26):
It's now finally finished.
The memoir that I've been writing is started in god.
It's it's already 7 or 8 years.
I've written a a spacesuit user's manual for kids that's 15 years old.
I've written I've been you know, I just know about persistence.
I know about it.
And you cannot let failure, you know, undo you.

(31:51):
No.
You can't.
I mean, the I I I believe in it.
It's I'm trying to follow your model and and figure it out.
Well, everybody faces failure differently.
Everybody you know, most a lot of people regard it as a personal undercutting of themselves.
There's something called, if you ever watched Northern Exposure, fabulous series that's on right now.
There's one episode called external validation.

(32:15):
And in it in it, one of the characters, he has all these these weaknesses.
He's afraid of being called this.
He's afraid of being that.
He wants to become a shaman.
He's an Indian guy who wants to become a shaman, but he's afraid nobody's gonna listen to him because of this, because of that.
And he has this dream.
The only way to get past this, he's gonna have to have a lie a a life to the death battle with a guy whose name is external validation.

(32:42):
And and in in this episode, which is hilarious, I gotta say, he gets in this fight with this big guy, and there's a little green man who's rooting against him, a little green demon that's you're never gonna win this.
You're a jerk.
You're never gonna win this.
You're a jerk.
You're really it's ridiculous.
And he's he's having this battle with external validation.
And why the show is so great is that it captures all of us.

(33:05):
We are all battling external validation.
And when somebody says you're not good enough, there's 2 ways to look at it.
A, I'm not good enough, and b, you're wrong.
You're absolutely I'm not gonna listen to you.
I'm gonna battle you to the death.
So it's hard changing your attitude about that.

(33:26):
It's hard.
You know?
But all you've got And
then it's something else.
Something else.
Sure.
When I was doing my PhD at Berkeley, I wanted I wanted to meet girls.
No.
I mean, no two ways about it.
I wanted to meet girls and, because it was the only the only kind of, maybe validation that I could get.

(33:55):
I didn't have time for anything.
You you're studying a PhD in mechanical engineering.
There there's not much time left for you to have a good time.
You're working constantly.
Right?
Trying to prove yourself in Mhmm.
Impossible problem sets.
I didn't have time to go to bars.
I didn't have time to just so I figured out a scheme.
The scheme is I would wait on the corner of Northgate, and I would see an attractive woman walking towards Southgate.

(34:19):
I would sidle up to her, and I'd say, hey.
Do you know where life sciences building is?
And she would say, oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I'm going that way.
Well, of course, she's going that way.
I knew she was going that way.
So where she was going.
Right?
So she said, oh, yeah.
Follow me.
Mhmm.
So I'd use that as an opportunity to chat her up during which time I would try to make a date with her.
And, maybe 9 times out of 10, hey.

(34:42):
Thank you, but no thank you.
And, in the beginning, I viewed that as external validation.
I I was being rejected.
But you know how I battle that?
Mhmm.
I kept on walking till I got to Southgate.
And when I got to Southgate, I waited until I saw somebody walking towards the Northgate.

(35:03):
And when I got to Northgate, I turned around and waited until somebody went to Southgate.
And I created an exercise.
And the purpose of the exercise was to deal with rejection.
And what rejection is worse than the opposite sex telling you you're not good enough for me?
Is there a worse rejection than that?

(35:26):
And you wanna know something?
No.
It doesn't even I it I can stand on a stage.
I have people tell me, you don't know what the hell you're saying.
I could I could have professors or experts, quasi experts say, hey.
You're full of baloney.
I could have the, you know, women telling me, hey.
You're too old for me.
You're too young.
You're too this.
It war off the duck's back.
None of it matters because I'm trained.

(35:51):
I'm trained.
I know what it means.
I know how to embrace failure.
I can't begin to tell you what an important lesson it is.
I've, I I don't use that word.
I've but I have had a tremendous amount of things every day, all the time, getting on a call, figuring out how things work.

(36:14):
You just look at a podcast series.
You know how many people you have to call to get the right person and the the
I'll give you another one.
I'll give you another one.
The Did
did you know and You know, I've been working on my books.
Right?
I think the climate change book.
It's called Cassie's Guests.
It's about climate change on Earth and how it started on Mars.
And it's about a it's a love story.
It's about a I I could go on and on about it.

(36:37):
But, basically, Cassie stands for Cass Climate Analog Situation Indicator.
It's about a a woman in the Arizona desert under the roof of Biosphere 2, which is a real place.
It's got this computer that's predicting the effect of the climate inside biosphere 2 for these tests where they're gonna put, people in for as long as they can stand it.

(37:00):
And they're trying to create a miniature earth so they can understand how the ecosystems affect each other.
And and so she meets this guy who's a scientist and he's he's trying to design life support systems to get to Mars.
And she meets him at a conference where she sees him peeing into a jug and puts the jug in this machine and then puts the glass into the machine and then it comes out and drinks his own tea.

(37:25):
Right?
So you're in reclamation system.
And she's saying I need that.
This is this is what I need for my system in in the biosphere too.
And so they get to know each other and they fall in love and blah blah blah blah.
And, and it turns out that she helps them design this this, this whole system that would be used in a in a in a, a greenhouse on Mars.

(37:47):
I'm I'm just rifling through very quickly the bullet points of this.
But, anyway, Cassie
I'm listening.
So she meets him, and then he says to him, well, what are you gonna use, Cassie?
You know, you've done a pretty good with Cassie in inside this biosphere 2.
You were able to keep these guys alive.
And and by the way, there was a real biosphere 2 test.
There were 8 biospherians who were put inside of it for 2 years, and, they came out and, they lost a bunch of weight.

(38:14):
There were some failures in the system.
It it it had, it was using up oxygen because it was bonding oxygen with clay inside the inside of it.
Anyway, long story about that.
But that's a true story.
And he said to her, well, what do you wanna do with this this Cassie ultimately?
And she says, I wanna use it in biosphere 1, the real world.

(38:35):
And he says, well, what do you mean?
She says, well, I wanna be able to predict what's gonna happen to our climate here.
And he says to her, you must be kidding.
You know, inside biosphere 2, you've got a stagnant climate.
Nothing changes.
In the real world, you've got winds.
You've got frost.
You've got you've got patterns of weather.
They're they're impossible.
It's impossible.

(38:57):
And she says, well, maybe impossible for you, but I have Cassie.
And Cassie is a artificial intelligent DNA computer self learning and and, and, well, have you made any progress with this?
And she shows them the progress because she's tried this.
Right?
And, ultimately, Cassie runs, and and gets she says my goal is to get the 65% agreement with the past in terms of climate change in these different areas of the of the world, including the rainforest and in the middle of Chicago and all these places.

(39:30):
And she says, when I do, I'm gonna run it ahead in time.
And just skipping ahead in the whole story, she gets there.
She does run it ahead in time.
And and after about 10 minutes of of running, it stops.
Everything goes flat line.
And people tell her, including her husband now that got married, you know, you you've you made a mistake, this whole thing.

(39:53):
Screw you.
You've got it's like, it's like that famous poem by I think it was, who is it?
Thomas Edison.
I'm not sure who said for want of a nail, a shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe, a horse is lost.
For want of a horse, a battle is lost.
For want of a battle, a a war is lost.
And he said to her, you've got you've got too many nails.
You you've got an impossible project.

(40:15):
She says says you, I'm gonna keep trying.
And, she runs this thing enough times where she begins to believe it's a real thing that's gonna happen, that the climate's gonna shut down.
Something is gonna shut down.
Yeah.
And, and by that time, he's already on Mars.
Yeah.
I'm skipping through a lot of stuff, and he's sent with 5 other people, and each one of them is a character in their own right.

(40:39):
And they get there, and the job is to find out what happened to the climate on Mars because it was warm.
It was wet.
There was probable possible life, certainly.
There were oceans, and they're all gone.
Bang.
They're gone.
And we don't know.
We have theories why.
So his his his goal is to find out why.
And the mission comes to an end without him finding that out.

(41:04):
And, unfortunately, by that time, all the warnings that Cassie had predicted in in climate change on Earth were starting to happen.
Things were warming up.
Oceans were getting bigger.
Coastal towns are being flooded.
Birds were flying north in, in the wintertime.
The list is endless.
Right?
And and the coalition that had put together the human Mars mission failed.

(41:26):
There weren't gonna be any more any more missions.
And on top of that, a massive hurricane blew through Cape Canaveral and wiped out the launch facility.
So it was clear on the eve of them leaving to come back home from Mars, there was never gonna be another mission.
And, but, fortunately, they had planned for another mission, and they built a habitat on the other side of Mars for the next crew to come, crew of 6 with a a, you know, a, a crew of 6 with, I think, a 2 year stay time.

(42:00):
So he did the calculations, and he said, if I can somehow get there, I can continue my research.
And 1 person, instead of 6, I could maybe survive 6 to 10 years.
And maybe by then, somebody could send a rescue mission for me, or I can figure out but mostly his his goal was to find out what happened.

(42:21):
And so he makes that decision makes that decision.
The night before they come back, he sneaks off with a rover.
He's he's plea he's pre planned all of this.
He's hooked all the life support inside the rover.
Life support, with 2 rovers, enough materials for him to have an outside shot at going 3,000 kilometers to the other side of Mars, from Valles Marineris to Olympus Mons.

