#287 Butch Wilmore - He Was Stranded in Space for 286 Days

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You don't want somebody ready to support your business and then lose them because you got a clunky checkout. I like Shopify's product so much, it's so simple, I had the CEO and founder, Toby, on my show. So if you've been sitting on an idea, waiting until you have it figured out, stop waiting. You can start simple, learn as you go, and build it from there. If you're ready to hear the s*** of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.com slash SRS to start your free trial. That's right, start your free trial at Shopify.com slash SRS. That's Shopify.com slash SRS. Butch Wilmore. Yes, sir. Welcome to the show, man. Our pleasure to be here. Thank you so much, Sean. You're welcome. It's an honor to have you here. The whole team's been looking forward to this one. It's an honor to be here. 464 days in space. Yes, sir. It wasn't planned to be that long, but here we are. Yes, sir. Indeed. Damn. Yeah. Damn. You know, Sean, it's a privilege to serve your nation. You know that. In whatever capacity it is. And things, you know, I got extended on deployments. I'm sure you did as well. And even through that, you know, it's a privilege. That's really the baseline. That's the foundation. And so when things don't go as planned and you're continuing to serve, even if it takes a couple extra days, weeks, or months, I mean, in the big scheme of things, it's a privilege. And I said that four times now because that's what it is. And that's really where, you know, the start of the conversation, where it all stems from, is that that's why I first joined the Navy. I felt that patriotic tug do my part for my country. And I really, really, really wanted to do that. And the Lord allowed it. And here we are 40 years later. And again, like I said, it's been a privilege. Well, so you were a test pilot. You've been to space. I'm just curious. What do you like flying better? You like flying? Or where do you like flying better? You like flying on Earth? I guess you would say on Earth. Maybe not. That's a great question. Within the atmosphere or outside of it? So for all of our fellow Americans that have served our nation in the military, NASA has its high highs. It certainly does. There's no doubt about it, right? I'm grateful for every moment, all the 25 years I've spent with NASA. But if I could live one life and I could be a naval aviator. Operating off aircraft carriers, or I could be an astronaut, what would I choose? There is nothing like operating from and training for the pointy end of the spear on the aircraft carrier and all that's associated with that. No shit. Day to day, my personal level of job satisfaction is higher when I was a fleet aviator. That's not to say anything negative about NASA. I don't mean that at all. But if I got one life to live. I'm going to serve my country in the Navy, flying aircraft off carriers. Why? Because. I would imagine it's a major rush, no matter. Well, it's not the rush. It's not the rush. You know, I joined the Navy. The reason I joined, because I had the patriotic tug. I'd grown up in this country, grew up in Tennessee. I went to state schools. And as I neared the end of my college years, what am I going to do? I mean, I was electrical engineering major. Am I going to go and design circuits? That would have been fantastic. But I had that patriotic tug. I was going to do my part. And at that time, of course, I didn't know what that would entail. And in my mind's eye, I thought maybe the best way I could use this hard-earned degree I had was to maybe fly. And it wasn't easy. Life is tough. Every phase of life is tough. The Navy wouldn't take me initially, but perseverance continued to go forward. And finally, I warmed down at whatever you want to say. And they took me. And the journey has been amazing. And if it had ended in the Navy alone. Knowing what I know now, it would have been more than thrilling, more than satisfying. So doing your part for your country, potentially going to harm's way, which you're familiar with, is there's nothing better from that patriotic tug. And that's one of the things I respect the most about individuals that I know. There's a handful of individuals that I would say are great Americans and that I've known personally. And I respect those individuals as much or more than I have anyone in my entire existence. I think you may have heard I'm a man of faith. And Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior. And from that respect, my Lord is everything. I can't separate that, who I am, from what I do. But as far as the world goes and the issues that take place in our lives, if I were to just look and say, these are the people that I respect the most. Some of the guys, Andrew. Louis, Woody, Louis, and others, great Americans who I've had the privilege of serving with and watching them. Watching them honor their families, their wives, their children, while serving their nation and going into harm's way. I got the greatest respect for those individuals than anybody I've ever met. Right on, man. Right on. Ready for an intro? Ready. Butch Wilmore, a recently retired NASA astronaut and retired U.S. Navy captain, a combat naval aviator and test pilot with over 8,000 flight hours and 663 carrier landings. One of the rare astronauts to have flown in five different spacecraft, Space Shuttle, Soyuz, International Space Station, Starliner, and Crew Dragon. A total of 464 consecutive days spent in space. 286 of those days came unexpectedly and are the subject of your new book. Stuck in Space, An Astronaut's Hope Through the Unexpected. A husband, a father, and most importantly, a Christian. Amen. Amen. Amen. But before we get too far into the interview here, I got a couple of things we got to crank out. Oh my, let's do it. That's right. We got a Patreon account. It's a subscription account that we've turned into one hell of a community. And so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. Okay. This is from Scott R. You've flown combat missions, tested advanced aircraft, and commanded spacecraft. What aspects of leadership turned out to be the same in all of those environments? And what had to be completely different in space? Leadership in all of those environments are predicated in that I am not the expert. And I know that in each of those situations. And leadership entails circling yourself. With individuals that can do various jobs and various requirements that I'm not gifted enough to do. And empowering them to do their job well without micromanaging. I hate being micromanaged. We've all had leaders that do that. And I will not micromanage someone. I will try to challenge them to do better if they're not doing well. But micromanaging, no. And if they can't perform. If they can't perform the job, you get somebody else. I think we live in an age where we don't do those type of things. It's not to say bad on you. It's to say this is not where you're gifted. Let's find a place where you're gifted. Let's get somebody that's gifted here. And I think in all those different areas, that's exactly, that's the common denominator. Regardless of what you're doing, I'm not the expert. I can't do it all. Surrounding yourself with the right people, the good people. And going forward. Because what's most important? The mission. This whole thing about Starliner, my focus from day one was mission, mission, mission, mission. A lot of different events are important, but the focus is the mission. I can deal with a lot of events, but my focus needs to maintain on what's the most important thing. And that's all aspects of leadership. That's great advice. Thank you. Thank you. Everybody gets a gift. This probably would have come a lot more handy in those 464 days. I love the gummy bears. Better late than never, right? Fantastic. Fantastic. Can I give you a gift? Absolutely. I love gifts. Yeah. Let me give you a couple of things. So these all have the same kind of denominator. This is Fly Navy. Oh, man, that's cool. I flew it in space. I wore it in space. I have washed it. It has been washed. So it was with me on this last mission. I wanted you to have that. Thank you. Sir, this, I mean, you got to have naval, aviator. Oh, hell yeah. Astronaut pilot wings. You can see I'm wearing them. This is naval, aviator wings. In the center is the astronaut symbol. It's got a three, three. prong swoosh with a star at the top and a circle around the center and that's what designates that as a naval aviator pilot wings and i haven't checked the exact number but it's only in the order of 70 individuals that have have these wings in the history of human spaceflight so i want to give you that and this one awesome well this one this next one is fairly special actually not the next one this one's kind of not as special flew in space patch from starliner i signed it on the back this one however i think is the special one that i want i want you to have because of what you know your background and your experience there are only a handful of items flew in space all of those flew in space there are only a handful of items however that have touched the vacuum of space and been outside the spacecraft and into no air right touched the vacuum of space and this is the american flag that i wore on my left-hand side of the aircraft and this is the american flag that i wore on my left-hand side of the aircraft and this is the american flag that i wore on my left-hand side of the aircraft shoulder on my last no way just over a year ago um you know the lord's blessed me in many ways sean and i have so many meaningful mementos i have so many meaningful mementos over the course of 40 years of serving my nation and these this is very meaningful i mean the chance to go on a spacewalk and serve your country in that fashion and the dangers that are potentially involved in those type of you know precarious situations could be um this is special it's it's our nation right it's our american flag it's our nation's flag it represents um resiliency over the course of decades and it means one of the most meaningful items in the flesh i think that uh for me anyway and maybe men and many across this nation this is one of those meaningful items that exists and to wear this have the honor of wearing this into the vacuum of space um is something that i cherish and and always will i'm grateful for my lord for giving me the opportunity and so i only have a couple of these but i wanted you to have this one and from last year like i said january 30th last year i was on a spacewalk this was with me and because i'm honored for what you do for our nation even in this role and what you've done in the past and uh so for you sir to have that thank you sir man that is a that's getting framed yeah that's getting free this this hasn't been in space but it's a naval aviator wings on the chest it's a little astronaut blue astronaut and it's got a big bottom so you know it's me it's a butcher that's awesome thank you yes sir yes sir very cool yeah this is like this is yeah that's uh that's yeah i mean i only have three and now i have two ones for my two daughters my daughters each get one they don't know they know this now but i was going to give it to them when they graduate college it's been it's in a safe at home those two are and that's the third one so yeah for you my friend thank you indeed yes sir that's amazing yeah that is amazing yeah you know something that um something that everybody kind of wonders is what you guys what you guys are carrying up there and so uh from outside people see space flight is rockets and launches but they rarely understand the actual technology astronauts live inside of can you walk us through the most advanced space tech you personally relied on your suit onboard systems and any gadgets or tools that are incredibly engineered but the public almost never hears about and explain how they actually function during a mission i'll give you a couple of quick examples perfect space shuttle launch this is the first launch 2009 november 16 2009 was my first launch into space launching on the space shuttle atlantis there are literally hundreds of items that have to go right exactly exactly right every time you launch at the base of the force the two solid rocket boosters there are four bolts they're 30 foot 30 inches long with big old nuts on top of them that are holding the space shuttle on the pad at the time of launch there's power techniques at fire that take the the the nut on top of the bolt this huge nut and they break it in half the bolt falls eight of these four on each solid rocket booster and then the rocket goes that's one example of things that have to go right if those solid rocket boosters fire 3.3 million pounds of thrust each 6.6 total just from the solid rocket boosters once they fire if those boats don't drop you're taking part of the pad with you wow and that could be a very bad day yeah so that's one example of one of hundreds of things that have to take place every time that you see a launch there's those type of items that are taking place the space suit itself you know i don't know the exact cost but it's in the range of five to seven million dollars five to seven million you got to realize these are one-man space capsules shaped like a person they're all self-contained it's got the air the pressure maintaining the pressure co2 removal system we have water that circulates to keep us cool in the in the vacuum of space because the temperatures vary plus or minus several hundred degrees depending on if you're in the shade or the sun and so they're very yeah they're not cheap and work right you can't be on a spacewalk and we do train for failure scenarios where we have issues with our suit and some of them are are okay let's let's go inside let's make our way and get inside and some of them are abort let's go now we got to get inside now so that's part of that and then of course the drill that we carry we got a drill on our hip it's connected we pull it off it's about two million um it's got to work every time and of course there's only a few of these right you don't make hundreds of these drills there's only like 10 or even there's not even that many on space stations so they've got to work you don't want to get outside all the way do all the prep something else people don't realize you you're you start getting ready for a spacewalk the very first thing you do from that point until you finally open the hatch is roughly five hours so you've already worked a full day and you haven't even opened the hatch yet because you have to purge nitrogen out of system just like if you were diving in the ocean um you have to be aware that the possibility of bends in certain situations so you've got to go through that whole process making sure all the procedures that everything's connected correctly doing leak checks all of that anyway that whole process takes about five hours before you even open the hatch so a lot to go on with spacewalks and suits and of course as the crew on board if you're when i'm training the suits show up i climb in and off we go and the tools are set up and we train and do all that in this large pool to try to simulate zero gravity you can't fully do it because you you're weighted in gravity's pulling it down inside the suit but at least the suit can be neutrally buoyant in the pool but it's all done for you but in space there are there are no techs you are the tech yeah so we're doing maintenance major i mean i've done what i would say is major surgery on some of these suits in space that weren't designed to be done in space but because of certain failures in the suits before you take them out you got to fix them and so literally pulling out fan pump separators and doing all this major surgery on the suits and you got to make sure you get it right because either you're getting in it or your buddy's getting in it and it's got to perform and you don't want something to fail in a suit that you've worked on right so you got to get it right and so the ground teams are all you know cameras on making sure everything's done correctly so this is not trivial business obviously yeah you're right we sit back and we watch a launch and we go woohoo success but there are thousands of individuals passionate about human space flight going deep in their level of knowledge you know as an astronaut you're very broad and go deep where you can but these individuals go deep in their level of knowledge in their various systems and they passionate putting their all into it and that's what makes space flight so wonderful because seemingly very few things happen where the public notices and that's why we want it to be but realize there are significant significant issues things engineering all that going on behind the scenes to make all these things look easy i would imagine you get to keep your suit ah that'd be great i mean it's size it's got to be would you say three to five million dollars yeah five to seven million dollars five to seven million dollars yeah so uh it's got to be fitted to you right well we have ways to change the length of legs length of the arms that we you know so where they're not one size fits all um so we have those capabilities plus they're on space station boy it'd be great to keep a suit i get to keep my flight suits the blue flight suits that we fly t-38s yeah we get to keep those but that's about the extent not the helmet no oh man no my flight my flight helmet you know my flight and i fly the t-38 in yeah i've got a couple of those from nasa that i you know got over the years one gets old gets beat up a little bit you get a new one but those helmets no those are you know i'm told the gold visor that comes down it helps to protect from ultraviolet radiation um i'm told it has literal gold you know flakes in it so they're not going to give there's no 10 of what that that one helmet costs probably several hundred thousand dollars i'm guessing could you go to the bathroom in those things i'm just curious that's a great question yeah i'm i'm one of those people i got to pee every time i get nervous so waiting on waiting on a helicopter to go on an op i got to pee like 20 times yeah so that's you you wear your diaper yeah right let's go yeah that's part of that's part of the process you know before i launched every launch including the starliner you get to the top of the launch pad where you're about to walk in to the spacecraft itself and you're walking off into the white room into the spacecraft i go to the restroom there's a restroom right there i always go pull the space suit all the way down to my knees go you know do my business because i've got the diaper on and i know i'm going to use the diaper three times before i have a take the spacesuit off anyway, so I might as well go in dry and prepare. Yeah, that's part of it. Diaper's part of it. Right on. Yeah. Let me tell you about my morning routine. I wake up, I have decisions I need to make. Am I going to train? Am I going to go to work? Am I going to be stressed out all day? And what kind of tea am I going to use? Usually I use a chai. Now, what I do every morning is I put Bub's Collagen Peptides into my tea, along with some MCT oil. You've heard me talk about their Collagen Peptides forever, but this stuff, the MCT oil, goes in my tea every single morning. It's real brain and body fuel backed by science, not vibes. It's made with grass-fed butter and fast-acting MCT oil from coconuts, which sounds kind of weird until you try it. And suddenly, I'm going to be in my tea. I'm going to be in my tea. You're awake and not pissed off at everybody. And if butter isn't your thing, relax. They've got a vegan version too. 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Astronauts also train for off-nominal landings, water survival and wilderness survival in case a capsule comes down in a remote or hostile environment. What does that training actually do? It's a great way to train for off-nominal landings, water survival and wilderness survival in case a capsule comes down in a remote or hostile environment. It's a great way to train for off-nominal landings, water survival and wilderness Say the question real quick again to make sure I answer the right question. What are you realistically preparing for during those scenarios? So since you're going that part of the planet, you're over water, you're over desert, you're over the Himalayas. And there are certain scenarios where you could come down anywhere, anywhere plus or minus 51.6 degrees. Now, that's never happened, but it could in any number of failure scenarios where you don't know where you're coming down. You just got to burn. You got to burn now. You got to come down now. And let's hope you're coming down. We try to we would try to target a landing site. Something's close to recovery forces someplace. You know, certainly with a space shuttle, you didn't have options. You had to land on a runway. And we had certain runways around the globe where we targeted. Otherwise, you'd be bailing out. So Soyuz, I give you the example for Soyuz. We do cold weather survival because you could come down anywhere on launch. During launch, you have a failure, you abort, you could come down on a mountain. In high altitude. So you've got to be prepared for that. And so we train for that, you know, learn how to just standard survival. You've done it as well. How to survive off the land, make fire and snow and all of that. Water survival, the capsule comes down in water. You know, they made us and in the heat of summer, they made us swallow temperature sensors so they could watch our body temperature remotely while we're inside this little bit of capsule. So the capsule, the Soyuz capsule, the inner side. The inner side diameter is less than seven feet. I mean, I could reach over and touch the third person. It's very, very small. And it's small because the smaller the capsule, the smaller the thermal protection that you have to have when you return, the smaller the rocket. The bigger the capsule, the bigger the rocket has to be to launch it, more propellant, all of that. So the Soyuz, the Russians designed it well. Very small descent module with an extra habitational module on top, which goes away and doesn't come back to Earth. Only the little gumdrop, we call it, the gumdrop comes back and it's very small. So when you do our water survival, we have to take off our space suit, put on a survival suit to get in the water. And you have to do that in this very close, small capsule with no room. There's not enough room for three people, but they stuff three of them in there. And then now you've got to get in a position to change your clothes and help each other change clothes. And it gets super, super hot. So this is all part of the training processes for all spacecraft, whatever you're flying, cold weather, warm weather, hot weather. Water survival. And it's just a part of the process. You've got to know in all those scenarios. Yeah. Did you bring anything with you to remind you of your family? Anything like that? I'm just curious. What did you bring with you? What I brought with me over the course of the three missions I flew, you know, Sean, I try to do things with intent and things that are, you know, I don't typically watch movies in space unless I'm working out and something to do. I pass the time when I'm working on the treadmill. The things I try to do off the planet are things that I can't do on the planet. Try to focus on that. So I try to do things with intent. So things that I brought with intent, something I thought would be meaningful for my girls. You know, my daughters are the legacy that I will leave behind. And instilling in them the truth of Jesus Christ, his Lord and Savior, is paramount. And other issues of life, being responsible, being good patriotic, good Americans, part of what I try to do. And as a part of that, a symbol of their dad that I wanted them to have is I flew a ring, wings that I had shaped like a ring, naval astronaut pilot wings, shaped like a ring. I flew one for my wife, for my mom, and my wife's mom on the shuttle mission. And my mom is now gone. My wife's mom is still with us. And they were going to pass it to my two daughters, which they have, that they would have that. And then a pair of gold, normal-sized wings. Again, they don't know they're getting these until they graduate college, until