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

Foreign.

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. We've been. The whole team's been looking forward to this one.

Honored to be here.

464 days in space.

Yes, sir. Wasn't planned to be that long, but here we are. Yes, sir. Indeed.

Damn. Yeah, Damn.

You know, Sean, it's. It's a privilege to serve your nation. You know that in whatever capacity it is and, 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, 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, that's really where, you know, to start 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. Or where do you like flying better? You like flying on Earth, I guess you would say on Earth, maybe not.

Great question.

So, within the atmosphere or outside, 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 that 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 pointing end of the spear on the aircraft carrier and all that's associated with that day to day. My personal, Personal level of job satisfaction is higher. When I was a fleet aviator. Not to say that's. Not to say anything negative about NASA. That doesn't. 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 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 do my part. What I had 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, 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 a patriot, 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 Lewis, Woody Lewis 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 and Astronauts Hope through the Unexpected. A husband, a father, and most importantly, a Christian.

Amen.

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 don't, I, I, I hate being micromanaged. You've, 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 the job, you get somebody else. I think we live in an age where, where we don't do those type of things. It's not, it's not to say bad on you. It's to say, this is not where you're, 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, 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.

You know, this whole thing about, you know, starliner. My focus from day one was mission, mission, mission, mission. A lot of, 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.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Everybody gets a gift. This probably would have come a lot more handy in those 464 days.

But I love the gummy bears.

How to late than never, right?

Fantastic. So fantastic. Can I give you a gift? Yeah. Let me give you a couple of things. So these are all have the same kind of denominator. This fly Navy.

Oh, man, that's cool.

I flew it in space. I worked really. I have washed. Has been washed. So it was with me on this last mission. I want you to have that.

Thank you, sir.

This, I mean, you got to have Naval aviator 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 it 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 space flight. So want to give you that. And this one.

Awesome.

Well, this one, this next one is. Is fairly special. Actually. Nothing. Next one. This one's kind of not as special. Fluent space patch from starliner. I signed it on the back. This one, however, I think is the special one that I want you to have because of what you know, your background and your experience. There are only a handful of items. Flu and space, all of those fluid 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. Touch the vacuum of space. And this is the American flag that I wore on my left shoulder on my last spacewalk just over a year ago. 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. This is special. It's our nation, right?

It's our American flag. It's our nation's flag. It represents resiliency over the course of decades and. And it means one of the most meaningful items in the flesh. I think that 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 is something that I cherish 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 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 so for you, sir, to have that, sir.

Man, that is. That's getting framed. That's getting framed.

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. Butchie Butcher. That's awesome.

Thank you.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

Very cool.

Yeah, this is like.

This is.

Yeah, that's. 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. Well, 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. Something that everybody kind of wonders is what you guys, what you guys are carrying up there. And so 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 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 pyrotechnics that fire, that take 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, that could be a very bad day. 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 spacesuit 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 dollars.

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 y, they're not cheap. And they got to 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 2 million. What? It's got to work every time. Of course, there's only a few of these, right? You don't, you don't make hundreds of these drills. There's only like 10 or even. They're not even that many on space station.

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 your system just like if you were diving in the ocean. You have to be aware that possibility of bands 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 and 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, woo hoo, success. But there are thousands of individuals passionate about human spaceflight, 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 spaceflight so wonderful. Because seemingly very few things happen where the public notices and that's the way 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.

That'd be great. I mean size, it's gotta be, would

you say three to $5 million?

Yeah, five to $7 million.

Five to $7 million.

Yeah.

So it's gotta be fitted to you, right?

Well, we have ways to change the length of the legs, length of the arms that we. So where they're not one size fits all, 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. T38. Yeah, we get to keep those, but that's about the extent. Not the helmet? No.

Oh, man.

Now my flight, my flight helmet, you know, my flight and I fly the T38 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 and you get a new one. But those helmets now those are, you know, I'm told the gold visor that comes down, it helps to protect from ultraviolet radiation. I'm told it has literal gold, you know, flakes in it. So they're not going to give. There's no telling what that, that one helmet costs. Probably several hundred thousand dollars, I'm guessing.

Can you go to the bathroom in those things? I'm just curious.

That's a great question.

Yeah, I'm one of those people. I gotta pee every time I get nervous. So wait. Waiting on a helicopter to go on an op. I gotta pee like 20 fucking times.