(42:46):
It's probably more than 3,000 kilometers.
And he sets off.
And he gets on a bluff and watches them leave.
And they're frantically trying to get him to come back.
And you can imagine the emotions.
He's sitting on top of a of a bluff.
He's watching his shipmates leave, and his wife is calling to him.
Everybody's calling to him.
And he has to listen on the radio until there's no turning back and they have to leave.

(43:08):
Right?
So I'm not gonna tell you what happens after that.
But it's it's a monumental story.
It's an epic.
It's it's worthy, and you'll have to take my word for it and get it because you can get it on on Amazon.
It's worthy of, a 2001 Space Space Odyssey film.
Humble as I am, but I will tell you this, which is what led to this whole dialogue in the first place.

(43:36):
Tom Clancy had 158 rejections for the Hunt for Red October.
158 rejections.
So think about it.
Yeah.
Doctor Seuss was doctor Seuss was similar.
A 159 because I've only found 9,999 ways not to do something.

(44:00):
And now I'm doing the 10,000.
So what is the lesson?
What is the lesson?
Failure, you must embrace.
That's the lesson.
It's taken me a long time to get this book, which has got a 100 images that you'll have you'll you'll be pressed to find images like this in any book and a story like this and get the characters to come to life where I can now honestly say to you, I'm a damn good writer.

(44:28):
This is a damn good book, and it's worthy of a film or a TV series.
It it's taken me a long time to be able to say that, but I'm telling you and I'm telling all your listeners, get it and see for yourself.
Call my bluff.
Okay.
Moving on.
Let's let's go on to yeah.
No.
Wait.

(44:49):
You gave it.
You gave the story.
I let it go.
I let it ride.
So let's no.
I'm I I I'm good.
I'm perfectly fine with what you had done.
It was an interesting story.
It's also listening to how embedded in what you were saying is the the sense of who you are.
So stories that people put out there, the the content they develop is something that's embedded in them.

(45:13):
So it was just interesting to hear that this is real.
The point of it is we can all No.
I got that.
I got this I got my point to be doctor Seuss is rejected.
We all have to deal with failure.
It's inherent in us to take it.
I I I got I got that.
That's that's a simple one.
Simple Right.
Not simple to deal with, though.

(45:35):
No.
No.
And that's just part of well, it depends on how people are, but some people get up and they continue to go and people don't.
It's doctor Seuss was also rejected by, publishers, and there is a number that it's similar to that.
It was not as big.
Doctor Seuss was rejected by 27 publishers before his, I think, 28th publisher sold 6,000,000 copies.

(46:02):
I mean, it's some some ridiculous number like that.
So, yes, if those who pursue, but there are also and you've got to admit, there are people who go to 27, 28, or 1's 1 58, 159
Right.
200, 210, and that doesn't make it.
So it's just part of life.
These are the things that we're concerned.
Trained to not fall apart at a rejection.

(46:26):
It's not de facto with birth.
Yeah.
You know?
You can be
trained.
Can.
Yeah.
You absolutely can.
And it's it's for some people, it's easily overcomeable, and for other people, there's challenges with that.
So I'm not I'm I'm not arguing your point about perseverance.
I mean, we look at look at Project Moon Hut.

(46:47):
It's it's a you gotta remember and think about how many rejections we've gotten just to get to where we are.
The great thing is we're getting people who are coming to us all the time and now saying, how do we come a part of this?
But the 1st years, here's this crazy guy who's not a space person, not in love with space, coming up before phase development, all the things that are involved with it.

(47:12):
Hey.
Got a lot, a lot, a lot of rejections.
Right.
You know, good luck with that.
Right.
Right.
So, no no challenge with that.
And even to do what we're doing, a 40 year plan, the numbers, the papers, the designs.
I mean, god, I mean, it's all day long.
So I've kind of so I understand that.
I was just trying to understand you a little bit.

(47:35):
I I I get rejections.
I mean,
every single day with me.
You you're you're another living embodiment of what I've said.
So here are 2 of us talking to people.
Oh, I I living embodiments.
Right?
Yes.
What what I deliver in a different sense, and that's what I was trying to find out with you, and don't take this as negative or positive.
It's just it is.
I I spent 12 years writing.

(47:57):
It was rejected by multiple publishers.
I had a publisher who took it, tried to screw the book up.
I worked with another publisher.
They were really a mess.
I finally found a publisher.
We went through the whole ordeal.
I mean, just everything, but it took 12 years to write 14 complete revisions, 50, over 400 examples in the book, 72% were mine.
I did all this work, put everything together, and then the publisher made a mistake at the end that cost me $80.

(48:24):
And I still went through with
it and published the book
and got it done.
And he he's still the publisher.
But I understand that.
So but my not but.
My approach is always to give people another set of tools.
So I was trying to listen in to how you had done it.
Nothing nothing bad.
So I love your story.
I think it's a great story.
I love that you're writing.
I love that you're persistent.

(48:45):
I love that you have priorities and passion.
Just trying to understand your model, and there's nothing think about it.
There's the fact that I'm listening to your model is a good thing.
Okay.
Okay.
Alright.
Sometimes someone but but just So so let's get let's get on to the, the introduction to the shuttle you've got and the Johnny Carson.
Introduction to the shuttle.

(49:07):
You know what?
All of this is in the memoir, which, I've just finished.
It's gonna be
Well, we're not gonna get any memoir.
You're right here right now.
Tell me what's going on.
The name of the memoir is called STS 136, coming of age, Odyssey above the Karman line.
So how did that how did that happen?
So I'm finished my PhD.

(49:28):
I'm going I have to go back to Houston because that's I have an obligation.
They've paid for everything.
So I come go back to Johnson Space Center.
I'm twiddling my thumbs.
A friend of mine comes in who works there, a materials expert.
He says, well, I got this course at the University of Houston.
It's, it's a home economics class, but we've relabeled it design of functional clothing, and I think you have fun once you join me.

(49:52):
So I went in there and started teaching systems engineering of functional clothing to these, sophomore girls for the most part, who are home ec majors.
And, lo and behold, we designed a whole bunch of interesting clothes using the systems engineering clothes that glow with children, grow with children, a little, a little Mylar suit in your glove compartment in case you get stranded.

(50:17):
Yes.
So so explain explain systems engineering to me the way you are defining it.
Just so
I know.
Any project can be broken down into its functional elements or systems.
And how those systems work together Mhmm.
Is kinda like the scientific method.
It means it means that that there there are components.
There are pieces of it, and those pieces have to fit together.

(50:38):
How they fit together in an optimum way to achieve a goal is systems engineering.
There's a gazillion different method, you know, ways of saying it, but that's that's basically the simplest.
Okay.
I just the again, coming down to that wordsmithing and and language, I'm trying to make sure that I'm understanding you, and that's great.

(50:59):
Because my background, organic chemistry, physics, calculus, all sciences, and I'm very big into systems and structure.
It's a is even a huge, TEDx talk that I did in Luxembourg where I focused on systems and that.
So I I believe in it.
I just wanna make sure.
So, so one of these projects ended up being the very first sports bra, and the the press got ahold of it, and made it into a field day, the bra that came from NASA, anti jounce anti jounce space bra.

(51:37):
It just went crazy.
Right?
They went crazy.
And, and I, you know, I was teaching a class.
I wasn't sure what to do with this.
I put a patent on it.
We built a bunch of versions of it, but I also had my regular day job.
This was kind of a fun aside I was doing at the University of Houston, and it was all over the media.

(51:58):
But I had my real day job, and I wasn't sure what to do because Apollo was finished.
My PhD was finished.
And, one day, my division chief walks in, and he says to me, listen.
I'm sending you to the Cape.
You didn't come you you're not here to build to build sports bras.
You're sitting there twiddling twiddling your thumbs at NASA.

(52:20):
You're building space bras.
That's bullshit.
Yeah.
I don't know the guy.
The guy was a hilarious guy.
There's a lot of incidents that took place that described in the memoir.
But, anyway, bottom line is I'm sending you to the cape.
You're not gonna make any sports bras anymore.
Right?
So I'd
Wait.
So I gotta I gotta when did you meet your wife?
1988.

(52:41):
This is after all this is after all this.
Okay.
Like
Okay.
I'm just wondering if they're walking through the campus Much later.
And the sports bras, somewhere in there you're gonna say you got married.
So later.
Okay.
So, what am I gonna be doing there?
Are you gonna be working on the Space Shuttle?
And I said, well, listen.

(53:02):
I just came off Apollo, sending men to the moon.
Why do I need to go work on the space shuttle?
I don't even know what the thing is.
I don't even see the point of it.
He says, I don't care what you see.
We need people down there, and they'd be may be there a while.
That's why you're twiddling your thumbs, and we need a single person who you know?
So I'm picking you.
Go.

(53:23):
So I get there, and, immediately, I'm resented because, the Space Shuttle Columbia had just arrived in pieces.
I mean, it was being built, and, they were trying to do systems in parallel.
They were trying to do the engines and the tiles and the testing and everything at the same time because it was already years behind schedule, 1,000,000,000 of dollars over budget.