this. And so a pair of those, gold, flew them in space, something that they would have to remember their dad and their mom. Because, you know, yeah, their dad wears the wings, but their mom is as big a part of it as I am. Because, you know, the families, the wives sacrifice. I mean, when I was in space, everything broke. Thing came through, I'd get a new roof, and my wife handled it all. My dryer that I bought in 1989, chugging along for 35 years, finally said, I'm done, while I was in space. So she's got to go through that whole process. So these wings represent what I do, but this is as much my wife involved as them. So this is an emblem of their dad and their mom's service to the country that I hope they will cherish. And so that's what I took with me. For my family. Did I take a couple of pictures? Sure. Yeah. But that's really the meaningful thing. Yeah, that is really cool. Yeah. That is really cool. And so what would happen if you, what would happen if, I mean, you landed in Russia or China, some type of a hostile environment, maybe, you know, somewhere in the GWAT, when that was going on? Yeah, they would. Did you guys talk about that? The powers that be would try to get us immediately. This is, of course, national. This would be up at the highest levels in both the Russian government and our government and whatever other nation that was with us. You know, we have a conglomeration of nations in the International Space Station program, many European nations and such. They would be involved at the highest levels immediately. And, of course, the search would be on if that certain situation were to occur because of the, you know, the visibility and all the geopolitical implications and all that, as you're aware. Yeah. There's historical documentation. There's historical documentation that some Soviet cosmonauts carried firearms in their post-landing survival kit after off-course landings in remote areas. In modern astronaut missions today, do crews carry any form of weapons or defensive tools in their survival kits, or has recovery technology made that unnecessary? Weapons. Yes, the Russians did fly pistols. Did they really? They did. For survival scenarios where you would need them. But they don't anymore. Like aliens. That was ended. Aliens. No, it wasn't for aliens. I'm aware of, but yeah, they did. But they canceled that before I flew the Soyuz. Okay. So that was done before I flew the Soyuz. I'm like, hey, man, we don't know where we're coming down. We might want one of those. But they're like, no, no, no, no, no. We don't do that anymore. Man. But yes, we did. They did, but not anymore. Well, we got you a little something. Oh, my. So, yeah, I got a buddy over at SIG. His name's Jason. And I told him you were coming. Yeah, yeah, hold it up. I told him you were coming on. And he wanted me to present you with one of these. Oh, my. So maybe the next time we go up. Oh, my. Yeah, if I go up, we'll put this on the docket. It kind of looks like a space gun. It does. It's a SIG 211 GTO. Amazing. It's got a compensator on the front. I'll have to read up on this one. New optics line, 9 millimeter. I can see that. Amazing. Maybe if it quits raining and we got time, we can break that damn thing in before you leave. Amazing. Thank you, Sean. And thank the person that you said that gets them for you. Thank you so much. I will. I will. That's amazing. Glad you like it. Oh, I love it. Love it. Thank you. My pleasure. But, well, I want to get into the interview now and do a bit of a life story on you. So let's just start at the very beginning. Born and raised in God's country, which everybody, of course, knows is Tennessee. And Mount Juliet, Tennessee, is where I grew up. And stable family. My parents, thankfully, took me to church because I was the most mischievous kid, I guess, in the county, probably, maybe in the state. And I needed some stability. And my church, the Word of God, actually provided that for that kid that really, really, really needed it. So grateful for, you know, I think about back to my college coaches. You know, I wrote about them a little bit in the book. Not as much as I would like to have, but because they were trying to mold these kids into men and the way that they went about that and some of the things they instilled. You know, you'll see in the book, it says, you know, you got to want it. Whatever it is in life that you're striving to do, you got to want it because it's not going to be easy. Life is tough. And I remember my coach Sims, my ninth grade position coach, were out there in the back practicing football. They had built a new junior high. And when they built Interstate 40, they'd taken a lot of the topsoil from the area, as they built the Interstate. And so where we practiced football had no topsoil. It was clay and rock and a whole lot of rock. And we called it the tundra. And we'd go out on the tundra and sweating and, you know, stinking together out there, hitting each other and doing what we do in the heat of the late summer. And I can still hear Coach Sims, you got to want it. You got to want it. And that little, that kid hearing that with my friends doing all this together, made me want to want it. And I have carried that with me, that kind of mantra. I mean, my Marine Corps drill instructor, get this, Gunnery Sergeant Tiberius Gerhardt, United States Marine Corps. What a name for a drill instructor. I mean, how fortunate was I to have a drill instructor with that name? And he, you know, his nickname was, we found this out, was the evil one. And oh my, he was not evil. He was tough. And he instilled discipline in me. That I didn't even realize I had. And took me places physically and mentally and emotionally that I didn't know I could go. And, you know, I think he's gone now. I've looked him up on the internet. I think he passed away a couple of decades ago. But his family doesn't know what he did for this guy in those 14 weeks that I was there. And just the grit and determination that he displayed that gave me that motivation to do it as well. And so those types of things, events, and I can name others as well, you know, growing up in Tennessee here and instilling in that young kid and growing up and eventually into college here in the state school, Tennessee Tech, majoring in electrical engineering, played football at the school. And those are, that was not easy as well. I mean, it's, you know, football's, college football's a full-time job and electrical engineering's a full-time job. And you only got one day and I was not able to do them both. But by God's grace, he gave me the determination. You know, playing football, I'll share this with you. I mean, you see me, I'm small, I was slow, and I was weak. Small, slow, and weak is not a great combination for football. No, it's not. It's not at all. But what the good Lord gave me an immense amount of is determination. I mean, over the top. And so, and I think part of that, he didn't just give it to me, he showed it to me as I was growing up through those coaches that I mentioned. You gotta want it. Those type of things. My parents challenging me growing up, my Sunday school teachers challenging me growing up. You gotta want it. And that kind of set the course and developed that level of determination that continued to grow. And so, that's why I was able to play football in college, small, slow, and weak, determined to do so. And major in electrical engineering, determined to do so. Because again, the Lord is the one that provides all of that. And it set the foundation. I talk a lot about foundation. Set the foundation for the rest of my life going forward from there. And some of that, I tried to display in the book as well. I tried to be encouraging to people in life and the challenges and tough times and tough situations that come. Man, right on. What age did you start going to church? From the beginning. From the very beginning. My earliest recollection of life was at my church in the Sunday school room. It was- Are you serious? It was a Sunday. I can remember it was a Sunday night. We were at church. It was in the CBs or whatever they called us. I don't remember exactly. I might've been three or four years old and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was on TV. That is my earliest memory in church. No kidding. Yeah, in church. Yeah, thankfully. I needed, like I said, mischievous kid, I needed that foundation. I did. That godly foundation. I thought when you were talking earlier, I thought you meant that you went to church because you were- No, no, my parents loved Jesus. They loved the Lord hard. My mom, when she passed, the most content person I've ever seen. She had brain cancer. We didn't know it. She didn't either. And the Lord took her quickly, thankfully. But when she left, she was content. She knew her Lord. She knew her Savior. Her only concern was that her grandchildren and her grandchildren, if this brain cancer thing was hereditary. I don't know that she cared about me and my brother Jack so much on that, but her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren, she did, she did. And that's comforting to me. To see the life that she lived, knowing Christ is Lord, her sins are forgiven, eternal hope. We deal with this book and I talk about the book, preparation, preparation, preparation. God doesn't, let go and let God is a mantra I've heard that I don't see in scripture. The Lord is sovereign, He's in control, but He also, we have requirements and our part of the deal as well, preparing for all. That's why for Starliner, I spent hundreds, almost 1,000 hours in the simulator preparing for things that I didn't know what would happen. And that's kind of what's been instilled in me from those early years on is preparation, preparation, preparation, because life's coming. So I think there's two things about the book. I think encouraging, I hope it's encouraging in the now dealing with life and the preparation required that goes into that. And I hope that it points you to what truly matters is the everlasting, eternal hope that comes only in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Because we gotta deal with the now, but we're gonna exist forever. And it's one form or the other, one place or the other. And Jesus Christ came here to this planet with the purpose of dying, incurring the wrath of Almighty God that we deserve for our sin so that we would not have to. And embracing that truth is what I pray this book will do. Dealing with the now, encouraged for the now, preparing for the now, but also fighting and so focused on what is to come. And that is now as well, embracing Christ as Lord. I'm curious, does your faith change in any way when you reach space? I did not need to go to space to learn anything about my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The Word, His Word, the Bible is sufficient. I didn't need it. Did it change? I wouldn't say it changed, but certainly it broadened my exposure to this Almighty God that we serve, His created power. I mean, I look down at the planet and I see Isaiah 45:18. This is the planet He designed and created to be inhabited. And you can see the life and the colors and the variety as you circle between 51 plus 51 and minus 51.6 degrees latitude and the earth's going by below you. You can see it. And that does give you a specific appreciation that I wouldn't have had otherwise. But did I need it? I didn't need it. Am I grateful for it? Absolutely, absolutely. Right on. Yeah. Right on. Yeah, praise you. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. So what got you into aviation? Football, electrical engineering, and then aviation. Aviation, the patriotic tug, do my part for my country. How can I best do that? Going to the nuclear program, I had my mind's eye, I saw a jet, and I thought, maybe doing that. I didn't know what the jet was. I was really, I didn't know what the jet was. I didn't understand military. I didn't know a lot about it. But in my mind's eye, there was a jet. jet, once I gained a little knowledge, was an F-16 in my mind's eye. That's Air Force. I didn't go Air Force. I have flown an F-16. I'm grateful for that too. But the challenge of landing aircraft on ships, on boats, that's something I thought, wow. And maybe eventually I could use this really hard-earned technical degree that I've had and use it in some fashion in the future. And maybe aviation is the way to do that. So that's really what it was. I had never flown. I hadn't taken any flight lessons, none of that. I'd flown once or twice in an airliner at the time. But just, again, prayerful that the Lord would lead me. There's a couple of things. I was a goal setter, like many as a young man. It's things that I wanted to do and experience. But always because my parents, God's word had given me a good solid foundation there too. I always wanted to glorify my Lord. I always wanted to glorify my Lord, whatever it was, with those goals in mind. And so prayerful. And I tell you, Sean, it wasn't easy. Yes, I wound up flying jet aircraft off aircraft carriers. But there was stumbling block after stumbling block after stumbling block that the Navy wouldn't take me. I had reconstructive knee surgery from a football injury my freshman year in college. And the Navy initially said, nope, disqualified. And then they finally said, after I kept pushing back, they finally said, okay, we'll take you. And then the paperwork went down to Naval Aviation Medical Institute, NAMI in Pensacola. They call us the NAMI whammy. They got the paperwork. They whammied me. They said, nope, disqualified. And I came back again, back and forth. And so it took almost two years to finally get, even my eyes, I had 2010 vision. And they came back and said, you're disqualified because you don't have 2020. What I know now, there was, I know. What? What I know now is that there was some, you know, an administrative person in the Navy is called a yeoman. There was some yeoman that's looking at the qualifications. It says 2020, you have to have 2020 vision. This guy doesn't have it. Therefore, he's disqualified. I know that now. I didn't know that at the time. I'm like, how can you have better than 2020 vision and be disqualified? So I petitioned back again. Again, this went back and forth. Finally, they said, go to an administrative school. I went to the local optometrist. And I said, hey, I need the paperwork says I'm 2020. He said, no, no, no, no, you're 2010. I'm like, I don't care. Please put 2020 on the paper and make the Navy happy. And he did. And so the Navy took me. So anyway, every step of life is like that for me in this life. And so, you know, looking back, I'm grateful. You know, James tells us in Count All Job, when you come to the Navy, you're going to be a great man. You're going to come through trials and tribulations because it's growing us and it's good for us. You know, iron sharpens iron. You don't get that unless you touch each other. You know, metal. How do we make metal stronger? We burn it. We burn it. We burn it. Cool it. Burn it. That makes you stronger. So in this life, I'm grateful looking back. At the time, I didn't know. I was, you know, struggling. You know, my faith, my understanding of things was not what it is today. But looking back, I'm grateful that it was difficult to get in the Navy. And like I said, every phase of every thing I've ever done has been just the same. And I'm sure that I'm not unique, that other people experience the same. Yeah. I think a lot of people do. Yeah. So why did you pick the Navy? Landing, the challenge of landing airplanes on boats, ultimately. So before you even knew what any of this stuff was, you just wanted to land a plane on an aircraft carrier. I did talk to the Air Force. I talked to Navy recruiter, Lieutenant Goddess. Oh, you're great. We want you. Come on, come on, come on. The Navy love to have you. Come on, come on. I talked to an Air Force recruiter. I don't remember his name. He's like, the Air Force only takes the best and the brightest. And I'm like, that probably ain't me. I'm going Navy. Oh, shit. So many factors, again, the Lord steering me down the path that I was to go. And the Navy was it. Well, where did you wind up going? I went to initially Aviation Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida. Gunnery Sergeant Tiberius Gerhardt, United States Marine Corps. And boy, I could, again, I keep alluding back to the book because there's several amazing stories about him. And I even referred back to him even when I was in Starliner. Things that he had instilled in me. One thing he, it's in the book too, but he's killing us one day. We're out right next to the bay on this flat asphalt area. And we're messing up, marching, just not doing well. And he sits us down and points us towards the bay with his back to the bay. And he starts, he lectures us for 30 minutes about the benefit of being disciplined, of focusing on what the task is. He said, the things you are hearing from me now may save your life in the future. And he was not right about once. He was right about multiple times. It saved my life in the future. Things that he was instilling me then. The whole time he's talking, there are dolphins in the bay, spinning dolphins, jumping and spinning behind him while he's talking. I couldn't have written a movie scene better than this. This man giving his all to these group of knuckleheads, me being one of them, instilling in things that, that a mindset that would benefit them for the rest of their lives. If they would listen, he hadn't seen those dolphins. You know, we don't, we're not looking at anything, but what we're doing while we're looking at them, sat us down, facing them and gave us that gift. You know, the evil one, he was tough, but he obviously had a little soft side because he gave us that lecture while seeing this amazing of God, portion of God's creation spinning behind him. You know, this is Lord's providence. And I'm, I'm grateful for that man. I'm grateful for that system. I'm grateful for our nation, for those types of things that have been a benefit to me. And now flow on as benefit to my family. And I'm grateful for that man. I'm grateful for family. Yeah. Wow. What did you end up flying? Oh, that's another story. You keep asking the right question. You've done this before, haven't you? Um, I go through flight school. I did really well. The Lord gave me the ability to fly. Well, I'd number one in my class and all three phases, primary intermediate jet advanced jet. And matter of fact, I accelerated and got in graduated with some individuals that didn't start with me. So when I got to the point where I was like, there was a guy, very talented aviator. He had done, had 2000 hours coming into the Navy and he had done very well in primary flight school. But my grades in intermediate and advanced jet were better than his though. He did very, very well. Like I said, very talented. So when it came to the point of being at the end, we, they give all those grades, put them all together from all phases of flight to give you an aggregate score. His was, I think one point higher than mine. Therefore only the first person gets to the end of the flight. And I'm grateful for that. And I'm grateful for it's their choice. He got his choice and I got an airplane that I did not even have on my list. I was assigned to the A7E Corsair II, single set attack, single seat attack aircraft. It was eventually, you know, we knew it was being phased out, but that was my assignment. And I was, I was bummed because I'd given my all in flight school and done, done well. And then I get a jet that's going out of, out of commission and didn't have a pointy nose, had a round nose. And it was, it was a bummer. I'm just being honest. It was a bummer. Again, life's tough. I didn't have a choice though. As a matter of fact, the commanding officer of the A4 squadron pulled me into his office, which he wouldn't have done otherwise, because they make the announcement of what you're flying in a group, group setting. He pulled me into his office and told me ahead of time. He said, I even went and talked to the admiral to try to get them to change this. And they wouldn't. Why would they put you on a fucking? I was number two. I wasn't number one. Quality spread. It was a need. They're decommissioning it. Well, so they had needs to put new fleet aviators into various airframes. And that was one of them. But Sean, the story continues. I was distraught. I finally get out to Lemoore, California, NES Lemoore. I check into VA 122. And it was the best thing that could have happened to me. That airplane, flying it, the people, the single seat guys, what became Vice Admiral Woody Lewis, guys I met in that community, great Americans. It was the best thing that could have happened. I loved flying the A7. I mean, loved it. 60, 70% of our training was down in the weeds. I mean, low altitude. Oh, man. And it was fabulous. I had no idea. I didn't know what I didn't know. And that's a recurring thing in my life as well. I didn't know that I didn't know. But when I got there, these guys were amazing. They're telling their single seat stories. And those first two deployments on Desert Storm, I was in the A7 during Desert Storm. Okay. Yeah. Flew that. And only two squadrons left in the Navy off the USS Kennedy. And we were flying combat in the A7. It was thrilling. Again, not knowing what I didn't know, the Lord, he's directing our past. It says, a man plans his way, but the Lord directs his paths. That's what Proverbs tells us. And it is true. I am so grateful that I got A7s and did not get anything on my list, as it turned out. It was fantastic. What's the point of the A7? It's a light attack, day visual bomber. We bombed at night too. We didn't have night vision goggles. That wasn't a capability, but it was the first aircraft with a heads-up display. So we had a HUD, a bombing symbology, all of that in the heads-up display. And it was thrilling. It was great to fly aboard the ship, challenging to fly aboard the ship. It had an engine that a little bit of a slower spool up time. So it wasn't instantaneous as far as adding power when you needed it. Amazing. Thrilling. Loved it. Why were you flying so low? Well, we're flying low because you might be down there. That was part of the training. So we had certain deliveries. That were classified with certain capabilities that were classified that we needed to be down in the weeds and not detected. And so that was a big part of the training because of that. Classified missions with classified weapons without being detected. Yeah. Yeah. And these deliveries, I do talk about one of the deliveries in the book, over the shoulder, fly over target. Let's hear it. Fly over target, low altitude, designate as you fly. Right over your target. So your system tightens up, you know, the onboard inertial navigation system. Start a pull to the vertical. About 125, 135 degrees nose high, the bomb comes off and goes up and you continue your pull. It goes up 30,000 feet. Don't know. Turns around, comes straight down. And one of my hits was 20 feet. Whoa. From that. Oh, we call it. Over the shoulder delivery. 