(53:47):
And so it turns out there were 6 different organizations that had the finger in the pie of this, making it complicated.
There was, there was the, NASA at Cape Canaveral or KSC, Kennedy Space Center.
There was NASA Johnson Space Center where I was coming from.
There was NASA headquarters.

(54:08):
There was Rockwell International who was the the contractor at Palmdale, California.
There was Rockwell International in Downey, California, and there was, NASA headquarters themselves, the big kahuna, the, administrator's office.
Everybody had a finger in this pie.
And, but that's why that's why it was so being botched up.

(54:34):
So they wanted a spy.
When I got there, I was told, you know what you're gonna do?
We're gonna make you we're gonna make you into a spy.
You're gonna go through Rockwell Tile School.
You're gonna wear the Rockwell uniform.
You're gonna get out on the floor in the OPF, the Orbiter Processing Facility, and you're gonna be assigned to a team, and you're gonna take a little black book with you.
And in that little black book, you're gonna just record your observations.

(54:58):
And there's an astronaut telling me this, so I befriended from a a previous project previous project.
I said, what?
He says that he he says, yeah.
That's what you're gonna do.
I said, you know, I didn't go to get a PhD to become a spy on the floor because according to the contract, civil servants or NASA employees were not allowed to even touch the space shuttle because the contractual management was in the hands of Rockwell International until it was literally turned over to NASA.

(55:28):
And until it was turned over to NASA Yep.
It was off limits.
So all of this was off limits.
And so I'm I'm saying to myself, well, I don't know what's gonna happen here.
I'm I'm not trained in any of this.
So but it had been arranged at higher levels that there would be a person on the floor by prior agreement who would be trying to find out information to assist in accelerating this whole mess.

(55:58):
And I was that person.
Just locked in the door circumstances.
And, the the first time I got there and walked on the floor, I couldn't even see a space shuttle.
There was jigs and tooling everywhere.
It's just a massive, unbelievable I I like to describe it as a hive.

(56:20):
And in in the middle of that hive was the queen, and all the honeybees are running around feeding the queen, and that's what it was like.
There were 1,200 people in this room, and they were putting this and you couldn't even like I say, you couldn't even determine where the space shuttle was because it was in inside the, all the jigs.
But what what I could see was all these tiles off and on, and I could see some of the skin.

(56:44):
And that was the project that I ended up, working on.
And I found out, amazing things about these things.
They're light, and I find out why they work and that how how delicate they are.
And that, the slightest mistake could end up being a disaster.
And and the people assigned to this, we were called the puzzle people.

(57:05):
If you imagine a jigsaw puzzle, that's what it was because every tile was was predestined to a single place on the orbiter.
It couldn't go anywhere else.
And there were 33 thou 31,763 tile.
Everyone different.
And the paperwork alone would have been would have sunk a battleship.

(57:27):
Paperwork alone.
Hey.
Right.
I I I'm gonna just I'm gonna give you something.
You said 31,763.
Yeah.
My birthday is 7 31
Pretty interesting.
63.
Pretty interesting.
Yeah.

(57:48):
Isn't that is if you did it in it's 73163.
But if you went to Europe, it's 3 1 7 Yeah.
63.
I I I had to bring that up because I just wait.
That that's a little bit too close to for comfort.
Okay.
Anyway, I went I went
I I will remember.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You I will remember that point.
Somebody who actually did not give a crap about the space shuttle, couldn't understand the point of it to actually being where the buck stopped and being emotionally involved and watching all the negative press, kind of like the football team and the newspapers and post in the locker room.

(58:24):
You're gonna get creamed by this other football team, you guys.
There there were all kinds of press like the elephant with wings, the the bird that can't fly, the blah blah blah blah.
Just constantly, we all used it as ammunition to puzzle people, and, and it became the most important thing that I could imagine.

(58:45):
The single most important thing that I can imagine.
I was immersed 247 for 2 years.
Eventually, I built, I I I took all this information down and bought my by the way, my astronaut when I asked him, where am I gonna do this?
I'll be suspected.
I've got a little black book.
If people watch me, I can't be part of a team putting tile on it and then be taking notes.

(59:07):
And he said to me, you gotta take a crap, don't you?
Go to the john, lock the commode, go in there and write it up while you still remember it.
Yeah.
So so I I ended up doing that.
And then then NASA hired their their chief problem solver.
His name was Kenny Kenny Konkinenek.
They he he's the guy that helped save the Skylab space station.

(59:29):
He worked he worked at he was a Purdue graduate who worked with, on the X15 with Neil Armstrong.
He was, his his wife, Pat and Jan Armstrong were best friends, and that's how I got to know Neil Armstrong through Kenny.
And he became like a surrogate parents.
Him and his wife, Pat, became surrogate parents to me when he came.

(59:51):
Anyway, when he showed up, he said, well, who are you, and what have you been doing?
And I I took out my little black book.
I read all this stuff to him, and he said, I want you to stay here.
I was supposed to go back to Houston.
He said, I want you to stay here.
So I ended up staying and writing a program called The Pipeline that was a, a predictive model of how fast we were gonna finish the job.

(01:00:13):
How many tile were put on yesterday?
How many were taken off?
How many failed inspection?
How many were to to do it was about 50 steps in this pipeline, all of them.
And it was kinda like a weather weather model.
It was it was not meant to be exact to tell you when the finishing date is, but it was the trend.
And it would trend and and look at our trends about how long how much longer can we be expected to keep doing this and when we were gonna get closure.

(01:00:43):
Anyway, I can't tell you the emotions involved in that.
It just just stupendous, experience.
I never thought I'd say that it was more emotionally involving than being on console in Apollo 11, but it was.
And do you know when it it was more emotional.
It was more emotional.

(01:01:04):
I'll tell you why.
So when
So when when when you say you're emotionally involved
Columbia was a living, breathing thing to everybody.
We're watching it come together.
You know, the average engineer at NASA or a contractor never puts a finger on a real life spacecraft.
You can imagine of those 400,000 people working on Apollo.

(01:01:26):
Everybody's got a little tiny piece of the pie, but it's but you don't very few people get to walk up the stairs into the flight deck and put their hands and feet and on a controller and actually touch the damn thing.
84 few.
A precious, precious few.
It's a different world when you do that.
I mean and I was all over that.

(01:01:47):
I was all over Columbia walking on its wings, going in the cabin.
You know, it's it's a totally different animal.
41 note man was a computer program that got me on console.
That's not the same.
Right?
So yeah.
So, so that you know, when when she was so then we're finally finished.

(01:02:11):
It's rolled out of the rolled out of the Orbiter processing facility.
It's on its way.
And during during the, journey, my boss, Kenny, that I mentioned about it, is being asked to talk to the press many, many times and explain what's going on because nobody knew about the space shuttle or what it was gonna do.
And all they heard was the lemon with wings is behind schedule, blah blah blah.

(01:02:33):
It's over budget.
So one particular instance, I get a call from a talent agency in Burbank, California with the Johnny Carson show.
And, the guy questions me and questions me and questions me, and he finds out that I've designed a a sports bra from a space suit.
That's all he had to hear.

(01:02:56):
And, of course, you know, I'm I'm by this time, I'm pretty good on stage.
I'm pretty good with my words.
I've done a 1000000 PowerPoints.
I I can give a pretty good lecture, pretty good at projecting myself and expressing myself.
And so he booked me on, Carson show, the purpose of which was to explain the space shuttle.

(01:03:17):
So, I had a model.
I talked about the engines.
I talked about just getting past all these tests.
I talked about the tiles.
I talked about the power of it, what it was gonna do, how it was gonna change the world, what an amazing vehicle it was, and time ran out.
And Johnny looked at me and said, well, he had some really wise crack fabulous jokes about the tiles.

(01:03:40):
He said, now I've heard I I'm paraphrasing.
You can actually find it on YouTube.
So that's I'm paraphrasing, what he said, but he says something like, well, you know, we've all heard about these tiles and the problems and problems taking them up.
He says, tell me, doc, did did you use Elmas glue all to put these on, doc?
Is that what you got?
Would you be afraid of getting on this thing with Elmas glue?
And, of course, everybody cracked up.

(01:04:02):
The audience cracked up.
I cracked up.
It's just Johnny Carson.
You know?
So, anyway, when this when this
Did he ask you about the bras?
Oh, okay.
He said, well, it looks like we're not gonna have time to do the second part of this presentation, which is you've invented all these things.
Would you be willing to come back tomorrow?

(01:04:23):
And I said, hey, man.
Yeah.
Of course.
Now I'm probably the only invited guest to come back on consecutive nights on, Carson show.
I don't think there's any been anybody else.
There may have been, but it's doubtful.
So I was back the 2nd night, and the 2nd night, that's exactly what that was about.
It was about sports bras and running shoes and water cooled garments and space suits and how they work and, all kinds of inventions that I'd come up with.

(01:04:51):
Now I didn't have a company, but I had, I had I had prototypes of all these things that I'd hand built.
And when that show ended, Switchboard was, I didn't I didn't have my timing right.
I didn't have a product.
I didn't even imagine having a product because I was still working at NASA.
But one of the calls came from Japan, and the president of this company, Weston trained, I'd like to meet you in New York.