20 feet. The tightness of the system, maintaining right on the exact, you know, symbology that you have to fly. Releasing, the bomb comes off, you know, just keep your thumb on the pickle. You know, the thumb on your, I say the pickle, I say that like you know what I'm talking about. People know what I'm talking about. There's the designate button where the bomb comes off. The bomb won't come off until the system says release in this mode. So you keep your thumb on it. You pull right up the line, stay on the line. Exactly on the line. The system calculates when the bomb should come off to impact the target. And I got a 20-foot hit once. Over the shoulder. Bomb going up to, I don't know, 30,000 feet. Way up there. As you continue, then you go back out low altitude and you egress. Thrilling. Sean, thrilling. Absolutely thrilling. What did you bomb? Well, we're just hitting the targets here. We're just, we have a target out in the, you know, this is the desert of El Centro, El Centro, California. Loom Lobby targets that were out there. I'm not even sure they even have those targets anymore. This is a long time. What were the targets? Connex boxes? Oh, they just have, yeah. They put a, sometimes they put a tank out there. You know, they got triangulation where they can give you the hits. The bomb is just little blue training bombs. And then when the bomb impacts, it blows a white smoke out the tail. It impacts the ground. Now we also train with some live weapons as well, but yeah, different cases, different scenarios. I never launched a live weapon over the shoulder, but some have, you know, because that's part of the training process. You know, they're divvied out. These good deal actually drop live weapons. I never got one over the shoulder, but I got live weapons in many different scenarios, obviously in combat as well. Let's talk about taking off and landing on a carrier. I've never even been on a carrier. Really? Uh-uh. Never even been on one. We need to get you a trip out to one, even for a day. Right on. Okay. So the aircraft carrier flight deck, one of the most dangerous places on the surface of this planet. Really? Yeah. You got jets, aircraft that are, taxiing, turning, exhaust, going into afterburner, jet blast defectors coming up to deflect the jet blast, wires, you know, the cables on the landing cables are getting pulled out. Sometimes in the history, the story, I never, I never saw the video, but I heard there was a video from like way back in 1940s desert, I'm sorry, World War II timeframe, where maybe it was a little after that, where an aircraft hooked down, hits the cable, the cable snaps, and of course it's whipping across the flight deck. The cable, you know, with high energy because it snapped with this high energy imparted into it. And one of the chiefs is grabbing his belt and starts pulling it off as he's jumping over the cable because he knows it's probably going to impact some people's legs and maybe he'll need to have a tourniquet and he's getting a tourniquet ready in his hand. No way. Yeah. Jumps up over the top, tourniquet in hand, starts running to somebody that was impacted by the cable. I never saw a cable snap, never snapped while I was on board, but I have heard of it happening. And like I said, the energy of a jet aircraft landing imparted into a cable that snaps that energy, I mean, that thing is whipping at very high speed. So anyway, I heard about that video, I never saw it. I do have videos of cold catapults where the catapult doesn't give you the end speed that you need and it's called a cold cat. So the aircraft settles off. The pilot in this case pulled the nose up too high, it was an A6. It didn't have flying speed, tried to jettison his external fuel tank, lose some weight and maybe could keep flying, couldn't, ejected. And I don't think one of them didn't survive. Oh, man. But so those, these type of things, it's just part of the environment. It's part, it's a dangerous, dangerous place. And so landing on an aircraft carrier, it's challenging. That's one of the things in life I think a lot of people appreciate that there are challenges in life, me being one of them. And landing on, that's one of the things I dreamed about doing when I decided to join the Air Force. Going to military, landing on aircraft carriers. And then at night, oh my, you talk about the challenge ramping up. You think about standing here right now, you're looking at me, but your peripheral vision sees everything off to the side, right? And in daytime, you can see the ground coming up. You can see, you know, if you get a little angle of bank, you can see that peripherally and your brain is processing all that. And you're making corrections all the way down the glide slope to try to affect and land and hit, the hook grabs the wire that they're targeting. If there's four wires out. They're targeting the three wire, most likely in most scenarios. And they all do this with how they roll the visual landing aid system, the Fresnel lens, which is what you're looking at, looking at lineup out of your peripheral vision. That's daytime. Not easy, but if that's what you do, you get accustomed to it. Nighttime, turn all these lights out. The peripheral vision is gone. You're just got the ball. We call it the ball, the visual landing aid system. It's an amber light that's mirrors that have an amber light in the center. And it's got green lights. It's called the datum out the side. And you want to keep that amber ball in the center of those green lights, right? Okay. And so you go a little high, you take a little power off, you catch it. If you go low, if you go too low, it's red. You don't want to, there's no life. The term is those green lights. There's no life below the datums. That's bad. You don't want to be low. You certainly won't be real low red because that's hit the back end of the carrier. Red, you're dead. Yeah. You don't have the peripheral cues. It's all visual on the landing aid system. And then, and there's also, there's lights that go right down the middle of the aircraft carrier landing deck. And there are drop lights that drop off the back end of the carrier. So if you're on lineup, that's a straight line. You get offline up. What do you see? You see an angle, right? So you can, out of your peripheral vision, you're looking to make sure you stay, keep those lights straight. If you get off angle, you see the angle and the lights, you know, you're not on center line and you're correcting back and doing all that without peripheral cues. It's very challenging, um, at night. Um, especially you got a little moon, you got a little peripheral cues. You got no moon, you got overcast. It's challenging. I'm just curious how much smaller is a carrier runway than what you're used to on the ground. I'm just trying to get some respect. Yeah. You get like 300 feet rollout. You touch down, boom, 300 feet. It stops you. So when you touch down on the aircraft carrier, you go full power every single time, because if you're, you could have a hook, skip, skip the wires. You want to have full power on the jet. So you take off even when you land, you could land past the wires full power. So you go full power. The wire grabs you. You hold full power until the yellow shirt runs out and says, throttle back, throttle back, throttle back. And then you pull power. If you were to pull power early or pull power, when you touch down, that's called a cut pass. And every pass is graded, different scoring. A cut pass is a zero in the grading scheme. And I don't know anyone, maybe it's happened, but I'm not familiar with anyone that has had two cut passes in a career that continue to fly around the aircraft carrier. It's that big a deal. Wow. You have to be ready, power on. If you're that guy that, you know, the brain fart issue and you pull back instead of adding power, we can't have that. Man. Yeah. How long, so 300 feet, how long is a typical runway? I would say the landing distance is probably, you know, we could look it up. It's probably 600 feet the distance, but the distance from where you touch down until you stop, 300, 350 feet. Yeah, it's not even quite the length of a football field. So yeah, you're forwarding your straps once you grab the wire, full power. It's pretty challenging. So a normal landing in an F-18 how short could you stop land and stop depends on your fuel weight how much fuel you have you could probably do it in maybe 2 000 less than 2 000 feet but our runways are 7 000 plus holy yeah like in a t-38 which i flew the last 25 years with nasa we are not allowed to go to a runway less than 7 000 feet yeah so the difference between a carrier landing and a normal whoa very different wow very different that's that's 300 feet yeah wow roughly yeah 6300 foot difference that sets you apart i mean this is you know there's always that interforce uh you know cajoling if you will with the air force you know y'all got long runways to land on y'all it's easy we do that too um but they can't do what we do as far as landing on a carrier damn do all naval aviators do that what's that do all naval do all naval aviators have to land on carriers no no it's just jet jet there's also some propellers there's the the e2 hawkeye the dome's got the dome on top of it it's a propeller airplane and it lands on carriers there's a carry-on delivery systems it used to be a c3 i think it was called the cod a big fat looking plane that landed aboard the aircraft carrier um but there are also that's the thing about initially in flight school the number one guy gets his choice if you wanted to go jets and you want to be guaranteed jets you have to be number one because the navy quality spread from that first primary timing they will send you to propellers or they'll send you to helicopters based on the needs of the name oh wow the only one that's guaranteed the jets is that number one guy so you don't even know if you're going helicopters no no i joined the navy wanting to fly you know pointy pointy nose aircraft off aircraft carriers but in that first phase of training dictates whether or not that would happen and it's not to say that if you're number number 10 in the class the graduating class that you wouldn't get jets but you're not guaranteed it unless you're the number one guy wow that's the only one guaranteed it yeah wow yeah did you did you fly anything else during your time and so yeah i flew f-18s mostly i flew more of that than the a7 f-18 another goodness amazing f-18 you air-to-air mode select it on the throttles in the stick air-to-air mode fight your way in switch the air seat to pardon it's single seat f-18c fight your way in air-to-air switch the air-to-ground mode bombs on target on time pull off target fight your way out air-to-air mode there's no that's why you know earlier i said that if i had one life to live i'd nasa astronaut it has high highs but if i can only do one knowing what i know now i'd be enabled over here in a heartbeat fight your way in bombs on target on time fight your way out there's nothing like it going out to fallon there's actually other naval aviators playing the bad guys in airplanes f5s and other aircraft and simulating you've got these pods on your aircraft where you link up to a ground station all the aircraft have pods and so you can actually go back and replay the fight and actually see where you shot did the weapon impact was it within the weapons envelope when you shot you can do replay the whole thing and to go in and fight your way in bombs on target fight your way out really doing it with real aircraft and this real you know you train like your fight train in the real life scenarios there is nothing nothing like it on or off the planet man nothing like it so when when i when i you know i talked about earlier about some of these great americans that i have served with that master this capability that our government has provided them to protect our nation against uh all enemies foreign and domestic there's not a higher level of appreciation for those individuals that i can imagine finding anywhere than those guys that do that and do it well sacrificing for their countries and their families doing the same because i'll tell you another how stupid i was like i got many i was stupid stories i'm at my very first squadron we have a squadron function everybody's together out of you know just friday night social and the commanding officer they asked the my executive officer's wife i overheard her talking and she was saying yeah when we finish the command tour we're going to do this and we're hoping to get disorders and we she was we we we we and i'm like i'm single at the time i'm like we it's not we it's his career what do you mean we as she's saying all this i'm thinking this i didn't say it to her what was i stupid i'm stupid because this is a family unit sacrificing for their nation because when i say sacrificing there's significant sacrifice i mean there's separation there's challenges of emotional separation because of what the individual that's you know on the point of the spear is doing and and the hazards associated with that and this is the the family unit doing this together and when she said we she was absolutely right and i was dumb stupid new didn't know didn't know what i didn't know but i learned it pretty quickly thankfully can you talk about your first mission first real world mission uh it might be better if i talked about the first real world night mission okay yeah i had a couple of day missions so set the scenario john f kennedy cv67 is in the red sea we would launch like 42 aircraft on a strike mission in to bad guy country which was desert storm at the time into iraq we would launch 42 aircraft at a time we would launch 42 aircraft off the care we would rendezvous all these aircraft would rendezvous on tankers whoa how long does it take to launch 42 aircraft off an aircraft carrier i would think the first one would be out of fuel by the time the 42nd well that's what that's what i'm saying we would launch we would rendezvous with air force tankers and think about this at night air force tankers eight of them and they're stacked up in thousand foot these air force tankers kc-135s or kc-10s they're stacked up from 18 000 feet all the way up to 26 000 feet wow nose to tail and you can see their lights this isn't nighttime and you're rendezvousing on your tanker your designated tanker and you have to be level you can't be low because now you're in somebody else's airspace that is rendezvousing on another tanker a thousand feet below you so we're rendezvousing 42 airplanes on these tankers to refuel you you stay on the left wing someone goes in plugs the tanker fills up they go to the right wing and they stay there the next guy comes he goes outside the next one next one next one until everybody's got gas and then the ones that started they go back a couple maybe the first two go back and top off again then you leave the tankers you go in country lights on until you get close to the border and then you separate with altitude and timing splits to go in country lights off at that point you don't want to be you know the enemy to look up and see you so your lights off 42 aircraft going in to prosecute a target lights out so you can't see anybody but you know they're there and this was my first night mission i'd had a couple of day missions we crossed the border something launches i learned then that at daytime a missile took off in the middle of the night and this was my first night mission i'd had a couple of day missions we crossed the border something launches i learned then that at at daytime a missile and this was my first night mission i'd had a couple of day missions we crossed the border something launches i learned then that at daytime a missile launches you got to be looking at it or you launches you got to be looking at it or you launches you got to be looking at it or you don't see it triple a anti-aircraft artillery fired triple a anti-aircraft artillery fired triple a anti-aircraft artillery fired you got to be looking at it you don't see you got to be looking at it you don't see you got to be looking at it you don't see it it it at night your peripheral vision gets it at night your peripheral vision gets it at night your peripheral vision gets it all it's dark and you see the light and all it's dark and you see the light and all it's dark and you see the light and you don't have to be looking directly at it. Something launched in the distance. At least I thought it was a distance. I didn't know because depth perception is hard at night. And it's a missile. I hadn't seen a missile launch at night. This was pretty eye-opening. And it launches and it goes higher and higher and higher. I'm at like 27,000 feet, 23,000 feet. It goes above me. And it seems like it's way out there. And Scud missiles, it's the NATO designation for the missile that the Iraqis had. They had launched a couple of Scuds before this. And this turned out to be one as well. And it was going towards the West, towards Israel. I don't know if you remember anything about the conflict, but they were launching some against Israel, trying to get Israel engaged. Because if Israel got engaged, then maybe the rest of the Arab nations would get engaged as well. But Israel wouldn't. They wouldn't engage with them. Anyway, it goes off that way. And so this gets your heart pumping. Let me fast forward to the issue and to what happened. So I wound up kind of a little bit in front of the strike package. I had a different role. I wasn't a bomber. I wasn't bombing the ground or the target. But I had a different role, which put me out a little bit in front of the strike package. When it came time to turn and head back and leave, an SA-8 gets launched. And my radar warning receiver, the raw gear, it's going nuts. What's an SA-8? SA-8. It's a surface-to-air missile. Surface-to-air missile. And it's got a designation. An SA-2 is like a telephone pole. And it's not real maneuverable, but it'll go further because it's got more propellant. Because it's really big. An SA-8, smaller, more of a tactical, close-in, but very maneuverable, out to about eight miles, 25,000-ish feet. And we knew that they were there. We got intel. We know they're there. That's part of what I were targeting, is to target them. But they fire as I'm turning. And my raw gear lights up. And it's visual. It's got eights on the display. And it's also aural. So it's going, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Different sounds for different types of something whatever different types of i you know radars or whatever that is locking on to you so my radar gear raw gear goes off i see eights i look off my left wing and i see a light come up above the cloud it was just a puffy cloud a small one come up above the cloud and it looks like it's targeting me if it's not targeting me it'll start moving on the canopy if it is targeting me it's going to stay right in the same spot coming at me and it didn't it didn't move on the canopy it's coming right at me i had never had a missile shot at me at night before and so training the what you try to do is try to time it such that you pull max g into a missile so it can't have to turn and get you that's kind of what the mindset is what you're trying to do but at night the depth perception is that you're not going to be able to get the missile shot at you you're not going to be able to get the missile shot at you you're not going to be able to get the missile shot at you is not there i don't know how close this thing is i have no idea so i'm you know maybe it races through my mind how long has it been going how long how fast does it travel in in six seconds is it going three miles in six seconds you know it's only really viable sa8s i knew were only viable the heart of their envelope was uh you know two to three miles you know get to four five six it's going to be have less maneuverability and so when it got to a point i pulled and it wound up going below me did it break lock did it did my maneuver kill it did it run out of juice i have no idea i just know i i didn't get hit and so i reached down and i we had in this it's kind of a rudimentary computer system but it had a thumb wheel where you would punch in a lat latitude longitude lat long and you'd have a route that you could have on your system so i flipped the thumb wheel to the egressed target i mean the egress destination back into into ira into saudi arabia and i just put the needle on the nose what i mean by that is on your heading situation indicator it's got a needle and i turned until the needle was directly vertical needle on the nose i am heading towards my egress heading as i do that and i start to turn another missile gets locked while gear goes off i turn i see another missile coming this one didn't it stayed on my canopy for just a couple of seconds and it started fading and it was not a factor for me and of course people are hearing these missiles and you hear on the radio and you hear on the radio and you hear on the radio and you hear on the radio missile in the air missile air and so it's it's not quiet i turn i put the needle on the nose and i am screaming as fast as it's safe as seven will go i am giving it all she's got full power full grunt we call it and off we go again i think you know the lord put it into my mind i'm like something's not right i don't know what's not right something's not right what's not right and i start looking i'm looking out of course my head's on a swivel looking for other missiles my raw gear is quiet but i'm still looking for missiles but something's not right i don't know what it is and i'm looking out of course my head's on a swivel looking for other missiles it wasn't it was just below a half moon that night that we launched um and the moon as i'm going in was behind me so as i'm coming out it should be right in front of me and some finally i i got the wits about me and i look and the moon's not in front of me like i thought it was and it's over here i'm like uh-oh i look at my system i'm needle on the nose i look down it's destination number 16 the target was destination number 16 destination number 14. my egress heading was destination number 15. i had put destination in destination 16 i'd put the alternate target if you're going to get 42 airplanes in the air over bad guy country five-hour missions tanking all these assets you don't want to get there in the weather be bad you can't you can't do your business so you have an alternate target just in case and i'd punch that alternate target into destination 16 when i reached down to flip that thumb wheel i went from 14 it went two destinations to 16. i didn't check it i'm just needle on the nose i look down i realize it i flip the needle i mean i flip the destination up to 15 the needle goes here which is of course now really so i'm heading towards the alternate target and don't know it fog of war we call it right and uh if a target is worthy to be targeted by us then it's probably worthy to be protected by them and it was they had sa i think they had sa twos and threes so i get an sa2 indication right on my nose and i see a light in the distance i don't know how far but it's pretty far and i'm like oh my so now i got a third missile shot at me i turn at this point and i put the moon right in front of me and i really i did dispense we have chaff and flares chaff it'll shoot out radar deflective material where the radar will hopefully glom onto that flare of course is a really hot flare that goes out if it's a surface to air a heat seeking missile and and i had forgotten about it on the first two missile engagements i just i didn't even never enter my mind i didn't think about dispensing chaff but this time i remembered it i spent a load of chaff it's a program it spits it out at a certain way for certain threats which we had loaded pre pre i spit out chaff as i turn and i keep needle on the nose i never look back i have no idea what happened that missile did it come close was it far away i have no idea i just know it didn't get me um lessons learned right so what put me in that position was a tactic early in the in there and then was a tactic early in the the conflict that we wanted to keep the aircraft all together for the fighter picture the air-to-air picture if all of our aircraft are together the fighters that are looking for bad guys they know where we are it keeps it keeps the the chance of we call it blue on blue blue is good red is bad guy right we don't want to be blue on blue good so you keep them together so this tactic we use kept me in a position i should have already been gone but because of this tactic we were using we stopped that after this mission once you finish whatever you're doing you leave we got transponder codes we got altitudes we can fly which can de-deconflict the the air-to-air picture and we use that instead of trying to just keep them keep the aircraft physically in close proximity you know lesson learned the hard way at least for me um wow so you know fog of war that's and that's hold on that's your first night first night mission yeah yeah i had several after that word and and i try to you know again the purpose of putting them in the book is not to say hey look what i did i don't care it's to see the progression of of what the lord situation he put me in in preparation for the next preparation for the next preparation for the next which you know ultimately this this wrapped around this starliner story which is a baseline for that and it all purpose is to glorify him truly truly is as we tell this again encourage people in dealing with the now for being prepared for the now and also focus on things that are eternal which is only through jesus christ our lord yeah did you drop any ordinance oh yeah a lot do you want to anything stick out there yeah night mission again no air-to-air threat it's going into a target area just does we call them kill boxes just a latitude longitude 10 by 10 mile box you go into in the bad guy country before the ground war before there were any ground troops there and anything you see in the kill box prosecute it we would drop a flare a loo two flares the lead would drop a flare the flare would fall a parachute would open under the flare the flare would light up and it would illuminate the ground and anything you saw in that under the ground wow prosecuted it again launching office there's only eight of us we launched we had there was one tanker for all eight of us i'm last i'm junior i'm pretty junior you know i uh i went on deployment i had decent landing grades got back i've been back only three months saddam hussein invades kuwait and then they send aircraft carriers kind of like they are right now over to the over the over there and kennedy was one of them and they were short on pilots so i was at home in tennessee and my xo calls me and says butch i need you to come back i can't tell you why well my one of my pistons in my 1984 ford ranger had blown on my way up there it was in the shop so i called the guy said hey you got to put my truck together now i got to go i got back found out that they're sending me to another squadron on the kennedy so basically i had almost two years where i was at sea you know extended unexpected deployments wow kind of the theme of the life here um so i've been home for three months but i went straight to see and this one was an eight month deployment desert shield desert storm excuse me so i'm in this squadron that it's not my squadron but i've assimilated into it we're on this mission and the flight lead i'm sorry we're rendezvous on the tanker i'm dashed last because i'm junior that's kind of why i told that story i'm junior i come up i go to plug i plug in and the tanker says tanker's dry tanker's dry means he can't give me any gas so seven aircraft are off to the right he's dry i got no gas i gotta have gas and the flight lead tells me to go rendezvous with the tanker that was going to give us fuel after we got out of country and get my gas and they went in country without me so they dropped the flare did the in the kill box prosecuted whatever they saw i went and got gas i finally make it up to the border i'm actually 50 miles south of the border they're checking out and i'm assuming that he's going to have me just join up and come back to the ship i can't land on the aircraft carrier with my weapons load out because You can only, you have to have a certain amount of, you know, extra fuel in case you have trouble getting aboard and you can't have sufficient fuel and the weapons weight, the aircraft cannot land at that heavy of a weight. So I would have had to have, you know, jettison, we call it pickle, jettison some of my weapons into the Red Sea unfused, which we don't want to do. So he tells me to go in country, said, there's no threat, go into country, drop your bombs. I'm thinking, so I even asked him, I said, you want me to go? I think crank was the code word. You want me to go to crank and deploy weapons? He said, affirmative. So he told me to go in country alone. Wow. Over bad guy country alone. It does not seem like a good idea. I didn't think so either, but I'm a junior, I'm junior. I'm, you know, he's a flight lead. I'm gonna do what he says. So I go in country alone. You know, when you get in situations, fear can be detrimental. It can be detrimental. It can be detrimental to your performance. And this is part of what happened with Starliner when I got to that point. But I won't talk about that now, but fear can be very detrimental. When I got all these missions that I flew, when I'd get 20 miles south of the border, there was apprehension, but when I got 20 miles south of the border, gone focus, this is a job. I got my, my responsibility, my friends and crewmates, you know, in their aircraft, they're, they're depending on me and there was no fear. It is time to go. On this mission, I'm going in country alone. There's fear. I mean, if, if the stick between my legs, if I didn't have that stick there, my knees would probably be hitting together. Cause I'm going in country alone. I've been in country, lights are out. You don't see the other airplanes at night, but you know, they're there mutually supportive, but this time I'm going in alone. Wow. Cause my flight lead told me to, and he said, just drop your bombs B-52 style. B-52 means straight and level. Whatever altitude 27, 23,000 feet. Whatever it was, just drop them. Come on and then come to the ship. So I go in country and I thought, okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to drop my bombs pointing outbound. I'm not going to drop them inbound and then turn. I'm going to go turn, drop them as I'm leaving. So when they hit, I'm going to be way down there. As I did the turn, looking back, they started shooting at me. Triple-A I'm way above it. Realize these flares have already gone out now. I can't see the ground. It's black. The flares that they had that they used to see the ground to prosecute targets, you know, that flare is gone, but them shooting at me gave me a target. So as I do the turn, he starts, they start shooting, they give me a target. So I rolled in and deployed my weapons and of course they impacted and the shooting stopped. People have asked me, how do you rationalize that with what God's word says about not killing? And all that, you know, the murder and I say, well, this is not murder. This is Romans 13. This is an extension of the governments that he has instituted to keep evil at bay. Go read Romans 13. I mean, if you do evil, you should be fearful. And that's what we are as military members. We are extension of our government and I trust my government to do the right things for the right reasons, because that's what we've done historically. And as a, and. An extension of my government, I'm not murdering. I'm not in that light. I am Romans 13 is extension of my government and I have no problem with that because evil needs to be held at bay because if it's not, it will overtake everything. And we know that wow. So anyway, prosecute the target. They stopped shooting and I went back to the ship. I, you know, at the ship, you ever heard of Barney Clark? I haven't never heard the name Barney Clark. I have not. Barney Clark was the first recipient of an artificial. Heart back in like 1980, something, maybe 1980 he lived, I think, for three months after he got this artificial heart. So on the ship in his honor, we named you have four meals on a ship, on an aircraft carrier, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight rations, mid rats. So you're flying at night, you come back mid rats is you go to, you go to the board room to the, you know, go to mid rats and one of the options to order was the Barney Clark and the Barney Clark was the double meat. Double cheese, double egg, double bacon, hamburger, full of cholesterol. So named his in his honor. So back to the ship, go get a Barney Clark and then you can go to debrief. Right on. Yeah. Damn. Damn. Wow. Would you have a question about refueling? So they stack them up, right? If you got a lot of aircraft that you don't, you know, you, you don't. You don't want blue on blue. You don't want aircraft hitting aircraft. And so that's why we did it. The aircraft, the aircraft, it was quite a sight to see, especially in your daytime. You see eight huge airplanes stacked up a thousand feet. They're following the lead down at the bottom. And we're refueling all these aircraft simultaneously, eight at a time as you're cycling through. And then you're getting off to the right side and eventually get the whole air wing, you know, those 42 plus aircraft off to the side. And then you go in country daytime. It's quite a sight. I mean, I'd hate to be on the ground seeing this coming at me. I mean, it's quite a sight and it's a formidable force as well with the weapons load out and, you know, the air to air aircraft protecting the strikers and the strikers focused on their task of putting bombs on target on time and time. And that's why I said the F-18, you're, you're all of that. You do it all yourself. You're fighting your way in bombs on target on time, fighting your way out, multiple roles, multiple capabilities and that aircraft. Wow. It is an amazing aircraft. Amazing platform. Sea models are no longer in, that's what I flew. They're no longer, no longer in the Navy. When I flew them initially, we had brand new, they had new car smell. I mean, brand's making new from, from St. Louis, the facility in St. Louis, where they put them together. Now there's no more in the Navy. The Air Force, excuse me, the Marine Corps is still flying some sea models, but they're all the newer E and F models now. Top Gun Maverick, Maverick was flying a brand new, you know, the E model, the newer one. I flew the sea models, but there was nothing like a sea model. It was amazing. Did you go to Top Gun? I did. That's Fallon, right? It is, it is now. It was, it was at Miramar in San Diego and they moved it to Fallon many years back when I was even, you know, active duty. I didn't go the long course, but I went to what was called the short course, which was a couple of flights. I just didn't have time in my training flow with the test pilot school and all that stuff to do the long course. I would have loved to, but I didn't do that, but I did do the short course. Yeah. What is the, what is the point of Top Gun? You take certain percentage of aviators and you give them this high level training, elite training for tactics, realize the Air Force pilots, they're not aviators, naval aviators, Air Force pilots, their primary job is tactics and flying the airplane. The Navy, we can't take a whole bunch of people aboard the aircraft carrier. So naval aviators, their primary job. The purpose is flying the aircraft, but we also have division officer jobs in charge of the troops and various, you know, ordnance officer and, you know, the guys that work on the avionics officer and we have different roles and responsibilities that all the pilots have, department heads when you get more senior. So we have to fulfill all those administrative jobs and fly. The Air Force, they have some administrative jobs, but not like we do in the Navy. So Top Gun is to focus on the tactics. As the tactics change, you want to get that into the fleet. You send some fleet guys, a couple, a guy or two from your squadron, and then you send those back to the fleet and we have a weapons school at the different locations like the East Coast F-18 RAG, Strike Fighter Wings Atlantic, has a weapons, at least when I was there, had a weapons school. I was the OPSO for a period of time, operations officer of the weapons school, bunch of Top Gun graduates go into the squadrons, fly with the squadrons, train them, check rides with their people to make sure that their tactics are acceptable up to the level. I was the OPSO for a period of time, operations officer of the weapons school, bunch of Top Gun graduates go into the squadrons, train them, check rides with their people to make sure that their tactics are acceptable up to the level of snuff of what the most current tactics are, various weapons employment, air-to-air, air-to-ground, all of that. So that's the purpose of Top Gun, to keep our tactics at the supreme level. I think Top Gun actually kind of says that at the beginning of it, why it was instituted initially, the movie, the movie Top Gun, and Top Gun Maverick as well. So that's the purpose, and we're making sure the fleet is trained, ready to fight, if called into that action. Quick break. Break time. The show will focus on what is neat to know, not just what is nice to know. All right, Butch, we're back from the break, and as much as I want to dive into your Navy career and all the missions that you went on, I want to get to space. Sure. And so why did you. Why did you leave? the Navy? So the Navy has a process, obviously the test pilot program. And this is one of the things that before I ever entered the Navy, how can I use my, the foundation I built at Tennessee Tech engineering and go forward with that. And I even then thought maybe I could eventually get into the test pilot program. So once I got back from my second deployment, which was like I said, two years at sea almost, a desert storm, I had a unique resume, if you will, in that I was fairly junior, two deployments, combat time. And so I made the application to test pilot school. And that was one of the, one of the few easy things in life, not easy, but I didn't have to apply multiple times. I just applied that one time. I had a decent resume at that point. And so they took me initially. And so going to the school, go through that process as a part of the school training, we went on a couple of field trips. One of the places, we went was Johnson Space Center, where the astronauts live and train in Houston, Texas. And when we were there and seeing what they did and what those opportunities were, there were some people that I knew, friends that I had that were there. And that I began to think, wow, wow, this might be something that would be interesting to maybe see if I could maybe go that, go that way. I didn't have a master's degree at the time. I was in the process of working on it and wound up, it wasn't planned, but I wound up getting two master's degrees, one from Tennessee Tech electrical engineering, and one from Tennessee Tech electrical engineering. And I was in the other from University of Tennessee Aviation Systems, where both of them turned out to be very beneficial as a process of eventually getting selected by NASA. So I made four applications in the ensuing years. It was every two years they were selected. That's over an eight-year period. I actually got called down for an interview on the third application and went through that interview process, had four days notice before I went, wasn't thrilled with my interview. They did a background check, which is encouraging because those aren't cheap. They're not cheap. They're not cheap, like several thousand dollars to do a background check. Go through that process. Looks like I'm going to get selected, got a background check done, but they didn't select me. And so three days after I found out that- Like security clearance background check? Everything. Okay. They're checking everything. The SF-86 type probably way better than that. Yeah. I mean, I've got a super secret clearance, but still they're doing that type of background check for NASA to make sure- Just for the interview. This is after the interview, if they're looking at you, after you go down for the week, and trust me, the week is medical. It's mostly medical, and you get one hour with the board. Are you serious? You get one hour. Yeah. And basically, they set the room up in a T, and they set you in the corner of the T. So you got people here, you got people behind you. And I think they did that just to give you a situation, a unique situation, because you're talking to, you may ask me the question, but I'm talking to the room. And I've got to address everybody in the room as I'm talking in that T scenario. And the chief of the selection board, the two years I interviewed, was John Young. John Young is one of 12 men to step foot on the moon. And from an aviator standpoint, the astronaut of astronauts, the premier astronaut is John Young. He flew in Gemini, the first Gemini mission. He flew in Apollo twice, went, stood on the surface of the moon, Apollo 16. He flew the first space shuttle. He flew later in space. He'd flown six times. The only person at the time to fly four different spacecraft, one of which was the lunar module to and from the moon. And so he's sitting on the board. He's the chairman of the board. As a matter of fact, my second interview, I go into the room, sit down at the corner of the T. He goes, okay, Butch, you know what we want, start talking. It did kind of set me at ease, though. It did. The first interview, I, uh, you know, and said, I had four days to prepare. And as I'm sitting there talking, kind of like today, I'm talking about me. That was the first time I had talked about me ever out loud. I'd thought what I wanted to say. I didn't make an outline, but I'm sitting there talking to complete strangers around the T about me out loud. And I'm like, as I'm doing, I'm like, this is hard talking about me. This is hard. And so they did the background check. I didn't get selected. The next time, two years later, I thought I'll try one more time. I put the application in. I got three months notice because I was transitioning, moving from the fleet. Um, I was going to shore duty from sea duty. I was in Virginia beach, Virginia. That's where they moved all the F-18 squadrons. And I was going to be the exchange pilot instructor, Navy exchange pilot at air force test pilot school in Edwardsville. So I was making that transition. I couldn't come initially when they called me, they were having interviews over the next several months. They said, well, pencil in pencil you in for, you know, it was three months from that point. So I spent the next three months like driving across the country. My wife, bless her heart. I talked about me out loud constantly just to get accustomed to it. Cause the first time it was so hard. Yeah. So I'm talking to her, we're driving. And I just talked, I talked, I told stories she hadn't ever heard. I told stories she hadn't ever heard. I, I couldn't, I'm surprised I remembered them just to get used to talking about me, which was not easy. I went into that interview when I've listed the first interview, I, you know, uh, and I'm thinking back, I shouldn't have said that I'm, uh, and you know, I shouldn't have said that the second interview, I had none of that. I didn't feel like I, uh, you know, and I, there was nothing that I said that I wished I hadn't. There was nothing. I didn't say that wish I had, because I just got accustomed to talking about me with my wife, bless her heart. Praise her for, for, for, for enduring all of that. But she was, you know, it's like I said earlier, we're the team, it's a team. It's not just me. It's, it's us. And so she was all on board with listening and hearing and giving some constructive criticism. So I did get selected. Obviously I got selected. I said, this was my last time I'm going to try. I got selected. And then of course the, the NASA 25 years later, here I am just left NASA. Um, looking back, I don't think, I don't know if I said this earlier, but you know, this whole thing, it's, it's, it's a privilege, right? It's a privilege to serve. And, and I look back at those early years, those desires that kid had and, and where the Lord allowed my path to go. And just the fact that the Navy finally took me, that was hard. It's a privilege serving our nation in, in conflict is a privilege. I think back to all those people that didn't come back from those conflicts. I mean, Memorial day is a, is a, a huge day for me, um, and, and yourself and others as well, because, you know, we enjoy what we enjoy because of them. And I am patriotic. Um, and I know you are too. And those other individuals I've mentioned earlier and a privilege to serve and then serve your nation and its space program. Oh, what a, what a privilege there as well, beyond my ability to really adequately articulate day in and day out, not to say everything's easy. Nothing's easy. Life's tough, but overall, all of it, a privilege regardless of what the situation is. So to get selected, this is something as a kid, I mean, my mom and dad got a, a freezer and it came in a big box and my brother and I made a spacecraft out of it, made cardboard helmets. And, you know, we imagined and, you know, drew a black crayon, made a window, poked holes in it. So the light would shine through, look like stars. And, you know, we did this as kids, not because I was trying, wanting to be an astronaut, but I wanted to be an astronaut. Wasn't the first thing I wanted to be. First thing I wanted to be was a garbage man, because the garbage man was strong. He could pick that can up and put it on the shoulder. And that's what I wanted to be first. Um, but as I got older, it'd be a garbage man, it'd be an astronaut. And if something was in it, you know, your mind's out of your dream by that, but never think that would happen. And here I am. Wow. My nation select me to do this. Wow. What a privilege. And then moving whole new lifestyle, very different from, you know, sea duty, shore duty, sea duty, you know, deployments, detachments gone, you know, all of that though. My wife loved the fleet. She loved it. The comradery in the squadrons, the other spouses is just a, just a special bond. And those, those that people may not be aware of them in squadron life is fabulous. Serving with these individuals, these Patriots are fabulous. It's just such a privilege, like I said, but anyway, that's kind of the process. Just, it wasn't something I, yeah, I dreamed of it. As a kid, not something I strove for, but in the course of time, you know, you croquet is a game. You've got wickets you go through. Eventually as I look back at life, I'd gone through all these wickets and those are the wickets you gotta have to be eligible to be selected by NASA. So I made application, eventually wore them down and they took me. Right on. Where do you start when you get in? You go right into astronaut, astronaut candidate training, ASCAN. I was here in ASCAN. And at the time we went through and studied the, learned everything we could about the space shuttle. What a complex spacecraft, probably the most complex spacecraft ever designed and built because this spacecraft wasn't a capsule. It had to launch like a capsule orbit, like any other spacecraft orbits, and then fly back in the atmosphere to a runway and, you know, quad redundant computers and all interacted with the reaction control system jets and auxiliary power units that power the moving components to fly in the atmosphere and all the reaction control system jets. Like I said, they maneuver in space. It's a super, super complicated spacecraft. And we try to learn, you learn a system at a time. You have a single task trainer, and you single system task string or ssdt and we go into that we learn the system eventually put them all together and you integrate them all and you learn all that and then of course we're also learning the space station which was new and coming online we were building at the time and all of that process and it's uh by one of the first instructors that we had was an astronaut from a current astronaut that gave us a brief and he said okay guys here's your task know everything and perform it well and i'm like i may not be here long if that's what the expectation is out of me i may not last my brain didn't have that capability but honestly why would you set a lower goal right to do great things takes great uh preparation great energy great endeavors take that and if you're going to set a goal know most things and perform them okay that's your goal that is not this business know everything and perform it well was the right thing to say i can't do that nobody can but that's what you're striving for again you you want to be very broad in your knowledge and you want to go deep as deep as you can in that broad knowledge realizing i can't go super deep in all of them i'm there's some people may have that mental capability i don't and that's where the team comes together the trust and the team the mission control team and all the people that are passionate about this business going deep in that knowledge is what makes this work for our nation it's a mighty thing and a mighty wonderful thing to be a part of and take part in yeah especially when you know there's a whole lot of people that are much smarter much more passionate maybe about this business than me but as the guy that climbs in the capsule on the pointy end i mean you get a little bit of visibility that others don't get but you represent them And that's why when I was out in public and I'm representing NASA, I'm not Butch Wilmore. I'm not just me. This is our national, international, global, significant human spaceflight program