(01:05:18):
I'll pay for your trip.
Could you meet me in New York at section section date?
So, yeah, so we met in New York, and he said, I'd like to make you the face of our company.
I'm prepared to triple your NASA salary.
I'm prepared to pay you 1st class trips to Japan best hotels twice a year.
I want you to help us design a ski jacket.
I want you to promote our company for the Olympics and so on.

(01:05:44):
And, that contract lasted 18 years, and that relationship was again, that's that's a whole other topic.
Like, I cover it in a book, the above the Karman line book.
I cover all that, But it was, astonishing.
What was that called?
Phoenix, p h e n I x.
P h e n I x, Phoenix Ski Ware.

(01:06:09):
And he got 2 other contracts for me personally.
He got me the sponsorship of the 1984, Los Angeles Olympics.
And Joni Benoit, who won the Olympic marathon in 1984, was wearing that ensemble that I designed, among other people wearing other things that we designed.

(01:06:33):
So, yeah, he got me a contract with Kappa Sports to build the outer shell.
He got me a contract with a Japanese 800 year old Japanese, bedware company called Nishikawa Sanyo to build liquid cooling bedware to control your foot and your arm temperatures and in a bed, precisely control different temperatures using flowing water.

(01:06:56):
Yeah.
He did a lot of those things, but the personal relationships in Japan were the highlight.
They were astonishing.
It was fantastic.
Yeah.
It's a pretty incredible country.
I and Phoenix is still Phoenix is still around.
And in fact, I had a his son They're
still around.
Has a role in it, and I had a conversation with, with mister Tajima lately fantastic gentleman, you know, just fantastic experience.

(01:07:24):
Just no other way to say it.
Anyway,
No.
I I lived I lived in Asia.
I think I told you Hong Kong for 10 years.
So, yeah, just the different different world of
things we've done.
Japan is an amazing country.
I got a call from NASA at Houston Houston, and they said, hey.

(01:07:45):
You can't be doing promotion of your company and selling things while you're working for NASA.
NASA doesn't
Oh, so you're still working for them at the same time?
At first, yes.
Okay.
And I said, well, okay.
Can I take a leave of absence?
They ended up giving me not 1, not 2, but 3 years leave of absence and held my job while I did all of this stuff.

(01:08:11):
And my family got involved, my friends got involved with this company.
We called it TechniClothes for technical clothing, and it was much more than a sports bra.
It was a lot it was cooled headbands and, just the ski jacket.
A lot of different a lot of different products, probably.
So so, anyway, at some point, they called me 3 years later and said we can't extend your leave of absence anymore.

(01:08:39):
You've gotta share to get off the pot.
You you've either come back or you've gotta resign.
And I thought hard and hard about it.
I went back there and I decided, I wasn't ready to give up the lifestyle that I now had going all over the world.
And, I I could have continued to do both had I controlled it, but it was getting to be too difficult.

(01:09:04):
I loved living in New York.
And, I finally in in tears, in front of HR, in front of NASA Legal, in tears, I signed the, the resignation document.
And I gotta say, in that separation interview, they never told me that I was only, like, like, 2 years away from a permanent, pension.

(01:09:29):
They never mentioned that.
Had they mentioned that Wow.
I never would have signed that document.
And and because they didn't mention it, I was not able to get back as a civil servant, and I was not able to get the year and a half to or 2 years to to to get on a permanent pension with a permanent salary, which which I really has hurt me.

(01:09:52):
I mean, tremendously hurt me.
Mhmm.
Fortunately Yeah.
The minute I got off the books at NASA, I got on the books for Social Security because you can't be a civil servant and have Social Security at the same time as one or the other.
And and we also had managed to to to purchase a house in the Berkeley Hills at the low port low point of the market.

(01:10:17):
And despite all the horrific things that happened with the stock market and the tech market crash and and 911 and everything else, I don't hold it against I I actually, at one point, threatened to sue.
I was gonna sue the government for not not telling me about this, you know, this clause, which, by the way, has since moved up to underneath the signature line on page 1.

(01:10:45):
It was there hidden in page 5.
Uh-huh.
So not only didn't they tell me, but it was there.
It was hidden somewhere.
So now because other people complained, I guess, it was, highlighted in page 1.
So, you know, I for a while, I was angry and upset, but then I looked back at all the things that good things that happened at NASA and all the benefits that happened and the fact that I was able to navigate that.

(01:11:11):
And there's a lesson to be learned.
Life balances out.
It just balances out.
You cannot vent your entire life on a single incident.
Like, you know, Elon I'll give you an example.
Elon Musk.
A
lot of people say he's an asshole.
He's crazy.
He's he's pottered in with Trump.
Crap comes out of his mouth.
He's a he's a disgusting human being, blah blah blah blah blah.

(01:11:34):
Right?
Well, you know what?
We are all the sum of the things we do in our lives, and the things we say in our lives are a minor proportion of the things we do.
It's what we do that counts.
And I don't care who you are, you've got some nasty things in your closet that you don't wanna talk about.

(01:12:01):
So Elon talks about it, and he's a jerk, and he does says this and that.
But this guy has changed the world.
And, you know, I know some Jewish people, who will never buy a German car to this day because of World War 2 and the holocaust.
Right?
And I know some people
Mhmm.
Who are unloading their Teslas or would never buy a Tesla.
And those people are very, very narrow minded.

(01:12:23):
They just don't get it.
We are all the sum of many factors.
And, except with except with Donald Trump, he's got too many fa I'm not even gonna get to that.
But too many factors too many factors.
Too many.
Anyway I I was I was I just was wondering if you were gonna step that way, and I said, I I don't know.

(01:12:50):
We'll see
what happens.
So, okay.
So yeah.
So,
So so you're now you're now about to live in Central Park, New York.
Yeah.
And I did.
I stayed at my friend's couch in his apartment on 61st Street and First Avenue.
I bought a a beautiful, penthouse apartment on 79th and First.
I was enjoying the New York life and loving it.

(01:13:13):
I started writing my books at that point.
And then, then I got the urge to go to teach.
And I I've been in and out of UC Berkeley a lot getting my graduate degree, and I I taught some courses.
So I put a request into my old apartment, can I teach?

(01:13:35):
And I decided to teach this course called living in space.
And, who knew?
But it was the right time and the right place, like I'm telling you before with the 4 p's.
And it got advertised by Space Club.
And the 1st day of the class, there were 440 students in that lecture room.
And and I had planned the whole thing out.

(01:13:56):
I was gonna the course was about everything you ever wanted to know about space, from careers to how the space shuttle works, to how do you fly it, to the stars, to the planets, to, Mars, to the moon, just just lots of topics.
And one of the things that I had going for me is I could get a lot of guest lecturers, really impressive people, astronauts and and contractors would come in.

(01:14:21):
I had them all lined up.
Everybody was lined up.
But a highlight a highlight of that course was gonna be, I think, the 8th lecture on January 26, 1986.
We were gonna get a live feed from Challenger by Christa McAuliffe, teacher in space.
And we're all set to get that live feed when the Challenger exploded.

(01:14:46):
I'll and I'll never forget that day.
I actually got that interview on tape, that that class on tape.
There were there were probably 500 people in the room.
The press was there.
ABC, NBC, CBS, they were in the room.
They thought I knew what caused the accident, and I didn't know what caused the accident.
You know?
But I was, like, the spokesperson in the Bay Area, kind of translate all this stuff.

(01:15:10):
And when You felt that.
And when the the dust settled, they brought me to their studio in downtown San Francisco, where I was on TV for the next 2 or 3 days.
I I sort of could piece together some of the story, but it took a long time to actually find out that the O rings had, shrunk.
The The weather, was too cold.

(01:15:31):
The red lines for launch criteria have been violated.
People had tried to stop it, and they weren't listened to, gazillion reasons.
And that's all in this book, Challenger, which Adam Higginbotham has just wrote.
He's a like I started to say earlier, he's a best selling author of, of, Midnight at Chernobyl, New York Times bestseller.
And it's called Challenger Heroes and I forget the exact term.

(01:15:56):
But, chapter I forget.
I think it's chapter 7 or 8.
It's called the tile caper.
And it's all about what I just described when I got to the cape and and and what I did, when I arrived at the cape and I saw Colombia the first time.
But but anyway
Yeah.
The name of the book is Challenger, a True Story of Heroism.

(01:16:19):
Yeah.
That's what
I'd name.
It's it's brand new.
It just came out.
I mean, a couple of months old.
So you can find it's a hard book.
It's an easy read, really.
It's like Midnight, Chernobyl is extraordinary.
This guy is, the best researcher, writer, of that genre that I've ever seen.
It's just it's like you're there as the clock is is clicking.

(01:16:40):
It's like he he's that good.
Anyway, well, when the dust settled, I had to go back to class, and then I find out that all of my guest lecturers are backing out.
They're involved in investigation.
So I I had to completely change the course.
And, so I'm I'm facing these 400 students, and I'm saying, well, I'm open for ideas about what to do.
And one student said, why don't we build a memorial?

(01:17:04):
And, well, how are we gonna build a memorial?
And, other other hands got waved.
Well, can can, before you get to that, how when you were in the room and you saw it, what it how did you feel?
What was going through your mind?
The way I saw it was I was at the I was at a where the heck was I?