that there's only a handful of them around the globe, nations that have this capability, and we're one of them. And to be privileged enough to be a part of that and be kind of visible in that light because of the position, wow, wow. I'm grateful to my Lord. I'm grateful to my nation for allowing me to have that, to be a part of that. When was your first time in space? STS-129, Space Shuttle Atlantis. I can tell you laying on your back for three hours-ish after you get strapped in and the countdown's going and you're saying, I mean, taking it all in, this is really happening. I'm really, I mean, this is, somebody coined this phrase. I don't remember who it was. I heard it from first. But you're literally leaving the planet. And at the time when I launched on the space shuttle, I was the 505th person in the history of human spaceflight to leave the planet. And I know that because NASA keeps records and they told me. I didn't look it up. The guy sitting behind me, our MS-2 was Randy Brasnick's. He was 506 because I was a nanosecond before him getting to space. And we had another guy on the mid-deck. He was number 507. I was number 507, getting to space. And to think about that in light of history and the billions of people that have survived on this planet, millions of which current day would love to have been sitting there. And it was me sitting in that seat. Sean, that's very humbling to take all that in and realize. And I remember those thoughts vividly. Training for it, preparing for it. This is a lifetime. My wife sacrifices and all that goes into that. My daughters were born, though they were young, five and two at the time. And realizing they're out there watching all this as we lay on our backs and get ready to go. Wow. And then when I got to space and the launch went well, the solid rocket boots were separated about two minutes in. You got another six minutes of powered flight. And then you separate from the external tank. And all these events are jarring. And the pyrotechnics are firing. There's blasts going on. I'll share that. So we finally did all that. We're in space. We're separated from the external tank. And I look out the front window. I'm the pilot. Best seat in the house, right? I'm still strapped in, but we're zero gravity. So in zero gravity, your muscles, your tendons, everything goes to a neutral position. It's because there's not gravity pulling it down. Like you sit here like this, your gravity is pulling your arms down, pulling your legs down. But in space, if you don't have tension on your body, it's going to go to whatever that neutral position is for your tendons and muscles. And feeling that for the first time and looking out the window. Sean, looking out the window, you got 870 pounds of thrust thrusters in the nose and they blast. It's like explosion. And there's orange blast going up as it's maintaining its attitude. Eventually, in the space shuttle, you would transition to the vernier thrusters. In comparison, 870 pounds of thrust. In comparison, they're 24 pounds of thrust. You didn't even feel them or hear them. But initially, when you first get there, these blasts are going off, maintaining attitude. When you separate from the external tank, water vapor separates from the tank, crystallizes into ice. And there are thousands of diamonds floating out the window. The sun's behind us, so it's coming this way. These diamonds are out there. I'm feeling this weightlessness. Diamonds. Wow. That was my first experience of space. And I look out my right window, and there's the Earth in the most magnificent, brilliant colors I could ever imagine. And I'm like, Lord, why me? That was the first space, Lord, why me moment. I've had many, but that was the first. Why me? How did I get here? And for anybody that's watching, to try to relay that and the appreciation, this is our nation that gives us this capability. This is what freedom brings. Going back to, you know, our forefathers, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, all those individuals, not envisioning something like this, is they're building the foundation of this country. But realizing where we have gone from those days and appreciation all the way back for centuries as you sit there in this situation, taking it in. And the Lord, you know, is the one that allowed you to be in the seat. And there's millions that would love to be in the seat. There's millions that would love to be in there. Talking, again, humbly and just, wow, special, special memory, special moment. I'm grateful that you give me the opportunity to share it because it's not about me. It's about our nation, about our Lord's providence and allowing things to happen, allowing our nation to prosper and do the things that it has to this point. And, oh, what a privilege we all have. I've talked about privilege with me. What a privilege we all have to be a part of this country with its current leadership. And throughout the history and where we have come from, where we were in comparison to other nations, we are indeed privileged. Man, I can't imagine just looking out and seeing the planet. I never could have either. That's what made it so special. My first sight of the planet, as soon as when I finally did, as I'm sitting there, just to continue real quick. Mike Foreman, our premier space walker, was strapped in on the mid-deck. There's a ladder over here that comes up from the side, a ladder where we would climb up all the time. Well, you don't need a ladder in space. Mike, I look over, he levitates up. I'd seen it in videos. I'd never seen it with my own eyes. He levitates up, just levitates up from the mid-deck. It was the strangest thing I'd ever seen. I'm like, wow. Because I'm strapped in, so I'm not floating. A couple minutes later, I look back. Leland Melvin, you know, the external tank separates. You remember Columbia tragedy. There was external tank issues that impacted. I'm sorry, the external tank issues impacted the shuttle, damaged the wing. Columbia broke up on entry back in 2003. So since that time, this is 2009, we took pictures of the external tank to see if there was anything with the tank that might have impacted the shuttle that we couldn't see. So he's floating back there in the windows in the back. I look back, he's levitating, floating, horizontal, taking pictures out the window, video and pictures of the external tank as it floats away. My mind is like, this is not normal. Now, within time, we're all doing it. It became absolutely normal in every mission after that. But the first time I saw it, it was amazing, absolutely amazing. And then in space, of course, you're Superman. People say, what's great about space? You're Superman, you fly. You know, you get in a pool and you float, you feel the pressure around your body. In space, there's none of that. And you literally push off and you fly like Superman. Amazing. That is wild. It is wild. It is. It truly is. I mean, does it feel empty out there? I mean, once you get over the initial, holy shit. You look out, you see the vastness and you realize how far the universe goes and how far the stars go. You don't need to go to space to know it, to realize that. But you see it from that vantage point. Yeah. Yeah. It feels very empty. And you feel it. like wow we're just a little speck and all this big everything and we actually left the planet there it goes zipping by below just it just doesn't seem it didn't seem right but here we are what was the point of that mission we were installing we were in the process of building the space station the final phases of building the space station and we took up several elements truss elements that we actually took the robot arm and attached an element this truss to the truss segment and it was full of spare parts it's just external parts you know pumps and and gyros and you name it everything that you might need to in to replace on the outside of the station because things fail right where things are not gonna last forever and so in the subsequent years we installed two of them the elcs that were called express logistics carriers we installed a couple of them and in the soon years you things fail we go out they've gone out and grabbed them off these elcs and installed them so that was what our mission was as we built the space station so you you did the final phase of the space station we were in the very final phases i wasn't the last mission i was the capsule communicator the capcom for the last two missions where you're talking to the crew during launch and during entry which is a very challenging position as well but i don't know we were like number six to the end or something like that but the very final phases of yeah building the space station before they end before the space shuttle program ended damn yeah yeah thrilling mission to fly the space shuttle i mean i've had i've asked people this if you think okay i get one chance to fly in space you get one chance to fly in space what are you going to do are you going to fly a spaceship or are you going to do a spacewalk you only get you can only do one which do you choose and i said what do you think i would choose and they all invariably 99 98 percent will say spacewalk i'm like oh no i'm a naval aviator you give me a choice i've done both now but if i can only do one i'm going to fly that spacecraft that's the way i'm wired don't get me wrong spacewalks are amazing and that one person space capsule you know shaped like a human inside that 180 degree you know bubble helmet looking and doing all that and you're out in the vacuum you know no air vacuum of space it's it's special don't get me wrong but if i can only do it once hands-on controls i'm going to fly that space no shit yeah when is the first time you did a spacewalk it was the second mission you know ironically the pilots never did spacewalks ever throughout the space shuttle history because we had the skill trained skill of landing the shuttle and spacewalks are a little more risky of an endeavor so they wouldn't risk the pilots going out and doing the spacewalks so we never had the opportunity it wasn't even in our training flow but the space shuttle program was coming to an end they had an open window in the training new people to do spacewalks in 2008 and they said anybody want to do it i'm like i'll do it so i was actually there were early early early in the space shuttle space station program some of the early astronauts that went up two of them were pilots but they had been doing ms mission specialist type jobs for quite a while and they went in and they they did a couple spacewalks but as far as space shuttle pilot um not involved in those early stages i was the first pilot to do a spacewalk damn yeah and it was it was special it was wonderful i did four i mean i did three i did one in november of 2014 and then i did three like three days three day centers in the end of january and february or in the february march of 2015 go do a spacewalk let your body heal for a couple days because you know you get beat up in these suits i mean it's you get bruises and everything else it's it's just that environment get three days to recuperate do it another get three days recuperate go do another one that's great that's great again wonderfully great but if i only get to do one i'm flying i mean what i mean how i mean the anticipation of exiting the shuttle so i got 32 hours outside in the vacuum of space in a on a spacewalks 32 32 hours total and five different spacewalks sean there's not a single hour that went by that i didn't think two things i can't believe we do this we actually put a human inside of a one-man space capsule shaped like a person and we go out into the vacuum of space and work i can't believe we do this and the second thing was that i always thought was don't get famous if you're on a spacewalk and you get famous during a spacewalk something probably didn't go right you know we have procedures where you have a tether a 85 foot cable you put two of those together you got 170 feet of cable that you can go from wherever you anchor your cable right outside the airlock we typically put the anchor down and i can go 170 feet from that point we have other ways if we have to go further 170 where we'll take and we'll extend our cable various ways so you've got your safety tether always attached and when you get to a workstation you're going to have to go to a site you have a local tether so you actually local tether is about three feet long and you local tether you never let go until you are local tethered even though you have a safety tether you know some of the commercials i see they go off and they're just out there you know off the space station you don't want to be that i'll bet because there's a chance you could become a satellite and if you become a satellite meaning that you're out there on your own separate from the space station you get famous you don't want that so are so mental. There is not a passive movement on a spacewalk. Everything is active. I grab my hand. I grab my hand. I don't let go until this hand is cold. I don't. And it's all active thoughts. My safety tether is clear. Keep going. When I get to a work site, I put my local tether down and I'm a try check kind of guy because this is a spacewalk and I don't want to be famous. Put my safety tether down. I'm sorry. My local tether down. My local tether is down. I'm still holding on. Okay. The second time, my local tether is down. Third time, my safety tether is clear. Okay. Now I'll release because I'm not going to go floating off structure. You don't want to be floating off structure. So you have no control. You have the next thing. If you float off structure, you don't want to be floating off structure. If you float off structure, we have a jet pack that is attached to our space suit. It's called SAFER. S-A-F-E-R. I forget what the acronym stands for. Survival something something effect. Basically, you reach back here, you lift the handle. It's way back. It's hard to reach in the suit. You lift the handle and a window spring opens and there's a controller. You grab the controller. You put it on your chest. You turn it on. And now you've got a small gaseous bottle of liquid nitrogen of gaseous nitrogen. And you control yourself and you try to fly yourself back to the space station with with the controls on this little controller. And the jet pack is going to try to arrange and do that. And we have virtual reality simulations where we put on a headset and we train for this. Before we launch, we do it. We actually do the same thing in space. We have computers. We connect all the system to software, put the helmet on the headset on and we're ready to go. And then we're ready to go. And I practice flying back to the space station before I run out of gaseous nitrogen. And it's got a little counter. Ninety three percent. Eighty five percent. Seven percent. Until you got none. And if you're not back at the station and you got no gaseous nitrogen, you're a satellite. See you later. See you later. And we train for all of that. I can't believe we do this. Don't get famous. Constantly in my mind. Damn. Yeah. Because it's. Like I said, most people aren't watching when you do a satellite when you know, most people aren't watching when you do a spacewalk. But I did my one of my first spacewalks. I came in. I got an email from somebody that was traveling in Europe and they had it in the airport on the screen in Europe while we're doing the spacewalk. So it's something that's globally visible. And it certainly will be if you do something and you get famous for it. What you don't want. You don't want to do. Man. Yeah. Yeah. So that is. Are you out there all by yourself or never partner? Always go with one or the person. The first person, Alexei Leonov, he went out by himself. He had an actual. This is the Russian, the first spacewalk ever. They actually had an inflatable airlock where they inflated this airlock. He crawled into it, closed the hatch, deflated the inflatable airlock and went out into the vacuum of space. He did it by himself. There was two people on the spacecraft, but he went out by himself. Ed White, first person in Gemini. To do a spacewalk. They depressurized the cabin, opened the hatch. He went out. I forget who he was with. That escapes my memory. But he went out. The other person's in his spacesuit exposed to the vacuum of space because the hatch is open. But he didn't go outside. So technically he didn't. They did the same thing on Apollo. They depressurized the cabin. One person on the way back from the moon would go out and do a spacewalk, do various things. The other two guys are inside in the spacesuits exposed to vacuum, but they didn't count that. Ed White is being a spacewalk for them since they weren't outside the spacecraft. Extra vehicular activity. activity, EVA. That's what the official term is, because you're extra vehicular outside the spacecraft doing activities. So they didn't technically go outside, so they don't get the check as being on a spacewalk, even though they're inside their suit, exposed to the vacuum of space inside the spacecraft. Man. So after doing, did you say five spacewalks, 32 hours? 32 hours. A little over 32 hours. Yeah, total. What are most, what are most, I mean, is that, is that a lot for the profession or? It's, it is. Sonny, who I was with on Starliner and with on the space station, I wound up with this last mission, excuse me. It was two long duration space flights that I've done. The first one was planned and I was the commander of the space station. That's when I did four spacewalks. Sonny, this was turned out to be her third long duration. So she, she's got 609 days in space or something like that now, because she did three long durations. And because she was up there more, she's done like nine spacewalks. She's got the most hours of any female. The most anybody's done is nine to 10 total. But the majority, I mean, if you get one, you're privileged, but the majority is probably three or four, five back during the shuttle era. If you got five and if you got six, you've really done many. Um, space station, there's, there's more people that have more, but five is, yeah, that's, that's pretty amazing to even think that I would get one, but being a pilot, I was selected. There was no chance of me doing spacewalks, but here we are 25 years later and things changed. I mean, I'm just curious, you know, with all the time you have in space, 32 hours worth of spacewalking, I don't know how many days in total you have in space, but 464. 464. Okay. It, what do you think when you hear about Elon Musk saying we were going to Mars, we're going to the moon? Yeah. I mean, I don't want to detract from anything anybody thinks or saying. Mars is hard, really, really, really hard. It's hard because again, when Mars and the earth on the same side of the plant, same side as the sun, if they're on the same side, you're like 35 million miles. The transit time of communication is like three to six minutes. You speak before that you get something back. It's like six minutes. When Mars, when earth, let's say earth and Mars is on the other side of the sun, that's like 250 million miles. And the transit time for communication is 42 minutes. So you're, you're basically autonomous because it takes, you know, sound or, or sound speed of light is 186,000 miles a second to traverse that far and go all the way out communication, come all the way back. So you're, you're autonomous. Autonomous. You have to be. And that makes it very difficult. Things break. Things break on the space station. We can fix it. We go outside and fix it. We fix them inside. Things are going to break on any mission that goes to Mars. So additive manufacturing, 3D printing, it's got to be robust. You're going to have to print a part. You may have to print a tool to install the part or both. That's got to be robust. I was actually the first person to do 3D printing in space back in 2015. Just, there just happened to be the timing. I was there when that experiment was going up and, and this was just plastics, but we're, you know, polymers get more, you know, get stronger and what we're using and we're baby stepping our way into trying to do that because we're going to have to be able to do those types of things. When you think about going to Mars, you think about the food, how much food you're going to rely on a crop that you're growing. What if you have a bad crop and it didn't produce, you're kind of out of, you don't have options, right? So just nourishment of the astronauts and all how that plays out. And so for many, many reasons, Mars is hard. Mars getting to the surface is hard. Nobody knows this, but I was, I was on a, not nobody, but very few people understand this. I was on an interplanetary landing evaluation team. This is, this is many, many years ago. And we surmised that get to the surface of Mars. So let me real quick, give you a little background. The earth has a certain mass, a heavenly bodies, a gravitational pull. Is based on its mass. That's 9.8 meters per second squared at the surface, 32.2 feet per second squared. That's the acceleration we feel sitting here in this chair towards the center of the earth. Mars is about 0.38, four tenths, the size of the earth. It's smaller, right? So it's got less mass. It's mass is less. So it's got less, I'm sorry. It's got less mass. Therefore it has less gravity at the surface. Mars has just enough gravity to hold an atmosphere. You go to the moon. It's even smaller. It's got one sixth the gravity at the surface. It doesn't have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere. So there's the surface of the moon. You're in a vacuum, but you go back to Mars. The Mars atmosphere is about one one hundredth the density of our atmosphere. We use our atmosphere to slow down. Friction builds up. You saw the video earlier. It's got 3000 degree, you know, plasma ball that says you're coming in, slowing you down. We use the atmosphere. The mass that we're taking to the surface now slows down in the atmosphere the same, but it's only one one hundredth the density of ours. It's harder to slow down. And so you take the mass of what we're taking to the surface now compared to the mass we got to take to go to the surface with humans. It's exponentially more mass, harder to slow down. It's almost impossible to slow that amount of mass down to get safely to the surface of the moon, to the surface of Mars. We surmised that it would take six supersonic, I'm sorry, supersonic parachutes the size of six football fields to slow down enough. I mean, we would look at ballutes, inflatable deceleration devices. And the math, the physics just doesn't work out. It's hard to do. So getting the amount of mass to the surface that it requires to support human life and then leave the surface, it is tough. I applaud people like Elon Musk that said, we're going to figure out a way to do it because the only way we're ever going to do it is to have that attitude. Know everything and perform it well, right? Have that attitude. We're going to figure it out. But it is a very, very lofty endeavor. What do you think about it as a Christian? I'm just curious. As a Christian? Should we be leaving Earth? Should we be going to settle other planets? The Lord created this planet to be inhabited, right? But he also has insight into gaining knowledge. The Lord has all knowledge. He knows everything. And he is, according to his plan and his purposes, he has parsed out his knowledge throughout time, more and more. More so now, abundance of knowledge coming to light, right? Abundance of knowledge. And that's all because the Lord is enlightening us, so to speak. And he's the one that gave us the ability, enhanced our capability to go to the moon. Which we have done. And so, do I see a problem with enhancing and growing knowledge? No. We don't know what we don't know. And the Lord has given us this ingenuity, this mind to go forward. I don't see an ethical problem with trying to go and explore and do these things. I don't see that in Scripture at all. I see just the opposite, actually. I see going forward. Was it Jubalcain? Tubal and Jubalcain initially were the first ones in Genesis chapter 4 or whatever that first worked in lead and then first. You know, stringed instruments and lute and music and all those things. It started somewhere and we've grown as we go. And that's obviously, I think, in the Lord's will and going forward. So, I don't see a conflict with that at all. Yeah. It's a good question. And, I mean, just from being out in space, you were just talking about how you get the shit beat out of you inside those spacesuits. I mean, how's it going to work? How are we going to get massive amounts of people there? Is it just, I mean. Low Earth Orbit, we've done a lot. We've learned a lot about how to live and operate in Low Earth Orbit. We have suit technology that's continuing to progress. So, the suits that we have now will be replaced. You got to realize the spacewalk, the suit that I went on spacewalk 30 January of last year, just over a year ago, I think it's 35 years old. I mean, that's pretty old for a technology. We're trying to bring on board for future programs. So, that will be better as we go forward, without question. And we're working on that now and have been and continue to do so. So, that will improve. But all of it is difficult. Flying in space, Starliner, we had an issue, right? We had problems. Spaceflight is hard. And sometimes, if you don't dot all your T's and dot all your I's and cross all your T's, you're not going to be able to do it. So, things are not going to turn out the way you hope. And that's why it's imperative testing, evaluating, using our capabilities, God-given capabilities to learn and grow. It's challenging. This is a very, very, very challenging business and very, very difficult to do well. I think by and large, we do it well, but there are going to be issues going forward as well. And we just got to prepare for that. That's why it's important when we have issues. You got to figure out what happened. If you have an anomaly, what happened once you figure out what happened then you got to go back historically and say why did it happen you got to figure that out if you don't do those things you are falling far short of what's required in this business what what happened why it happened and then you got to have a process to fix it to get it right because we in this business you can't have these type of significant issues if you're not doing a full-up process of going forward to rectify it as we continue to move forward because there's too much at risk human lives are literally at stake yeah yeah and that's important of course let's move to starliner great where do we start oh my where do you want to start i can explain what happened well let's let's let's start with what was the point of the mission starliner starliner was the sixth first crewed spacecraft in the history of the u.s space program mercury gemini apollo space shuttle spacex dragon starliner number six it was the first crewed flight i was a commander and the only reason i was a commander because we talked about the test pilot stuff background i had that background and for a first flight it's the first flight it's a test flight it's a test flight and i was the first one to be able to test flight all space flights are test flight but certainly the first one is significant in that you're trying out new capabilities you're certifying capabilities what you say see on paper what you see in the engineering how you put it all together you're certifying it all works as and goes as as designed so that's the mission we're going to launch we've got a list of test parameters that we're going to do prior to affecting the rendezvous and docking we're going to do the rendezvous and docking tests as we go through that process we're going to have quiescent docked evaluations of the spacecraft thermal implications all this other stuff while it's docked for a period of days we're going to undock we're going to leave the vicinity of the space station we're going to set a test setting up for the d-orbit burn evaluating again the capabilities of the system things that we have designed in the system do they really work as planned as as designed do the d-orbit burn into the atmosphere all the way down to parachutes deploying and landing hopefully on the spot that you intended that's the mission it's a test flight specifically all missions have tests have test portions in them anytime you're flying in space but certainly this one first flight is a full-up test mission and that's that's that's the purpose of the whole thing how many people were up there with you there are two on starliner me and sunita williams sunny williams is that the is that the least amount of people you've gone to space with oh yes and the reason there weren't more the spacecraft can carry more it's a test flight there's no reason to put anyone else at risk in in in this scenario there's no reason for that and so i even lobbied for that they talked about maybe more we had as many as three assigned at some point again it was a long drawn-out process we had years where we had several different individuals scheduled on the mission i was not the first commander scheduled i was a backup i was actually initially selected to back up the first two missions the commander and the pilot the pl on the first mission and the second mission one guy backing up four positions that was my role eventually the first guy the commander of the first mission decided to step aside for many reasons and that's when i went in as the commander of the first mission so originally i was a backup and i hadn't been back you know it's it's kind of the hacker time you go in space you go to space you come back you go to the bottom of the pile and you work your way up until you get back up the top you get assigned again if you stay you know come back and you go so that was me i went to the bottom 15 worked my way up had specific qualifications as test background but i wasn't in the position in the hierarchy of assignments to be assigned to a mission but i was i had the skill there wasn't many people that could back up all those positions but i had that that experience is why they put me in the backup role and eventually that evolved into of course the commander role for the first mission do it a lot of different circumstances what went wrong what went wrong a lot yeah there was i mean when i came back i said it i i didn't see a lot of discussion about those issues from nasa or boeing while i was in space but when i got back every press conference we had we had several on orbit and even getting back i had four four goals in mind when i spoke to the media and the and the nation and the globe and the world i wanted to honor my our administration that's our leadership of our nation because this is a national endeavor i wanted to honor nasa my direct you know the ones that i'm i'm a i'm a slave to and i say that not in a bad sense in a good sense i'm they're part of you know the hierarchy of where i work for i want to honor them i want to honor boeing and i had to honor my integrity and those four things were the driving forces in every time i opened my mouth every time i said whatever i said honor my nation honors nasa honor honor boeing and maintain my integrity so when i got back i was very open i said we had some failures it's obvious we did i mean you don't have this play out the way it play out and say nothing happened we obviously had some failures we obviously didn't have sufficient assessment of some some of the spacecraft capabilities it's obvious i mean i don't know why we wouldn't say that but we we did and like i said earlier we're going to find out why it happened we're going to find out what happened and then we're going to put steps in place to rectify it that's our plot that's our process that's what has to take place or we're not doing it right so what happened coming up day one was amazing we launched we had all this several multiple tests where i'm hands on the controls manual flying space in open space testing out the capabilities and this spacecraft was precise as it can as i can imagine if i were to give an example of what the spacecraft i've flown are like i hope nobody the space shuttle is a cadillac big sturdy go it's super nice the soyuz is like one of those uh buggies that are racing in the desert they're bouncing and that but they're great capability sturdy um not as sleek necessarily looking but so capable and you know if i'm going to go race in the desert and do bouncing and all that i want to be in a soyuz starliner sports car i mean that day one precise manual flying i mean if i wanted to that's you've got a flag on the wall american flag on the wall behind you if i wanted to point a dot at one of those stars i felt like i could do it precise sports car dragon i don't mean this detrimental but as a kid we had a volkswagen uh beetle a bug it was different engines in the back it's air cooled it's not as sleek as some of the other other other uh cars but my goodness you talk about sturdy and reliable did everything you wanted it to wasn't a sports car you don't get into dragon a spacex dragon in control it doesn't have that capability it has some rudimentary type of control but most of it's automated so it is a volkswagen beetle capable sturdy i'd have one in a heartbeat and we did it like i said i was a kid growing up but starliner is a sports car that's day one it was unreal i mean it was we were over the indian ocean one of my tasks was to see if i could point my velocity vector the vector in which we're going in the same direction that i was going in the same direction that i was going in the same direction as the direction we were going could i point it directly in line with how we were orbiting the planet without any other cues on the displays or anything just looking out the window and we were over the indian ocean no moon minimal stars because i'm looking down at the earth so that i can't hardly see the earth i can only see very vague impressions of clouds that are going by so we're traveling 500 miles an hour that's five miles a second right boom second we just went five miles so you're orbiting the planet every 90 minutes at this phase we're over the middle of the indian ocean no ground lights no lights on it it's nighttime no ground lights no moon and i'm trying to orient the spacecraft to see if i can get it exactly in line because you think about it if you lose your computers and our thermal you know our solar array basically how we gain our electrical power is on the back of the space shuttle i mean some back of the starliner and i want to point that at the sun if i've got no system how am i going to ensure that i point it at the sun directly so i can maximize my ability to gain gain power if i got no system what about if i lose communication and i don't have a system how do i point my antennas at the satellites out there so i can regain communication how do i do that this is a part of the test that we were doing part of this was a test that we were doing and we were doing a lot of the tests that we were doing how can I orient myself with my Lick Vector if I'm in a rendezvous scenario where I need to get away away from the from the space station i need to make sure that i'm in line with the velocity vector of which the space station and we are going so i can make sure that i make the correct control inputs to make me leave the station and not run into it so this was we weren't at the station but we're doing these tests in case we get in a scenario to make sure we can do these things i almost nailed it i was a couple of degrees off but with no visual no light no nothing i almost nailed it exactly on line with that velocity vector just looking out the window that's a sports car that's a sports car so capable so capable day two we're coming up we lost a thruster so try to describe this briefly you've got thrusters located orthogonal on the spacecraft top bottom starboard and port and there's seven thrusters at each location they're called dog houses kind of stick out on the sides of the service module so top bottom starboard and port and these thrusters point in different directions so you can control the spacecraft six degrees of freedom pitch roll and y'all that's attitude right translation forward and aft up and down left and right that's translation put them all together three and three six degrees of freedom you're flying six that's what you do in space so we have eight aft firing thrusters two at each location to affect the ability to do some of the attitude control and pitching y'all and also to translate forward right to affect that maneuver we lose an aft firing thruster on the starboard side we had lost some thrusters on the service module in the previous uncrewed test flights we had two there's only supposed to be one but we had two we lost some on both of them but the bad thing about the service module itself you got the crew module on top where the crew is you got the service module on the bottom you do your d-orbit burn use the service module engines to do your d-orbit burn to slow down you go from 25 000 feet per second to about 24 700 so now you start to come back to earth once you do your d-orbit burn you detach that service module and it burns up in the atmosphere the only thing comes back is the the module so you don't have to do that again you don't have to do that again you don't have to do that again you don't get these thrusters back the ones that failed on the first two uncrewed missions we don't get them back we can't inspect them we just know they failed you're down linking as much data as you can you take the data you do your best engineering assessment of what happened because you can't inspect the thruster so we had failures on the previous two missions so we lose this thruster i'm like that's not good but fault tolerance we build multiple layers of failures into our systems our capabilities and we're not going to be able to do that again so we're not so dual fault tolerance what most of our systems are i can lose two things and whatever the system is and still be able to affect whatever is i'm wanting to do for control we build dual fault tolerance i lose this one thruster i still have two fault tolerant i'm still dual fault tolerant so not a big deal not good but not a big deal we start to get closer we get the velocity vector of the space station as it's orbiting the planet we get right out in front of the space station which is part of the rendezvous process and we lose a second thruster now i'm thinking okay now we lost the level of fault tolerance we went from dual fault tolerance to single fault tolerance and it was a bottom thruster still aft firing and i'm thinking oh this isn't good this has happened and you got to realize what's going through my mind i've got thousands of iron simulator i know the spacecraft is good or better than anybody in an integrated fashion not as deep in certain areas as some others but you got to realize what's going through my mind i've got thousands of iron simulator i know the spacecraft is good or better than anybody in an integrated fashion not as deep in certain areas and i'm thinking automation we're under the automated sequences does automation have something to do with this should i take over manual how are we going to get these thrusters back if we need them how are we going to do that all this is going through my mind i'm thinking maybe i should take over manual and the ground calls up take over manual control so i take over manual control we're on the v bar the velocity vector of the space station 260 meters out and now we're zero fault tolerant to maintaining six degree of freedom control this six degree we're zero fault tolerant now and the control even with three thrusters down is not what it was the day prior nowhere near it's sluggish um i'll pause here to tell you what we think where it's happening before i continue when we did our tests after the fact there's a piston basically i'll just try to do this very basic there's a piston that keeps the propellant and the oxidizer from entering the combustion chamber these are hypergolic fuels meaning there's no ignition source these two chemicals meet boom they fire so there's a piston in there and the piston will pull back let some fluid through it gets in the combustion chamber and the fire takes place the thrust occurs and then it closes right there's a teflon seal on the end of that piston that we surmise was deforming due because it got it got overheated so it's it's not the same shape it actually deforms and when it pulls back it's not allowing sufficient fluid to flow into the combustion chamber it's restricting it some so we're getting less thrust reduced thrust in these thrusters okay so we surmise that's what's happening when the thrust level goes below a certain level the computer goes huh you're not operating right let me take you out of the out of the mix it's called fitter fault detection indication response fitter so fitter says nope you're not working you got below that level you're you're out you're done so fitter is what's taking these thrusters out we don't we don't know why i have no idea in the real time i just know that control is not what it was a day prior it's challenging i can't prove this but i would have to say that other thrusters were reduced in their cape in their thrust level because of what they were doing what the control was like but not low enough to fail so we've got eight air firing thrusters i would say they were all reduced thrust just to give an example audibly what we were hearing you could hear they prior that day as the piston would move you know sound doesn't travel in a vacuum it has to have air for sound to travel but it's set travel through the structure of the service module into the air that's in the crew module and we could hear the thrusters fire meaning you could hear that piston move in the day prior and every and up until this point we could hear now what we're hearing is like a machine gun oh man i know that probably looks funny on camera but that's the way it sounded yeah we're hearing machine guns fire which we hadn't heard before so the spacecraft is laboring we're down three thrusters we're zero fault tolerant now to maintaining six off control i'm on the controls manual trying to maintain control and then we lose the fourth thruster we're already in the process with the ground to get the thrusters back to try to work a plan to come back with the thrusters but now we've lost four we're past six off i don't have six off control we went past zero fault tolerant now we lost six degree of freedom control that's not good that's way not good and the control in my hands was very challenging i'm at i'm at six degree of freedom control and i'm at six degree of freedom control and i'm at six degree of freedom control and i'm at six degree of freedom control and i'm at six degree of freedom now of i mentioned orbital mechanics how spacecraft fly in proximity to each other now we're in that that area of what if i if i make this control input what's that going to do with respect to urban mechanics and my ability to maintain position i have to maintain my my distance i have to maintain my attitude because we have sensors on the spacecraft that see the space station cameras infrared sensors radar they're seeing the space station and they're building a digital picture of the spacecraft and they're building a digital picture that's how how you can rendezvous and dock manually because the system builds a visual picture comes in using this this visual picture it's built based on these these sensors and it can and affects the docking manual i mean automatically if i lose that attitude if i lose and can't see the station it's going to dump all that and we can't get it back so now you know this this is i just share what i'm going what's going through my mind sunny and i didn't talk we didn't talk about it i mean we were just i'm completely focused on maintaining control she's working this the the procedures and the systems and we did not discuss it i didn't discuss it with the ground the ground didn't talk to me because i know they're busy and they know we're busy when we operate the spacecraft normal ops the crew supports mission control and the operation of the spacecraft that's the way i view it i'm supporting the ground as we operate the spacecraft when it comes to flying it in this like this scenario the ground is supporting us because we are hands-on we're the ones that gonna make or break and so my focus and again this is what we talked about earlier decades of preparation various scenarios that i've been through preparing me to be able to focus forget about everything that's happening in aviation we call it beware of the snakes in the cockpit they're not physical snakes but in that mindset things happen you cannot let the snakes in the cockpit the issues place overshadow your responsibility in the moment because you know as a commander i'm responsible for the spacecraft my crew and this is of global significance right i mean it's it's international importance and it's a great deal of responsibility and so at that moment my focus is on flying the spacecraft sunny is doing a wonderful job with everything else involved because my focus is fully where it has to be you know aviate navigate communicate that's the order in aviation that we talk about aviate fly navigate figure out where you're going communicate last i'm i'm aviate that's all i'm doing sunny's doing the navigate communicate wonderfully well so focus lost the sixth off control what is this control input going to do with all mechanics can i maintain my position if i lose attitude i'm going to drop this lock we won't be able to dock autonomously you don't want that very challenging what if we lose a fifth thruster it's going through my mind if we lose a fifth thruster will i be able to control i don't know i've never we never even dreamed up this scenario i just know what i feel in my hands and losing a fifth thruster i don't know what's going to happen because this is the mindset the way it's bred into us in aviation and certainly at nasa we're always looking to the next worst failure what if and i'm even thinking what if we lose calm what am i going to do if we lose communication with the ground because we have to dock we're in that window of if we don't dock with the control i feel i'm not sure we can do a deal but burn and get back to earth in this you know at in the in the moment i'm not sure we can these are the thoughts that are going through my mind we have to dock if we don't dock i'm not sure we can this is going to turn out well and then what if we lose calm that comes in my mind to me i'm not sure we can do a deal but burn and get back to earth in this you know at in the in the moment i'm not sure we can these are the thoughts that are going through my mind we have to dock if we don't dock i'm not sure we can this is going to turn out well and then what if we lose calm that comes in my mind too and i decided even in this situation i was in leaving is not an option unless we just unless i'm going to endanger the station so i'm going to fly all the way in to 10 meters that's when we set up our docking mechanism hold there and then come on in as i fly into 10 meters i'm going to evaluate the capability to control the spacecraft can i do it i get to 10 meters if the answer is no i can't do it enough to where i think i can do it enough to where i can do it enough safely doc i'm going to leave because i can't i can't endanger the space station but if i do even if i can't talk to him if i think i can do it i'm going to dock that's really the only option we had even thinking back on it there was not another viable option it was this or or you know like i said in the moment we have many options i know we have many options we have different capabilities we have a backup mode in the spacecraft you don't have a computer you go directly to the thrusters you know inputs go directly to the thrusters to maintain control i know all of this but in a scenario at the moment i'm going to emphasize this i i don't know why we're losing thrusters i just know what i'm feeling in the in my hands and how challenging it is and i'm just trying to think next worst failure what am i going to do and so it was it was in the moment it was it was very trying and what if we lose another one i cannot control it all i don't know i have no idea matter of fact i even asked the flight director vincent mccourt after i finally got on the phone i said hey what would happen if we lost fifth one he's like i don't know yeah anyway that's anyway so anyway this is all going through the mind so the what happened so