(01:17:29):
You said your school was all set up.
You're ready
to do this whole thing.
Teaching.
It was like lecture 8.
I had already begun teaching.
I was getting ready to do preparing for a lecture, and the the phone rang 7 o'clock in the morning, California time.
It was one of my students that I've gotten to know.
And he said, have you heard the news?
I said, no.
It was valerii.

(01:17:50):
It's kinda like I also got the same news for 911.
He said, yeah.
Challenger just exploded.
And, of course, I went to the you know, couldn't believe it.
And then I went into the lecture, and that's when I saw this other stuff taking place.
Yeah.
It's like getting a gut a gut punch.
And,

(01:18:11):
Well, the reason I say it is you the way you are describing your working on the challenger and then having that happen, it it's probably I don't I don't know if it's describable, but it must have been more than most people felt because he that you were part of that whole experience.
Well, I had started working on on the real Challenger after I finished Columbia and when I took to leave the Athens.

(01:18:36):
So, yeah, I had a connection with Challenger.
I I I knew Judy Resnick, for instance.
I knew, as it turns out, you you know, I've known quite a few astronauts and people, and I've known some that have perished.
And NASA's a different world when that happens.
Wherever it's it's like when JJFK was assassinated.
You never forget.

(01:18:58):
And and then the grief counselors come out and your job stops.
I don't care what it is.
Basically, the Johnson Space Center stopped.
Whatever was going on, everything stops.
They assigned grief counselors.
They've got to reconfigure, optimize how we're gonna figure out what happened.
They have investigation teams come out.
You can volunteer to be a part of an investigation team for a while depending on what your job is.

(01:19:23):
You could be in total limbo or you could keep on going.
That's something that had nothing to do with the shuttle program.
Of course, there's, you know, there's 30000, 20 1000 civil servants.
They're all doing different things.
Not that not everybody's working on the space shuttle.
So it's, it's a very, you know, it's a it's a it it's like you're shocked.
It's in shock.
You're in shock.

(01:19:44):
There's no other way to describe it.
You're in shock.
So when the student said, you know, we can do a memorial and another student say, hey.
You know, I think I can help.
I've built homes.
And another student said, yeah.
I've done construction.
And before you know it, I said, well, is this really a possibility?
What kind of memorial will we do?

(01:20:06):
And, again, it's on YouTube.
You can look up Challenger Memorial on YouTube, see for yourself what started out as a box of of of of of, of, chicken wire and cardboard.
What it turned into was not even to be believed.
You won't believe it.
And the fact that students not trained at a university can do this, it speaks it's it's you know, I'm a person that believes things can be done with passion because for a reason.

(01:20:38):
I'm looking at this stuff and I'm saying, woah.
How did that ever happen?
I urge you, get on YouTube and do a search for Challenger Memorial.
My personal website is n 2 Mars, letter n, number 2, Mars.
So when you get on YouTube, just do a search for n 2 Mars.
You'll see 60 videos.
You'll see sports bras.

(01:20:59):
You'll see boobs bouncing.
You'll see shuttles launching.
You'll see lectures that I'm giving, but somewhere in there, you'll see me building building Columbia.
You'll see me on the floor, putting tile on Columbia.
And you will see one called Challenger Memorial.
And of all the ones to watch, that's the most astonishing when I look back, how that was we were able to do that.

(01:21:24):
Okay.
Anyway, when that was when that was done and we opened it up and made it into a teaching tool, A chapter of my life ended.
And, at that point, I was offered the opportunity to a post to do a postdoc, at NASA Ames, which is close by to Berkeley, Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

(01:21:52):
And I needed to pick a topic, and I picked one near and dear to my heart, designing a spacesuit for Mars.
And nobody had ever done that.
And that ended up being let's see.
That started it.
Wait.
But you you also had the full scale fuselage
I turned it over to the university.
It was now part of the Lawrence Hall of Science.
We built it on the grounds of the Lawrence Hall of Science outside.

(01:22:16):
And it was blessed by, we were given permission by Glenn.
Is he at a 100 different CEOs
who mentioned To get permission to do this, the the the lead of the Lawrence Hall of Science at the time was Glenn Seaborg.
Now Glenn Seaborg doesn't mean anything to you.

(01:22:37):
He's a Nobel Laureate who worked on he he was in the, in the in the Oppenheimer movie.
He's got he's got, atomic he he's in the he he's in the periodic table.
He has, elements named after him, seaborgium or something like that, Glenn Seaborg.
He was temporarily at the head of the Lawrence Hall of Science, and he said, go for it.

(01:23:00):
Here's a piece of land.
Go for it.
But, he was only temporary.
When he left the he was the acting head.
The real head, her name was Marjorie Gardner.
She was in the hospital.
She came out and she saw this and said, what on earth is this?
You're building something in our our prime real estate back here.
I didn't give you permission.

(01:23:21):
And she put up a battle and tried to get it stopped in the middle.
But that's when I learned about the use of, of the media.
So I called ABC and CBS, and they came out, and they did a whole, story on it.
It was all over the news, and then they could not stop it.
But, you know, I got I got a real hint of the bureaucracy and how it works and the and the fight you have to put up with big bureaucracies to get anything done.

(01:23:48):
And it's a tough fight.
It's a tough, tough fight.
But thank goodness, they came to the rescue, and that's how we got that finished.
So, anyway, back to, I turned it over to them and and then I
Just so you know that we Project Moon Hut started at NASA Ames.
It started, a portal.

(01:24:11):
So I owe a lot to NASA Ames because they introduced me once I started working out there.
I had to meet the planetary scientists.
I had to find out all about Mars details that I never knew.
I got to know about the Mars Society, the Mars Underground, the movers and shakers, Bob Zubrin, who wrote the the, the famous case for Mars.
I got to know all the people involved in in in in, you know, both robotic and human missions to Mars.

(01:24:41):
And, that brought me on a on a trail that I'm still living, which is building and designing a space suit for Mars.
And, again, crazy things.
It was all in a classroom.
It was all in PowerPoint.
It'd been going on for years years.
Each class would build on the work of the prior class.
It's it's a a process I call the, HyperNet paradigm, where you break you break a you break a a class up into projects or subprojects and elements, and it's all based on what?

(01:25:12):
Passion.
Each one picks a piece of the pie based on their passion.
I don't assign them, and they don't have to be, experts.
I can have an English major working on a spacesuit torso.
I can have, mechanical engineer working on a, on a marketing program.
It doesn't really matter.
It's all about passion.
And they all work together and they produce, a deliverable and the deliverable gets, peer reviewed.

(01:25:39):
And the and the peer reviews make suggestions how to proceed.
And the next semester, we start from the prior semester's work.
And the students are allowed to take this class multiple times.
They can start out as a freshman, and they can go, become a team leader.
They can do it for a graduate project.
Meanwhile, they're learning about how NASA works and how to make presentations, and they they give an entree into places they never would So they learn how to present.

(01:26:04):
They learn how to present, how to proceed next week.
Grade from a test.
They get a grade from how they fit in with their team and how that team has put together what I call deliverables and schedules, of their part of the project.
And they have to interact with all the other teams.
And it's called, again, it's called the HyperNet paradigm.
You can probably find some of it listed on, you my YouTube site, how it's done.

(01:26:27):
But but the the main point is this started out in 2012 up until the pandemic.
We were just evolving the design.
And then when the pandemic hit and we were all, like, locked up, and and one day, in short order, I met a guy I met 2 people.
I met a guy who, who built spacesuits in his in his in his own laboratory.

(01:26:56):
And he said, I can build that.
And I met an investor.
And in a very short order of time, like just a few months, we went from PowerPoint to actually a real space suit.
And since then, we've built a team of about 10 people with expertise in a lot of different areas who are actively looking for financing.

(01:27:18):
But, but we're kind of ahead of the game.
It's about 10 years too soon, but we we're setting the stage for meeting probably with SpaceX or somebody like that to partner with them.
But the the the the, the more significant is that this the space suit is designed to stop, to provide planetary protection.

(01:27:42):
So you you you the title you called out was all about Mars.
So what did you before you get to the suit, what is all about Mars to you mean?
Because you said you learned so much about it.
What did you learn?
What Well, I you well, I
learned about the environment.
I learned about the history.
I learned about the probability of liquid water.
I did studies.
We we had a bell jar on campus here where we actually reproduced the Mars environment, temperature and, we couldn't we can't do the gravity, which is 38%, but everything else, we learned that liquid water could stay liquid.

(01:28:18):
It doesn't just flash and and sublimate, immediately.
It depends where on Mars you're talking about because the because the, pressure the triple point is about 10 millibars and the the the atmospheric pressure on Mars varies from whether you're going down or whether you're going up.
You you can go down 3 kilometers below sea level.

(01:28:40):
It's it's it's bay it's not there's no sea, but it's called base base level.
Or you can go up as high as Olympus Mons, which is higher than, you know, the highest mountains that higher than Everest.
Everest.
Yeah.
So we you know, we've so I learned all of that and how how the water cycle works, where the most likely places that from what you sorry.

(01:29:06):
From what you've learned, you're you're a 100% not a 100%.
That's a tough word.
You're confident that the travel there and living there is possible.
Absolutely.
Why?
Sub lutely.
What would Tell me why.
Well, we've already stayed on ISS for longer than it takes to get to Mars.