we get to the point where we've lost four we're lost three three six off control but maintaining the attitude in the position like i just shared and challenging as it was the only way to get these thrusters back is to send test firings to these failed thrusters but to do that i got to be off the controls because i'm putting a control input in to a thruster that fires when this test signal is sent it's gonna it's gonna corrupt the data and they're gonna be able to tell if this thruster fired sufficiently to bring it back in so i've got to maintain my position maintain my attitude urban mechanics all this going through my mind and don't touch the controls it's pretty challenging um wow to go off the controls so they can send this test firing but by god's grace again decades of preparation that i didn't even know existed was that this is looking back hindsight now i can see it i get a little bit of drift a little bit of drift little nothing okay and i'd say hands off sunny would say hands off they sent the signal to the thrusters i came back on too quickly um initially the story goes on um but we in that process very challenging like i said we got two of the four thrusters back i moved in from 260 meters to 200 meters they asked me to move it in i did that sunny says go slow that's the one thing she did say go slow because i'm a get it done now kind of guy she knows that we've been together for years and i'm like i agree so i crept in i didn't add any extra you know closure rate you know range rates what we call it i didn't add any extra closure rate i didn't add any extra closure rate i didn't add any extra closure rate i didn't add any extra i just slowly slowly slowly brought it into 200 meters stopped at 200 meters we lost the fifth thruster we lost the fifth thruster fortunately like i said though we've gotten two of the four original four we lost back so now we're only three thrusters down we're not five thrusters down simultaneously back that we're still zero fault tolerant to six degree of freedom control but we're back to zero fault tolerant same thing maintain your distance maintain your attitude don't touch it not easy get in the position drift is minimal hands off send the test firings and we've eventually got two of those three back so now we're only down one we're back to dual fault tolerant but the spacecraft is still i had told the flight director several times you know this is this is developmental test this is what we're doing this is development of a new capability and that's what you know it's developmental experimental it's experimental test too when you're in the test pilot test pilot jargon developmental experimental test that's what this is and so in that process you understand what's taking place in the moment and how to affect whatever needs to be affected and so we expect to have failures in the process it's brand new capability there were a couple of situations in the simulator where i had to go to manual mode out of automatic mode again these are scenarios we're testing and then i had to go to backup mode because manual wasn't sufficient and after we went through the process of trying to rectify the problem i try to go back into automatic mode i couldn't and then i couldn't also get into manual or backup mode so we perish in the simulator i got no mode i can get into i can't get into i can't get into automatic i can't fly it manually and i can't get into backup mode so we perish and that happened more than once because of that experience in the simulator again you expect to find things as you go through this process i told the flight directors i said if i'm on the controls and i'm able to control and you want me to give it back to automation i might not do it because you support me in flying the spacecraft at this in that scenario like like i was mentioned earlier so when they said okay it's time to give it back all these assessments during test were software hardware related problems i did not feel like this was a software hardware related problem let me back up when we brought those those those thrusters back in we had to cancel the fitter the fault detection indication response we had to cancel it on those thrusters so basically a little bit you're hanging it out they're not going to drop they're not going to be pulled out if they go to no thrust if they get a failed leak whatever they're not coming out they're going to be in the in the mix regardless we had to do that to safely dock anyway so i go back um i knew they were going to ask me to give it back automation when we got down to when we got back dual fault tolerance but still the spacecraft i can still hear the same sound so i know there's thrusters are dead something's going on i don't know at the time what it is but it sounds different still and i'm able to control and it among for a moment i'm like i'm not sure i want to give it back to automation because of like i said all that had transpired in the past but that was the grounds assessment they have more data than i do i did not feel like this was a software issue because of how the failures had happened it wasn't like a blanket a whole area of a system failed it was individuals that went out simultaneously i didn't feel like it was software hardware related software related i didn't know what it was but because of that i said roger that and i gave it back to automation through this whole process like i said we got a doc i'm not sure what our options are if we don't and people have asked me what did you feel like when you found out that you weren't coming home and i'm like well i got to tell you the whole story because one of the other things i think i thought even before we docked this is spacecraft sick I mean, it is. Tell it. Say what it is. If we dock successfully, we probably aren't coming home in this spacecraft. Because I knew how difficult it is to bound a problem like this. You can't go out on a spacewalk and inspect the thrusters. They're not designed and built that way, where we can do that. And so it's going to be an assessment on the ground based on whatever they have capabilities to test to see if we can figure out what happened. And then bound the problem of what happened enough to get us back inside to come home in it. So even before we docked, I'm like, this chances are very slim of us coming back in this spacecraft. So I knew that early. I didn't tell my family that. And so this was June 6th. The decision to come back or not come back on Starliner was late August. It was probably early July that I told my family. I didn't say anything initially. I finally said, you know, the most likely scenario is we're going to be here until 2025. This was July of 2024. So 2025 was six months away. We're probably going to be here till at least 2025. That's what I'm guessing the most likely scenario is. Just because, again, I knew it before we ever docked that chances were slim. Just how difficult to figure these things out are. And that's obviously the way it turned out. How did your family react? I've tried to build resiliency and that type of, you know, mindset. I've tried to build resilience. I've said to my daughters from day one, you know, a couple of things I've told them. Rule number one in our family, since they could speak and understand, you will not disrespect your mother. That's the first. And the second thing is I've tried to teach them to be responsible. And being responsible is understanding that life comes at you and that you have to flex with how life progresses. Our Lord is sovereign. It doesn't reduce our responsibility and preparation, like I've said. But our Lord is sovereign. He's in control. We can be controlled. We can be content in most difficult situations because He is working out His plan and His purpose for His glory and your good, ultimately, if you will believe. And we've got to believe that. That's what God's Word says. And so I'm not saying there weren't tears. There were. My youngest daughter was going to be a senior in high school. I was going to miss it. Her final year of playing volleyball. We always go to the tournaments and travel and do all that. I wasn't going to be there. I knew that. People miss those type of things in this line of work and other lines of work. Those things happen regularly, not just us. But it was unexpected, right? It wasn't in the plan. And so we had to shift, and she did, too. And I'm proud of my daughters for how they flexed. My wife was apprehensive from the beginning. She's, you know, there's a lot of things that happened. Starliner had 30 scheduled launch dates until we finally launched. That has never happened before, dating back to 2018. And we'd lived failures, finding stuff, slips. We'd lived it for years. And so she was skeptical anyway about the whole process. So us not coming back on Starliner, she was absolutely fine with it. Because of that. Because of the history that we'd shared. And that's just a loving wife, right? Concerned about her husband and those, you know, situations of life that we find ourselves in with specific tasks and roles and responsibilities. And so she was like that. Not to say there weren't a tear or two. But because the reality of it sets in. This is really, really happening. But persevering through it all. We track our sleep, fine-tune our macros, and try every biohack under the sun. But the truth is, your peak performance starts at the cellular level. Armora colostrum is nature's original superfood. Colostrum is packed with over 400 bioactive nutrients that fortify your body. And that's why it's called Armora. Because it's a superfood. 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Even if it's super little bitty tiny leak, a leak is a leak, right? Before we return, by the time the spacecraft returns, seven of those eight manifolds had a leak of some sort in it. Seven of the eight? Seven of the eight. They're small, they're manageable, but a leak is a leak, right? There was only one that was leaking prior to launch, and we'd been through so much. There's always, there are always issues. I want to caveat that and put this in the right light. There are always issues, but, and we're always, you know, going through the process of trades. What's assessing, engineering assessment, what the data's telling us, hardware assessments. We're always doing that. That's constant. And so for one system to have a leak and say, let's go ahead and launch with it, once we think we've bounded the problem, like I said earlier, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. It's not uncommon. Would you have launched it? No. No, I would, obviously I didn't, I didn't object. You got to realize the mindset from the beginning, growing up at NASA for, I was in my 24th year at this point. Trust the process, trust the process, trust the process, trust the process. There's a lot of smart, passionate individuals that are involved in this process, and they want what's best without letting external factors invade their decision making. And so as a part of that, you know, when I came as commander, we were originally, we're supposed to launch in May of 2000, 2020, May of 2020 was the launch day. We had a failure on the test flight in December of 2019, where the Starliner did not make it to the space station. And we got it back, but there were significant issues, a timing issue with basically the clock system software. And we didn't make it to the space station. But got it back. Had that not happened, we were launching crew in May, June, you know, five, six months later. That was the plan. I came in as the commander. Late summer of 2020. It was obvious there's going to be delays because of what had happened on OFT, the original test flight and other things were happening. Like I said, the guy, the gentleman that was a commander stepped aside. I came in as commander. And from that point forward, we went into full up test evaluation mode. As the, as I started to build a little bit of a team with engineers, we didn't have those. The SpaceX had a whole crew of engineers. They trained out at Hawthorne, California. Whole army of people would go out there. We had nothing. We had 20% of a couple of engineers and I went and asked for them. It was not easy. I finally got a couple. We built a team and I couldn't get, I couldn't get tests because we were seeing things in similar. I didn't, I didn't understand. And I wanted to test it in the, you have a simulator. Simulator does what you tell it, right? Just to be, just for basic level of understanding. You do this simulator and it does it. If you have an iron bird, meaning you have the real avionics boxes, the real wiring, the real cockpit, all connected together, integrated together. That's where you really test your, in your iron bird, everything that you can on the ground, then you can't have an iron bird connected thrusters. And actually fire a thruster. You can't do that on the ground, but you can have an emulator that emulates the firing of the thrusters connected in the system and, and evaluate it. So we wanted to get in the avionics software integration laboratory, ASIL and do some testing, but we couldn't, it was hard to get, I won't go into all the, all the nitty gritty details when we finally did get in there. And it was, it was a struggle initially when we finally did it and get, get in there, we found several lethal failure modes in the software again. This is part of the developmental, experimental process, but realize we were launching in May of 2020. If that OFT had gone well, we were launching crew and the thing with any, any aircraft, spacecraft, you want to find everything that is a problem before you go. And what you don't find, you hope your preparation has got you in a place where you can handle it. Well, we found multiple lethal failure modes in the software after the. By pushing for tests and my wife knows all this, right? That's why the question earlier, she was fine with it because we originally supposed to launch already. And I come in as a commander, push for this stuff. And the story is long, but I don't need to go into all those details. But fortunately this process, the most mineral test, we found a lot of stuff, but we don't have any, we don't have, it's a long, long answer to your question. As a crew, we don't have, we don't have insight into hardware. Yeah. and thrusters. you know those evaluations for those capabilities are outside of our purview and we basically trust the process right trust the process trust the process people that are taking care of all that you just got to trust that those are sufficient whatever thing because we don't have purview over that we found a lot in what we have purview over thankfully but that other stuff we just trust you got it that's all we can that's what this business is about trust is imperative absolutely has to be there in this business and uh and that's where we were in trusting i can guess what your next question is then what happened i i said earlier that we we obviously had some we had some we had some shortcomings right and we had some shortcomings in our evaluation our assessment our testing that we didn't catch some things we should have again those are failures that we got to fix that's the what happened the why it happened why did we not test them those are questions that that if they're not already in process of being answered they have to be answered and i know that uh you and probably others are aware that uh nasa has changed its stance on the classification of the mission you're aware of that i'm not aware of that yeah they uh initially they called it a low high visibility close call and um i was vehemently against it how can this be and i'm going to share this thought i mean this is this is part of the process it's not right um the this classification is based on the nasa procedural requirements document npr and in the npr it talks about controllability of the spacecraft as part of the assessment of is it a close high visibility close call or is it a type a mishap mishap classification gives a completely different avenue of of assessment and they gave it a and it was it was a long time before they gave it this high visibility close call and from the beginning i was like this is a mishap of course it's a mishap and they gave it this and i'm like if if if the npr if the npr says it has to do with controllability of the spacecraft who controlled the spacecraft that would be me don't you think you'd you'd ask the guy that was controlling the spacecraft about the controllability of the spacecraft if you're trying to make an assessment of classification you'd talk to that guy right wouldn't you i would yeah this is this is part of the sadness of processes and culture and all that that they didn't wow and i even voiced that up the chain i'm like how do you how do you make that happen i'm like how do you make that happen this call without talking to me i mean i'm not that i'm special but i'm the guy that was on the controls how do you make that assessment um what was the answer it was the wrong answer because that's what's happened now they've changed it it is now a type a mishap in line with the other mishaps we've endured where we lost life challenger in columbia it's the same classification and it should have been from the beginning and this is part of what administrator isaacman was saying the other day in his announcement about this that we this business is built on trust what i was saying earlier and we cannot have situations occur where our trust is not at the the forefront of one of our concerns and if we're making decisions where we're losing trust and and sean this is you know it's a long story i'm not going to go into it here but um that's just one of the points that that it just it just it just can't happen when you when you have an npr based on controllability and you're saying well we lost six off control but we got it back but you don't talk to the guy that's on the controls to tell you about how difficult it was to control or if it was difficult yeah we can't have that and i and i and i hate to say that but it's true um but we're on the right path now we weren't i voiced it and but now we are now we are and that led to nine and a half months of extra time and space 286 days stranded you packed for eight we did i wore the same shirt for two months what do you i mean it was okay i mean so many questions i mean you pack for eight you're there for 286 days what do you even eat you know the lord's provision i'm telling you it's everywhere in the story i keep saying it but it's true i got up there there were four and a half bags of food that had been i say trashed set aside crews before us didn't want it so they put the food in these bags and eventually they will go into cargo air you know spacecraft that don't return to earth they burn up in the atmosphere it's just put away as trash because we got new food right so these bags of food were there they had me parse it out into the different uh categories you know meats vegetables whatever and that's really basically what i ate for the first four months there's always a surplus we planned for four months contingency that was there but we also had this extra food that wasn't accounted for and that's basically what i ate so you ate trash for four months no i like ship food on aircraft care i'm probably one of the rare people that did so i like ship food so no i thought it was great i was fine with it because you know i don't have a very discerning palate i'll eat anything so it was perfect for me timing was perfect for me so that's that's basically i mean that's not all i ate but that's i i just i had a bag a mesh bag and i'd just go every couple of days and i'd go to that area where that food was stored and i'd just fill up my mesh bag and stick it in a location that's what i ate on that week is there ever a point where you you thought you're gonna die up there uh no no no no i 286 days yeah no you gotta realize i might not go back to earth yeah we know that there's a plan we're working a plan to get us back we didn't know what it would be initially but you know when we first got there when we first docked and we did our hugs and in front of the camera and you know all that as soon as the cameras went off i went we had ku band coverage suitable and i called the flight director vincent lacorte i said vincent what do we do in this emergency situation we trained for you got to leave space station now it's never happened but in a scenario where there's debris coming at the space station we can't maneuver the station you got to leave maybe you have a depression of depressurization event you can't you can't fix it you got to leave maybe you have a depression of depressurization event you have a fire and you can't access most of the key parts of station you got to leave i said what do we do in those situations in a situation we run into this where we have to leave i gotta we had a sick spacecraft here what do we do he said butch it's never happened i'm like yeah i know that the chances of it happening are slim but if it does starliner's your option that's the option you got because to go and get there's not enough room in a soyuz we had a soyuz there there's room in a dragon there's excess room in a dragon but there's no seats there's no environmental control eclipsed to support where i could plug in my suit and get air none of that so starliner was our best option and for the first several months that was our only option that was our safe haven and we even had the scenario where a satellite broke up and they were afraid debris was going to come and we woke us up in the middle of the night we went into our into our spacecraft you know the soyuz the dragon and our and our starliner closed the hatches waiting to see if we got to go so we're actually in that scenario um it wasn't optimal obviously the spacecraft we were still didn't know what the what had caused the problem um and would it be sufficient but that's all you got that's all you got and that's the way we were for several months eventually we built seats we built pallets in the dragon that was there um the ground spacex great engineering with what we had on board and we built seats we built pallets in the dragon that was there um the ground spacex great engineering with what we had on board and we built seats we built seats for for us you built seats we built seats in the bottom seats for for us you built seats we built seats in the bottom of the dragon yeah and that was then of the dragon yeah and that was then of the dragon yeah and that was then when we had that sufficiently done when we had that sufficiently done when we had that sufficiently done that became our safe haven now we didn't that became our safe haven now we didn't that became our safe haven now we didn't have the ability to plug in the eclipses have the ability to plug in the eclipses have the ability to plug in the eclipses and all and all and all and i don't i mean sure if when we had and i don't i mean sure if when we had and i don't i mean sure if when we had the ability to plug into communication i the ability to plug into communication i the ability to plug into communication i stuff and or he did too but as a as a stuff and or he did too but as a as a stuff and or he did too but as a as a side job he did a lot of extra work on side job he did a lot of extra work on side job he did a lot of extra work on his own to get these seats built for us his own to get these seats built for us his own to get these seats built for us so we would have so we would have so we would have a viable way to return other than a viable way to return other than a viable way to return other than starliner starliner starliner yeah holy shit yeah holy shit yeah holy shit yeah yeah yeah so you had to build your seats we built so you had to build your seats we built so you had to build your seats we built them home we sure did them home we sure did them home we sure did and it was it was and it was it was and it was it was a great feat of engineering this type of a great feat of engineering this type of a great feat of engineering this type of stuff happens and again the world stuff happens and again the world stuff happens and again the world doesn't know that so are these all it doesn't know that so are these all it doesn't know that so are these all it these are there's these are there's these are there's essentially there's three aircraft essentially there's three aircraft essentially there's three aircraft yeah yeah yeah connected to the space station what is connected to the space station what is connected to the space station what is the space station like the space station like the space station like do you get in there Think about five or six buses connected end-to-end as far as volume. The Russian segment's a little smaller. I think the outside diameter is 14 feet of the volumes, the lab, the Node 2, Node 1, Columbus, Japanese Experimental Module. I think it's 14 feet. And, of course, inside that we've got racks, which brings it smaller, makes it square instead of round on the outside. And there's a lot of volume, a lot of volume. And then, of course, the spacecraft coming and going, there's only so many docking points. In the U.S. segment right now, we have two. We have the forward and the zenith, the top one. The Dragon was on the top one. We were on the forward. And, of course, the Russian segment docked to the Russian, the Soyuz docked to the Russian segment. And so it's back there. And so, yeah, three spacecraft. It's pretty amazing. And also then we have a cargo spacecraft. The Cygnus is attached below Node 1. Yeah, it's pretty amazing when you think about all that's taking place in low-Earth orbit with the space station and the choreography and the orchestration of all these spacecraft coming and going. It's pretty amazing. It's pretty amazing. It's very amazing. Yeah. What kind of effects does it have on your body, Bean? When I launched in 2014 on the Soyuz, up for five and a half months, and came back on the Soyuz, we touched down and. The desert of Kazakhstan in permafrost. It was March of 2015. And it was hard. The Soyuz has what they call soft landing thrusters. Basically, it's like getting hit in the back with a sledgehammer as they fire. They fire about 10 feet from the ground, and then you hit the ground. So it's boom, boom. And it was the hardest thing I've ever felt. I'm laying in a bucket, basically, that's molded like my body. Because, you know, that's the seat liner that we launched with. It was molded to my body, and I didn't get knocked out of breath. I was pretty surprised, because it was that hard. I didn't feel any pain. Everything was great. It was just a very, very hard landing. Within a week, there was something in my right side of my back that I felt. It's never gone away. Don't know what it is. They've MRI'd it. They've X-rayed it. I have a constant, forever pain, a thorn in my side, if you will, since 2015. When I was in space this last time, it was gone. You get no pressure on your system, zero gravity, and all your joint aches and pains are gone. You haven't noticed, but I don't turn my head to the right. Pulling G's for 40 years, almost. My neck is just not what it used to be. So it's hard for me to turn to the right. Not as bad to the left, but I can't turn to the right hardly. No pain. No pain. No pain in space. I got back. We splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. Gulf of America. And within 10 minutes, before they'd even gotten us to the boat, my neck had already started hurting. Damn. And that pain was back. And now, so what does it do to your body is your question. I don't know what it is, but that pain is there. And some days it takes my breath. I don't know what it is. So that's one of the leftovers from space flight. Is it worth it? Absolutely. I don't know. Neurovestibular, your balance. You're not stimulated by gravity. All of a sudden, you are. It takes a little while to come back. That's why you kind of get, you know, I've never gotten sick. Going to it is seamless for me. No issue at all. Some people get space sickness, the transition from gravity to nothing. Because the fluids, as we sit here, our fluids or gravity pulls it to our lower extremities. In zero gravity, fluids just go all over. You'll see. Look at my face. My face is puffy the whole time. I'm on orbit because the fluid is shifting into my head. A lot of people, I've just learned this, have a vein that helps drain fluid. Some people, you can't tell it. But some people's veins, maybe it's a little smaller. It doesn't drain the fluid. And so my face is always puffy. You come back to space, from space, excuse me, come back from space. Now the gravity is pulling you. Neurovestibular, your balance, your body, your structure is not used to holding up your structure. You know, we've got muscle. We work out two and a half hours a day. I work out every day. Even the day. The day I did a spacewalk, I worked out. I got up early and worked out. You've got to keep your muscles from atrophying. You've got to keep the calcium from decalcifying. You've got to do all of that. And every single day, you've got to do it. And it feels good to put some stress on your body. But coming back, your little muscles, we can't work out. Your body all of a sudden has to hold up your structure. And those little muscles go, oh, my goodness. And oh, my. When I came back the last time, we didn't have any massages or anything. But now we do. Since then, some of us said, hey, we've got to do this. The Russians always have. They always give massages every other day to help those muscles get back in tone. And so now we do. And it's great, except this one, whatever this issue is with me, I guess it's going to be with me. It's just me now. But it started with the Soyuz mission. Again, I don't think it was the impact. It just was my body in space and then transition to gravity. It just something happened and not sure. What's your daily life like for 286 days? Busy. Is it? Yeah. I mean. What are you working on? Stuff breaks. I mean, things break in your house. Other than building a seat. Yeah. Stuff breaks. Potty ops. You know, you got to. There's life issues on certain aspects of various components throughout the space station have to be changed out. Things break. You got to fix it. Science. We're doing science every day. 200 and something different science, stem cell research, DNA sequencing. Capillary flow. I mean, just the list goes on and on. You know, we, you know, we give ourselves, take our own blood and get trained to do all that. So phlebotomy, I do it myself, take my own blood and successed, we freeze it. We send it down on the cargo spacecraft that returns. There's a, there's a space dragon that returns in the atmosphere or we take it down with us. Um, and it's assessed for various, a number of different things, you know, peeing in a bottle, freezing your pee. And, and that's all, I mean, it's just, there's all kinds of that and that's constantly going on. Just every, every element of life, every element of life, new environment and the space station, think of it, your house, things break, you got to fix it. And because it's the space station and it's not because it's a space station, but because of the environment, things do break more so than what you would think they would. And we're always launching spare parts to have them there just in case when the next thing breaks, matter of fact, we took a pump for the potty UPA and had, uh, the, the structure. The structure of one was good and the pump of another was good. So we took it, the pump out of one and put it in the structure of the other called it the Franken pump because we put two and made one out of it. And it lasted for a couple of months, which was great until they launched another one. Those types of things are ongoing. Always, always doing those types of things. It's a, it's a significant engineering marvel. It truly is. How are you maintaining contact with your family? Actually, very easily, very easily now. Uh, I launched in the shuttle way back when minimal to nothing. The last time I launched on the Soyuz 2014, 2015, when we had the right coverage, I could make a phone call through my computer. Um, and they would set up video calls once a week, holidays. Now with capabilities, I can do a video call myself. I could call you video from space. Starlink. Uh, I don't know if we're using Starlink or not, but you know, into the future. I can go to the iPad, make a video call through whatever satellite system we're using and right there, almost feels like it's real time. I mean, I tied into my church every Sunday. I read that. Yeah. I'm tying into my church and I, you know, I I've learned over the course of this life, if I want to live worthy, I mean, what's my goal. What's my goal in life? Um, in the flesh, I want to live worthy of my Lord, what he's called me to. If I'm going to do that, I have to have continual influx of, of the truth of his word. And I have to have the fellowship of the local body of the church. I need it. And I've learned that if I want to be, if I want to be the man that I, that the Lord would have me be. And that's what people say. Hey, what, what can I pray for you? And I'm like, well, pray that I would be the man that I say I am, even when nobody's watching, because that's the true integrity of a man, right? It is. I mean, if, if I'm going to be a different person when nobody's watching, that's not integrity. And I want to be, I want to honor my Lord walk worthy. And that means when nobody's watching either. And so that's something that's paramount for me personally. And I can't do that alone. I need the influx of my local, my church. And it was wonderful. I told you earlier that I was in the corner of a module. They didn't have a place for me to stay. And I just took up residence in the corner of one of the modules out in the open. And I tied to my church. I'd sing with them. And I never asked what everybody thought of that, but not that you can hear. There's a lot of sound on space station, ambient noise. But I'd sing. I'd sing with them, worship with them. Felt a part as much as you can when you're not physically there. And it was vital. I loved it. Loved it. Still do. Celebrated Christmas up there. Did. It was great. The crew, you do what you can. You know, we sticky, you try to get a substance, put on a pan, maybe peanut butter, stick a muffin on it, make some type of frosting. And we made cakes and did all that kind of stuff, you know, using sticky type of food so it won't float away. And we did all kinds of that kind of thing. Birthday cakes, all of that, celebrated it all. all you know we they have space stations been up there 20 25 years right so we've got different things that have been launched over the years santa hats and and reindeer noses and those type of things we made a we made a reindeer we had a bull you know we got big old ml ml leave for big huge bags full of food and a smaller bag full of food and we developed a way to tie the smaller bag make a head actually put some clips on it made it look like horns drew a face and and we wrote it attach it to bungees over one of the kind of low places and we wrote it like a bucking bronco the bucking bucking bronco deer christmas time put it you know a santa hat on it and everything you know that kind of stuff you got to do that stuff what about i mean i know i keep bringing up your juice does your family think you're coming home they understand that the process is there that we're we're working on that you got to realize in september what was the plan yeah well there was no plan initially right because this wasn't expected but the plan eventually was developed there was a crew launching in september to relieve the crew that was already there not us but the crew that was already there the other spacex crew they pulled two of those crew members off and they launched it with only two to give us seats to come back so it launched in september and when it launched we knew we were going to be six as much the normal increment expedition time time frame that the next one would launch and when they got there and we did a handover then we'd come back so that was the plan and what changed in the plan is that there were some issues with the dragon spacecraft there was two of them in process and there were some issues with them and the timing of when they would get those fixed and with the other cargo spacecraft coming and going which clobbers up one of these docking spaceships and we're going to be able to get those back we're going to be able to get the docking mechanisms if there's a cargo spacecraft there you can't dock anything else to it the timing of all that one of the most likely scenarios is we'd be back about the june time frame but the administration got involved and what they wound up doing is swapping the two spacecraft that they were working on and the one that they were working on they did some extra man hours on it got it rectified whatever the issue was that's the one that launched in march we usually have a week handover we took it down to a day did a day handover real quick with that that crew and that's when we came back so the most likely scenario would had us there about a year because of how everything you know these spacecraft issues but when the administration got involved they rectified that swapped the spacecraft and they came and got us well they came and relieved us they didn't get us we already had our spacecraft there i think the misnomer that most people well people talk to me that they launched and came and got you well they did but they launched in september and it was a normal normal flow of entire mission normal six-month mission that was going to be extended because of these issues i just mentioned that wound up coming back right about on time in march because the administration did get involved and so how did you wind up getting home on that dragon the dragon came up in september we climbed aboard it's at our final farewells and undocked 17 hours later we did our d-orbit burn how was i mean what did it feel like to undock oh what'd it feel like if you're going to get stranded stuck whatever the term is did we feel stranded stuck not necessarily but were we as many definitions that we were ultimately i've said it several times sean our lord's in control he's the one who had us you don't sound like you were actually that stressed why would i get stressed because you're stuck in space for an extra nine and a half months you know i'll tell you this sean i've i've learned i'm not going to fret over things that i can't control that is not beneficial to me or anybody around me if i'm going to sit there and go oh my goodness that's there's no benefit to that that's not i don't think that's you know walking worthy like i said earlier so i'm not going to do that i'm going to take it do what i can to affect what i can i might get frustrated over some of the processes that are going going in place or maybe some of the reasons why we got there but as far as fretting over something i can't control no way i'm not doing that i said that long before we ever this situation ever happened i mean i got you ever got extended on a deployment yeah did you fret over it no you maybe maybe initially but i can't change it i can't do anything about it and therefore i'm not going to fret over it i'm not going to put myself through that i'm not going to fret over it in front of my family and put them through that because you know as a leader you know my number one god-given responsibility in the flesh is as a husband to my wife my number two god-given responsibility in the flesh is as a father to my daughters and i'm you know i'm i think the word is clear that i'm i'm called to protect them to provide for them and to pastor them help them in the truth of god's word and i take that responsibility greater and i know that if i'm gonna fret they're gonna fret and there's no reason for me to put me through that and put them through that as the leader of my family so no fretting no i wasn't fretting i was i was i was concerned about some of the things that were taking place as far as why we got there and all of that but as far as being there i couldn't change it i'm not gonna fret over it i'm gonna press forward and do what what i'm called to do my government has done so much for me for so long to do what i can for it these days well however many it is uh in this situation that i'm in and that's really truly the mindset damn i mean there's there's no benefit any other way i don't think god's glorified in that you know what does it say matthew says worry not you know philippians four six and seven be anxious for nothing but everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your request be made known unto god and the peace of god which passes all will keep your hearts and minds in christ jesus and if you look at the details of what that passage is that is exactly what happened it's not to say that i wasn't concerned about things but i go to him in prayer he takes over the peace of god in christ jesus it is true the word is true i've experienced it not just that but many times in this life that's why i'm grateful to him he you know he's the one that gave me life 2327 a man cannot receive even one thing unless it's given to him from heaven above that i'm breathing air right now given by my lord that i can do that and my whole existence is wrapped around the truth that my god is in control and people say you know there was a little bit of notoriety from the faith standpoint and i didn't orchestrate it i don't proselyte from my position as an astronaut i never did that i didn't do that i didn't do that i didn't do that i only answered questions and there was one reporter about midway through maybe before midway through in a in a in a press conference you know we're just looking into a camera we're not we're we don't see anybody but there's reporters across the nation they throw up questions this one guy says i don't know who it was captain wilmore what is your number one biggest takeaway from all this and i can't separate who i am from what i'm doing i said well that's easy i am content my lord is working out his plan and his purpose for his glory and ultimately my good if i believe and that breeds contentment and what i was thinking that i didn't say that i'll share with you now i mean go to corinthians and paul talks about i was whipped five times 40 lashes minus one 39 lashes five times i was beaten with a rod three times i was stoned and left for dead i was shipwrecked and in the sea a day and a night and then you go to philippians and he says i understand how to be a how to abound and how to be abased how to be full and how to be not and he says i am content and the reason he's content and all of that he's not like give me another lash that's not that's not what that means contentment he's content in the situation because he knows he's right exactly where the lord would have him be he's attempting to walk worthy with his lord with his god and that breeds contentment that breeds contentment that passes all understanding is that passage i just quoted says and it's true it passes all understanding and and i think i said it earlier i'll say it again you know this book we can talk about the book but that's the reason i published the book i didn't write the book to publish it i wrote the book for my daughters my wife and i had them when we were in our 40s we lived a life i wanted to give them a record of their our lives before they were born i'd written some chapters but as all this played out publishers contact me while i was still in space through my brother through my church all kinds of different things like gosh and i'd already published one other book with a guy that's starting a publishing company and i'm like i'm gonna go with him if we're gonna if i want to publish i wrote it for my daughters but i published it because of two words if i could bring in two words encouragement and perspective if if events in this life could be an encouragement to people that this life is about preparation reparation, regardless of what you're doing, and situations that don't go according to plan, if you're seeking to be worthy, walk worthy of the Lord, of our Lord and Savior, who went to the cross and incurred the wrath of God for your sin, if that's what you're seeking in whatever situation you're in, be encouraged that you can be content. So that's dealing with the now. And to point people to what really matters. And that's the eternal, everlasting perspective that only comes through Jesus Christ, our Lord. And that's why the book is sitting here on the shelf in a published format, to share that message. The Lord's given me this opportunity. I wouldn't have published it otherwise. It wasn't written for that purpose. But ultimately, it became that purpose for this opportunity to share Him, be encouraged in your life. Things aren't going to go right. You're not going to be able to do what you want to do. You're not going to be able to go right. Continue to prepare. Give Him the glory and the good and the bad and press forward for His glory. Share the blessed truth of Jesus Christ as Lord whenever you get the opportunity. And that is what the Lord has made on me to be passionate about. And I'm not different from any true believer. We all feel the same way because He indwells us and He transforms us into His image. But we also have responsibility. That's part of it. Man, I almost feel like that's the perfect way to end this. That is a good way to end this. So I'll ask you one more question. Sure. It's very obvious how much your daughters and your wife mean to you. Sure. And so do you have any closing remarks that aren't in the book that you want them to know? Oh, my. I hope they already know. I've heard so many people say, my dad, he just wasn't an affectionate guy. He wouldn't tell me. He really didn't say he loved me. I've tried to be the opposite. I want them to know how much they mean to me. They are a gift from my Lord to my wife and I. They're not ours, but He's given us responsibility over them. And to know that regardless of what happens, your daddy loves you. And regardless of what happens, you know, this right here, that's my wedding ring. It's not round anymore. This wedding ring has saved my finger many times over the years. And it's got the dents to show it in various scenarios. But that's my, that's my most prized possession. Because that's representative of my union that the Lord gave me the gift of my wife. And she's not perfect, bless her heart. And she would say the same thing. Bless my heart. But together, trying to glorify Him in this life that, you know, James says it's but a vapor. It's here and it's gone. And, but what this life does, it sets the tone for all eternity. And I'll, I'll, let me give you this. Let me give you a one sentence summary of the Bible. The whole Bible summarized in one sentence. Before the foundation of the world, God, the Father, determined to present God, the Son, with a redeemed humanity that would honor, worship, and glorify Him for all eternity. And if you believe and your sins are forgiven, you have repented and turned from sin, and you believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, and He incurred the wrath of God for your sin, you have met the responsibility for why you were created. That's to honor, worship, and glorify Him forever. And it doesn't start after we die. It starts at the moment that He transforms us, and He forgives us, and He saves us. That's what a loving Father does. And I can never be loving like my God is loving. But for my family, in answer to your question, I can incorporate what this word tells me that my responsibilities are. Provide, protect, and pastor my family. And I would hope I wouldn't have to say anything more that they would know that. But I thank you for the opportunity to say that. I say it anyway. You're welcome. Because they are, my daughters are the legacy we'll leave behind. That's really it. And that's, in the big scheme of things, life and existence and eternity, glorify my Lord. And what do I leave behind? A lasting, eternal legacy in my daughters. If I were to invent something amazing, that's wonderful. It's great. I'm grateful for the opportunity. The Lord gave me a mind to invent something many people have. That's wonderful. But nothing is everlasting except for Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Paying the price for our sin. And my daughters know that. Praise Him for it. Man, I love that. Amen. Butch. Brother. It was an honor. Honor to interview you. Honor is mine. Thank you. Thank you. God bless. God bless you, brother. No matter where you're watching the show, this is the John Ryan Show from. If you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.