(01:29:29):
We already have countermeasures for longer than it takes to get there.
Far longer.
You can get there in 6 to 8 months depending on, on the orbital mechanics that you pick.
So you can be there.
You can land, and it's far, far more hospitable than the moon or low earth orbit.
It's a planet.
It's not empty space.

(01:29:50):
So, and it's got a gravity very similar, you know, 38% of ours as opposed to 16%, which is on the moon or 0 for all practical purposes in low earth orbit or on space station.
So, so then the question is, well, okay.
So you've arrived.
Well, that's why I that's why you'll have to read the book, Cassie's Guest, because once you've arrived Well,
I I'm on the call with you.

(01:30:12):
This is what I wanna do.
Right?
Okay.
So once you've arrived Yeah.
Then you gotta tell me.
It's not gonna go read the book.
I'm not gonna go I got other things to read.
So once you've arrived, if you're on the equator, it's 80 degrees.
If you're on the North Pole, where Viking 1 was or Viking 2, it can be, you know, a 100 degrees colder than the Arctic if you're in the South Pole, which is more like, more like, the moon.

(01:30:39):
It's lower, actually.
It's it's below datum level on the South Pole than it is on the North Pole.
It's a completely different environment.
So you've got all these different environments just like you do on Earth.
You've got you you know, on Earth, you wear a ski jacket when it's cold.
You wear a bikini when it's warm.
So the the so the spacesuit has to do exactly the same thing.
That's taken into account.
You've got different environments.

(01:31:00):
You've got a higher gravity level.
But the key question, the most important question is, when you arrive there, will the 38% gravity level reverse all of the effects that you've accumulated on the voyage there?
Because without countermeasures and we have countermeasures.
So I'm saying without countermeasures, you have fluid shifts, you have cardiovascular changes, you have, changes in, in in immune system function.

(01:31:36):
All all this is about 10 different physiological systems that change soon as you leave Earth, and it takes anywhere for bone loss, for instance, can take up to 6 months to stabilize, and sometimes it doesn't ever stabilize.
These these are all things that change in your body the minute you leave Earth and get into 0 microgravity.

(01:31:57):
Right?
So But you you so I'm gonna jump you were the life science experiment manager for the International Space Station.
So does that tie into how you're you believe that this is all possible?
Exactly.
Precisely.
Precisely.
In fact, that that, organization I worked with is tasked with the countermeasures so that you can do this.

(01:32:22):
Let her know because there's not So there are active countermeasures.
There's exercise, 3 different kinds of exercise.
There's drugs like alendronate.
There's diet.
There's there's just lots of countermeasures.
But the one countermeasure that we have have not used is artificial gravity.
And the the real question nobody's answered, which I keep on pushing, I've written a paper on it, and a PowerPoint presentation is, will the gravity of Mars help you, hinder you, or just not any anything in between?

(01:32:55):
Because if it helps you, you're just the longer you stay on Mars, the better off you are prepared for the trip home.
Right.
So What what about radiation from your perspective?
Radiation, can be dealt with, multiple ways.
First of all, the habitat would be built below ground.
The habitat would have radiator radiation.

(01:33:17):
You can build above ground habitats, native materials.
It's pre landed.
Even the habitat, you can we can pre land a habitat, which is what we do in my okay.
She's here already.
Wow.
Oh, no.
Sorry.
She's not.
You can pre land a habitat with, with Elon's starship.

(01:33:38):
In fact, the starship is the habitat.
So you can you can outfit the habitat to be radiation, secure.
What you can't do is you can't go outside in a spacesuit for too long, But NASA has worked it out.
They've worked it out with lifetime dosage.
So we already know, this is again part of my life science, manager experience, that a voyage to Mars and back, a 3 year voyage to Mars will give you a career dose of radiation.

(01:34:06):
That will up your probability of getting cancer over the course of your lifetime by up to 10%, 6 to 10%.
It might and with mitigation, strategies in place, it could be a lot lower than that.
It would be a lot lower if you had a spacesuit that prevented that, and that's one of the tasks of building, an advanced spacesuit, which we haven't really addressed yet.

(01:34:33):
We have 10 years to do it.
So, yes, you can get there, and it's not gonna kill you.
And it it may be the the the issue is you're talking about 6 to 8 months where a lot of things can go wrong.
Then you have to land, in a place with an atmosphere through a fiery reentry.
And you're not just landing a light payload.

(01:34:55):
You're landing 25 tons.
So, we've done that on Mars several times, but nothing on the order of 25 tons.
We've added a couple of we've landed a couple of tons.
But we have I believe from what I've been following, we have the technology to land a 25 ton lander.
Certainly, Starship will be able to do it.
And soon as Starship, demonstrates, landing it has demonstrated landing.

(01:35:21):
It's already landed on the ocean.
But soon as it demonstrates landing on land, and then, of course, it's gonna be used in the Artemis project.
And it's a, it's a fundamental link to landing on the moon.
But when Starship demonstrates that, we now have the way to land on Mars.
And that's what Elon that's behind the whole thinking of what he's done.

(01:35:44):
We don't need the Space Launch System that NASA's got.
It's a colossal boondoggle, and everything associated with it from Starlink to Orion to the whole ball of wax that we're that's the Artemis project is, unnecessary.
It can all be done it can all be done with, Starship.

(01:36:08):
And so On our
on our on our last call, you had a lot of commentary about this aspect of not being done, not going to work, on and on and on.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, is the so do you think any of that will happen?
Of which?
Of the the NASA's work that they're working on.

(01:36:31):
Oh, god.
Yeah.
There's You know, because, gotta understand, NASA's a jobs program.
Boeing is another another version.
Need a credit card that I can Please.
Please.
Please.
Boeing is another version of NASA.
Okay.
All all of the all of the subcontractors that are out there, with the exception of the new commercial guys, who are for profit, really, they're all AKA NASA, which means that their contracts are fixed price contracts.

(01:37:07):
NASA gives them a bunch of money.
Sorry.
They're they're cost plus.
NASA gives them a bunch of money, and the money then, if they run over, they get more money.
And, it's basically to give jobs.
NASA's job NASA's job as a as a federal agency is to distribute and disperse funds and give jobs out, which is highly commendable.

(01:37:30):
But it's a different world when you're running a company for profit, which Boeing doesn't do, maybe in their airline division, but not in their space division.
When you're running a company for profit, you don't run it the same way.
And, the the best example I like to give is that SpaceX, and I'm sure Blue Origin, they're vertical corporations, which means that everything that goes in one end of that building is the raw materials to build what comes out the other end of that building.

(01:38:02):
If you ever tour SpaceX, you got raw materials coming in one side, you've got, Falcon nines and and Starships coming out the other end.
And it it that's exactly the same with Tesla, which is not a car company.
People make the mistake of thinking Tesla's a car company.
It's not a car company.
It's a tech company.
And, basically, if you visit Tesla, which I have, you see all the pieces come in one end and the precious few subcontractors.

(01:38:27):
Because the more subcontractors you have, the more delays, the the more politics get into it.
So the way I like to envision it is SpaceX is a dictatorship.
NASA is a democracy.
NASA's job is to distribute to the people.
SpaceX's job is to build a product in the best and fastest and most efficient way.

(01:38:50):
So if all goes to hell in a handbasket with Artemis, you I already know deep down, you know, SpaceX has the alternative to land on the moon by themselves.
They don't need Artemis even though they're building the landing part of the of the project.
They are they are contracted to build the human landing component of Artemis, which rendezvous with the the gateway, which is another total boondoggle.

(01:39:15):
Right?
All that is a money was given out by NASA to build these things.
And, to be fair, part of the reason that money was given out was to develop technologies.
It was not to land on the south pole of the moon and figure out if there's ice down there and actually move move us on to Mars.
That's that's the word, but that's not the reality.

(01:39:38):
The reality is the money is going to develop technologies.
But if you wanna go somewhere and you've got a target, that's not what you do.
You've act you actually build stuff and test it to failure.
This can be done by Elon and and the other guys because they can do it.

(01:40:00):
They build multiple starships, and they and they test them to failure.
You've seen it happen.
They
So you're are you per are you perceiving a somewhat of a collapse like Axiom Space is having challenges now?
I would not be the least bit of surprise.
Already, one company, Collins, pulled out of the, the agreement with the spacesuit.
Axiom Space is together with Paragon, and I know I love Paragon.

(01:40:24):
They build life support systems for space suits.
There's frustration from head to toe.
I'm not the least bit surprised.
Grant.
Grant has been on our program.
Grant Anderson.
Yeah.
I love Grant.
We're friends.
We're we're not He's a great guy.
Colleagues.
We're friends.
And and Grant and I can be completely honest with each other, and he can I'm not gonna quote him as saying anything bad about anything because that's not how

(01:40:46):
you Ed, actually, I will say with Grant, I will I presented at the National Space Society, and afterwards, he walked up and said, anything you need, I'm here to help you.
He was just right from the gate.
That.
Grant was
great.
Helpful.
It's great.
Couldn't be more helpful.
Could not be more helpful.
And, we've extended all You
see a lot more of this kind of collapsing in the transition to more commercial?

(01:41:10):
Or what do you
it's hard to you you know how I view it?
Most recently, bringing us up to pretty much closure here is what happened with Starlink, is not surprising.
What happened with Starlink is a repeat of what happened with Challenger in Colombia.
And the reason I say that is because the warning signs were everywhere, and they were ignored.

(01:41:38):
What if your job is safety is page 1.
If if you grow up in an environment like I did with posters on the walls, safety is priority 1 everywhere you look.
And you see that there were people coming out of the woodwork from Challenger trying to stop it because it was too cold, and you have other people on Colombia saying we had a tile hit, of a piece of foam hit a hit a skirt on the SRB just 2 missions ago, and it put a dent in a metal solid rocket booster skirt.

(01:42:15):
Not a tile, but a metal solid wrist booster skirt and imagine the damage it could do.
And and by the way, the damage was never gonna be the tile.
People wanna blame tile.
But if you look at the configuration of the orbiter sitting on the external tank, it can only be dealt a glancing blow by pieces of foam coming off the, the tank.

(01:42:37):
Because if if you just look at the the pathway for for pieces of foam to get down and hit the orbiter, they're only glancing blows.
The only way you could have a lethal blow is if it hits the wing.
Just look at the look at it, the geometry of it.
And and because the odds are so low, that ain't gonna happen.

(01:43:00):
Even though there were a 100 instances, a 100 tile being replaced because of the foam coming off.
The issue was not where the foam hit.
The issue was the goddamn foam was coming off from day 1 and having worked tile and seen what happens.
You know, in between flights of the space shuttle, the tile would be replaced, a 100 tile or so would be replaced each time.

(01:43:22):
They would be repaired.
It would go back out, to the launch pad, the pad 39, and it would sit there in inclement weather for as much as a month while rain came in and temperatures fluctuated back and forth.
And is it any surprise that foam got brittle and foam pieces came off in an environment like that from the get go, it should have been known immediately that foam is gonna be suspect.

(01:43:49):
You can get your home you can get the roof in your house covered with a foam cover, or you can get it done with bitumen or other other roof coverings.
Right?
But when you get the top of your roof sprayed with foam, they're going around these structures like vents.
Right?
And the foam has to have a seal with the vents and other nonlinear places.

(01:44:14):
And guess what happens if you're in the northeast or if you're in temperate places where it rains or if you're in places where wild fluctuations happen?
What do you think is gonna happen to that foam?
Just go up there and look and put your hands through it one day.
It's no surprise.
So it should have been understood from the get go, and there are ways to prevent it, and there are ways to deal with it.

(01:44:39):
But when you have an experimental vehicle like the shuttle that did a 135 flights and 2 major accidents, that killed 14 people the first one happened in the 25th flight.
The second one happened in a 107th flight.
Every time you have a major accident, you learn something you thought you knew but you didn't, and you repair it.

(01:45:02):
It's not gonna happen again.
So it gets safer.
So let me tell you let me tell you, there have been 747s that have gone down for reasons just like this, but they had thousands of flights.
They didn't have a 135 flights.
So people took potshots at the shuttle, but they didn't understand the background.

(01:45:24):
They didn't understand how many flights it actually takes to wean out all the problems.
And, eventually, NASA got in a mode where they could not support the Space Shuttle and support the International Space Station and future programs.
1 was eating out at the budget of the other.
You can't do multiple introduction programs with a limited budget.

(01:45:45):
And the other thing is is that the Space Shuttle had become like an airline.
NASA was never should never have been running an airline, but they were.
So I wanna I wanna finish up with this because
Well, but you one last thing.
You you said Starlink
I'm gonna get to that.
To that.
Pricing.
Okay.
So Yeah.
After the shuttle was retired and I was retired by it's a whole other story how I ended up losing my job, but that's that's I came back to NASA.

(01:46:12):
I worked for I worked for, like, 12 or 14 years as a contractor with the National Space Biomedical Research Institute.
Institute.
That's when I was the experiment manager.
So I had a second tour of NASA when I did that.
When that when that ended because of funding, because president Obama canceled the constellation program and that was funding me, Couple of years later, Michelle was officially retired, and I had a friend in Los Angeles say, well, why they're retiring it?

(01:46:41):
And I basically explained a lot of this, and he said, well, how many how much did they cost?
He said $5,000,000,000 each.
He said, well, how much how much are they selling them for to museums?
I said 25,000,000.
He said that's insane.
Who who who who you know, they can't do that.
They don't belong to NASA.
They belong to to us, the the people.
We should save them.

(01:47:02):
I'm skipping ahead.
This is all in the book, but, ultimately, we decided to try to save it.
Just a crazy story.
And in the process of trying to save the space shuttle, which was an impossible task right from the beginning, and we actually got we got we actually got within 6 months of being able to pull it off as a private entity, a private entity to refly the space shuttle, and we had for profit numbers.

(01:47:25):
We had business plans, and it would have made money, not lost $5,000,000,000 a year.
And, but it was too late.
We came 6 months too late.
But I'm telling you this story because we had an infusion of cash to make this happen by a guy I met on a cruise ship from England.
And he so was taken with this idea that he secured a loan in the UK from an India businessman of 4 $1,000,000,000.

(01:47:56):
Now when you walk into a meeting at the highest levels of NASA headquarters with $4,000,000,000 in your hip pocket to save the Space Shuttle, they're going to listen.
Yeah.
And they did.
And I'm not kidding.
We came you can look it up, last ditch attempt to save the space shuttle.
You'll find articles all over the place, and it's in the book.

(01:48:18):
It's an epic story, and, I really allowed myself to believe that it would happen.
So I was, another emotional roller coaster when it didn't happen last minute because a law had been passed and because it was too late by all this stuff.
You know?
And by the way, the guy who made that decision, Bill Gerstenmaier, ended up going to SpaceX after that.

(01:48:41):
But before he went to SpaceX, we made the presentation to him and he told us, I'm sorry.
It's too late.
I wish you'd come along 6 months earlier.
I think we could've done it.
I love the space shuttle, but we gotta go on to building SLS.
That's where the money's gotta go, the space launch system.
And we winched because we knew that whole Space Launch System was a total boondoggle, a jobs program, a nightmare.

(01:49:06):
And the guy who he told that to, the guy in a meeting with Bill Gerstenmaier, a guy by the name of Kevin, Bill Gerstenmaier recommended that Kevin go to Boeing for a meeting that he personally called in to recommend him to direct Starliner in 2012.

(01:49:29):
And Kevin went to Starline went to went to Boeing and met with the the the the director of engineering, and I don't know what else that the highest guy in in in, in Boeing Space Systems and heard this guy say, we don't have a problem developing this.
We'd like you to take this on, but, but, and so Kevin said, well, what about the competition?

(01:49:55):
What about SpaceX?
And at that point, SpaceX had not launched a single Falcon 9 that hadn't exploded.
We're talking 12, 2012, 2013, 14.
And this guy from Boeing said, quote, I'm not worried about you bunch of yahoos in a garage.
These guys are not are nothing.
We don't have to worry about them.
And Kevin replied to him in a PAC meeting, I think it was a PAC meeting.

(01:50:17):
I don't remember.
I wasn't there.
You may think that these are a bunch of yahoos working out of a garage, but any company that starts out with $0 evaluation and 3 years later is worth multiple $1,000,000,000, I would not call that a bunch of yahoos in a garage.
And so after that, they decided to offer Kevin the job of running Starliner, and Kevin declined.

(01:50:45):
And you see what happened to Starliner into intervening years.
And I will just finish this off by telling you that when Butch and Sonny Williams were taking that craft, which had had multiple problems now we've had we've had astronauts get on the space shuttle and ride it that had never been an unmanned flight before.

(01:51:07):
First time manned flight.
NASA had a lot of cojones back then.
And Saturn 5, they've been, I think, 4 or 5 Saturn 5, unmanned flights before they got in.
But the the the whole Space Shuttle thing was a different a different world.
Getting in that thing, first time launch, that you know, that's what test pilots are trained to do.

(01:51:29):
And they were told, here are the odds.
1 in 10000, it'll be a loss of crew and vehicle.
Well, it turns out it was a successful first flight, but all the signs were there, and it turns out to be 1 in 25.
25th flight.
Boom.
Then it has a whole bunch of more successful flights.
And by the time it got to the end of the program, the odds were, like, 1 in 75, 1 in a 100.

(01:51:50):
The odds were safer, in a spatial than they were of climbing up to Mount Everest and surviving and flying to Mount Everest by the time it was retired.
But guess what?
Sonny and Butch were told the odds of successfully riding Starliner up and down is 1 in 270, and there was no real data on that.

(01:52:15):
There was no real data on that.
If if you go back and look at the odds of dying, in space from the very beginning from Yuri Gagarin's flight to today, there's some 400 and somewhat human missions.
The odds of dying are about 1 in a 100.

(01:52:36):
1 in a 100, not 1 in 270.
Now astronauts are weaned on risk, so they can accept risk.
But what's unacceptable is when they made it uphill and they got on ISS and they were and and and the questions were asked about, oh, you know, we're gonna take them down and all these things that happened, then I have a real problem because it was obvious, to me anyway, that the decision was instant.

(01:53:05):
There was no fooling around with this decision.
We had a craft that had trouble.
We had a way of getting that crew home.
We had a way of getting them home, not just by the way with SpaceX, but we had a way of getting them home with the Russians if need be.
And what did we do?
We spent weeks analyzing this.

(01:53:26):
It never should have come to that.
Get them home, send the sucker down, and look at it and make your decisions or but what it tells me is, have we really learned?
Have we really learned all these lessons?
And, and I'll tell you something else.
I'll I'll finish up with the I'll finish up

(01:53:48):
Then I got a question for you.
Yeah.
So so Go ahead.
I'll get to the Columbia mission because I I knew I knew a couple of those astronauts.
I knew I knew, I don't wanna name names, but I knew a a wonderful woman and her husband, and had dinner had lunch with them couple of weeks before STS 107 launched, and she found out I was a puzzle person working on the shuttle.

(01:54:14):
She got a picture of, one of the tile that I put on, and she gave me a mission patch after lunch that we had together.
And then, she launched.
And it was a wonderful mission, but everybody saw that piece of foam hit on day 1 at something like 80 80 something minutes.
They saw that piece of foam come down.

(01:54:35):
And if you haven't seen it, you really need to watch Columbia, the final flight, CNN production with the BBC.
It's on right now.
You can get it on Prime Video.
You get it on net there's a lot of places you can get it, especially pay attention to episode 3 where where a guy working at Mission Control, and he wasn't the only one, many people working at mission control saw that piece of foam head and saw the inadequacy of the investigation to find out what was the real damage and basically did not tell the crew.

(01:55:09):
The crew was not told until, like, day 10.
Even though some of these people had daily conversations with the crew, they were not told.
How do you do that?
And the reason I mentioned how do you do that, how do you not tell somebody we've had an incident, we're doing an investigation, and I'll finish up by telling you that I have another friend who flew the follow-up flight after after, Columbia.

(01:55:38):
And he and his crew would not would not trust mission control after that, insisted on a direct line to the head of the astronaut office, and point blank were adamant.
Had we been told, we would have done an EVA.
Whether they gave us permission to or not, we would have gone out and we would have looked at that wing.

(01:56:04):
And if we had looked at that wing and if we'd have seen that hole, despite what people say that nothing could have been done about it, those are the same people who said nothing could have been done about Apollo 13.
A lot could have been done about it.
And I'll finish it up by saying, you know Well, no.
2 things because you got planetary protection.
Last part of You got
you got planetary protection and anti pandemic suit, and then I'd like to know what you believe the future will hold in the next 10 years.

(01:56:32):
Alright.
Well, so the space suit, the space suit we designed has a series of filters and a flow through system designed to capture any and anything on Mars that would be a pathogen.
And design anything that's captured or anything any problem problem that an astronaut has before even boarding it getting inside the suit that he has some, pathology that may have, that's captured in the exit of the suit.

(01:57:00):
So the suit has an entrance and an exit to capture possible pathogens.
That's what the suit has.
And the and no suit has planetary protection.
It's never been.
If you take a look at pictures that even going back to Apollo 12, you can see this plume of gas around the space that we're dumping stuff like crazy from spacesuits.
So there's been no attempt to conform to article 11 of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, preventing pathogen exchange, forward and back contamination.

(01:57:28):
By law, it's been ignored.
This space suit that we've designed is the first attempt to deal with it.
Right?
So, in the middle of the pandemic, I realized that same technology could be embodied into a PPE, a, personal protection equipment that you could buy off the shelf, hang it in your closet, and it would stop a virus from killing you, and even if it was worse than than COVID.

(01:57:59):
And the design is, is such that it's called an MQS, a mobile quarantine suit.
You're not in lockdown.
It has a series of super HEPA filters.
There's no out there's nothing on the outside of the suit facing forward.
Most most, pathogen exchange happens when you talk to somebody.
You're looking at somebody.
There's no openings.
There's no openings in the entire front of the suit.

(01:58:21):
Everything is in the back, and it's in redundant.
It's at the ankles.
It's at the hips.
It's It's redundant.
And there are multiple filters to stop it, redundant filters to stop it.
And so our target right now is building this, for less than $200 retail price, and that's where we are right now, trying to make that happen.
But it's all based on the MARS suit.

(01:58:42):
So that's that's the activity I'm involved.
And so the next what do you think?
Because you've got, we had 2, 3 hours before.
We're talking now.
I'd like to hear what you believe is gonna happen a few to next 10 years.
I think Elon's going.
I think he's gonna do it.
I think he's gonna land on Mars, and I hope he's got our suit on.
And I, I know he has wildly crazy, schedules, but he also has unbelievable accomplishments that very few people have.

(01:59:12):
I know other people are chasing him.
Blue Origin is chasing him and maybe some others.
But NASA is in parallel with him.
They're trying to get Boeing to be another player.
You know, I've got half of half a feeling Boeing is gonna be dropped.
They're gone.
It's costing them too much.
It's too many problems.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Starliner just dropped.

(01:59:36):
But Starliner is another Orion.
Starliner wasn't gonna do anything that Orion wasn't gonna do anyway on that monster SLS, and Orion's had problems with the seat shield.
And on top of that, the gateway and and the whole orbital sequence of the gateway, you can only get off the moon once every 6 days.

(01:59:57):
You have a problem on the moon, you gotta wait for you gotta wait for the plan you gotta wait for the orbital mechanics so that you can get off.
This is crazy.
This is crazy.
There are a bunch of sites you can go to to watch how this thing is spinning out, and the only thing going for it, David, is it's a jobs it's a it's a, technology development program.

(02:00:21):
That's it.
I've heard enough.
I've had enough.
I believe NASA.
I love NASA to death, but I've seen the handwriting on the wall.
NASA should be should be a money disbursement agency giving it to people that can get this done in the most efficient way.
There are some subcontracts that can be done, in a in efficient ways.

(02:00:46):
But, yeah, man.
I've I've lived the life of this stuff, with many different many different sequences and many different parts to it, and it's just hard for me, to accept other than the fact that I bring up that same comparison.
You got a democracy versus a dictatorship.
You got distributing the money, to as many people as possible versus having an objective and meeting the objective at the lowest possible cost and at least the loss of human life.

(02:01:15):
That's what it comes down to.
And I'll finish by saying, I have a a thing I use in my book.
What NASA does, they do dangerous things to expensive people.
They do dangerous things to expensive people, and somebody has got to die.

(02:01:39):
No getting around it.
Whether it happens in a 107 flights, which is what it took to happen in the space shuttle, it's happened twice in the Soviet and Russian program where we we had two fatal accidents just like we had 2 fatal accidents in the shuttle program.
It will happen with SpaceX sooner or later.

(02:02:01):
It already happened with Virgin.
Those accidents were on the ground, and that's why Virgin's backing out.
Good luck to Bezos and what he's trying to do.
And, again, you know, you got a 747 that blew up.
I was listening to a podcast of, an Air France flight.

(02:02:22):
There were 209 people.
In 2009, 209 people died on a Air France flight that was, I don't know, 38,000 feet proceeding on its way to Paris, I guess.
Everything was fine and all of a sudden, boom.
They decided to go above a storm.
They they didn't make a decision in advance to go around the storm, but they wanted us to go above the storm.

(02:02:46):
And when above the storm, the air was so thin that the flight controlled flight by wire system went awry, and it started feeding them in false information on airflow, air velocity.
And, the the second in command was running it at the time.
The first command had just was taken a rest in his route and, you know, outside to catch some z's.

(02:03:07):
And, all of a sudden, the instrument says, voice comes in saying, stall.
Stall.
That didn't make any sense.
They were 38,000 feet in in straight and level flight.
Why is it saying stall?
He did not know how to react.
He got used to the fly by wire system.
He forgot everything he learned flying a Cessna.

(02:03:29):
I have a pilot's license, so I know what stall means as you pushed it, yoke down.
You don't push it up, and he continued to push it up.
And then, eventually, the the fly by wire system disengaged, and they weren't used to flying, Airbus without the fly by wire system at altitude in low density, and the airplane started to rock back and forth and rock back and forth and went into a flat spin.

(02:03:53):
And there she wrote, they never recovered.
And they should have been trained.
They weren't trained.
These things happen.
Well,
thank you very much.
So let me, for I wanna thank everybody who's listened in, taking the time today to do that.

(02:04:14):
I do hope that somebody or everybody's learned something today that will make a difference in their lives and lives of others.
Very quickly, Project Moon Hut Foundation is where we look to establish the box with a roof and a door on the moon through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to take the innovations and the paradigm shifting from the endeavor and turn it back towards Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.

(02:04:38):
So, Lawrence, what's the single best way to get a hold of you?
Well, I have a website for our products and company.
It's called planetaryprotech.com, and that's planetyprotekplanetaryprotek, one word, but protect is protek.com.

(02:05:02):
And I have an email address which is, n to Mars, letter n, number 2, mars@, I guess, icloud.com is probably the easiest.
Okay.
Well, thank you very much again.
We'd love, for everybody else, we'd love to connect with you.

(02:05:23):
You can reach me at davidmoonhut.org.
You can connect to us at Project Moon Hunter on Twitter or at Goldsmith.
You've got LinkedIn, Facebook.
You can reach out to us in multiple ways.
We're pretty easy to find.
And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.

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