Yeah, so, so that's you wear your diaper. Yeah, right up, just 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 into the spacecraft itself, 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 chance to take the spacesuit off anyway. So I might as well go in dry and prepare. Yeah, that's part of it. Diapers, 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. So I put bubs 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 you're awake and not pissed off at everybody. And if butter isn't your thing, relax. They've got a vegan version, too. MCT oil gives your brain quick fuel, supports digestion and gut health, helps curb cravings, and keeps your energy steady all day. I dump it in my tea with my collagen, stir it around, and I'm set. I trust Bubs because they don't cut corners. Their products meet serious quality standards.

In the MCT creamer is NSF certified for sport, which means it's clean, tested, and not sketchy. And here's the part that I love the most. Bubs was founded in honor of Navy Seal Glenn Bubb Dougherty. 10% of all profits go to support veterans as they transition back to civilian life. The stuff we talk about all the time on the show. So when you buy bubs, you're also supporting the guests that have been on this show. If you want to upgrade your morning routine, then you need to go to Bubsnaturals.com SRS and use code Sean for 20% off your order. Again, that's Bubsnaturals.com SARS and use code Sean for 20% OFF your order. 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 look like? And what are you realistically preparing for during those scenarios?

You're realistic preparing to come down in cold weather. You're really realistically preparing to come down in water, to come down in an area where it's heat, because you figure, you know, the space station, if I can explain this clearly, the space station is orbiting on an inclination from the equator at 51.6 degrees. So it's not orbiting around the equator. It's orbiting to plus 51 to minus 51.6 degrees as the Earth spins underneath it. And the reason for that is you can't launch into a lower orbit, lower than your latitude. And the Russian launch site, which goes to space station, is just below 51.6. We fly to 51.6 because we don't want to overfly China. So the orbit is at 51.6 degrees going around, right? So you see a large portion of the, of the planet as you're. As you're orbiting the planet because you're going plus or minus 51.6 degrees. Say the question real quick again to make sure I answer the right question. That was just.

What are you, what are you realistically preparing for during those.

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 could. You don't know where you're coming down. You just got to burn. You got to burn now and 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 an example for Soyuz, we do cold weather survival because you could come down anywhere. But you on launch, during launch, you have a failure, you abort. You could come down on the mountain in high altitude. So you got to be prepared for that. And so we trained for that. You know, learning 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 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, bigger the capsule, the bigger the rocket has to be to launch it. More propellant, all of that. So the soy, the Russians designed it well. Very small descent module with an extra habitation 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 spacesuit, 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 got to know in all those scenarios. Yeah.

Did you bring anything with you to remind you of your family and anything like that? Any, any. I'm just curious, what did you bring

with what I brought with me over the course of the three missions I flew? You know. You know, Sean, I try to do things with intent and things that are, you know, I don't watch typically watch movies in space unless I'm working out and something to pass the time when I'm working on the treadmill. The things I try to do off the planet, 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, other issues of life, being responsible, being good, patriotic, good Americans, part of what I try to train them for. And as a part of that, a symbol of their dad that I wanted them to have as 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's 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 size wings. Again, they don't know they're getting these until they graduate college, until this. And so a pair of those gold flume 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 a 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. Hurricane came through, I'd get a new roof and. 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. And it. So this, these wings represent what I do, but this is as much my wife involved as them. And so this is a moment or an emblem of their dad. And their mom service to the country that I hope they will cherish.

And that's. So that's what I took with me for, for my family. Did I take a couple of pictures? Sure, yeah. But that's the really, the, the meaningful thing.

That is really cool. That is really cool. And so what, 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 G wad when that was going on?

Yeah, they would.

Do you guys talk about that?

Or the powers that be would try to get us immediately. This is, of course, national significance. This would be up 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 to all the geopolitical implications and all that. As you, as you're aware.

Yeah, there's historical documentation that some Soviet cosmonauts carried firearms in their post landing survival kit after off course landings in remote areas. Modern astronaut missions today do. Do crews carry any form of weapons or defensive tools in their survival kits or is 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. That was aliens 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, 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. So. 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. Told him you were coming on. He wanted me to present you with one of these.

Oh my.

So maybe the next time we go up.

Yeah, if I go up, I will put this on the docket. That's, that's.

It kind of looks like a space gun. 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.

Amazing.

Maybe if it quits raining and we got time, we can break that damn thing in before you leave.

But 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, and, and do 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. 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. 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 gotta want it. Whatever it is in life that you're striving to do, you gotta want it. Because it's not gonna be easy. Life is tough. And I remember my coach Sims, my ninth grade position coach, we're out there in the back practicing football. They had built a new, new junior high.

And when they built Interstate 40, they taken a lot of the topsoil from the area as they built the interstate. And so where we practice 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 gotta want it, you gotta 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. Me and my Marine Corps grill instructor, get this. Gunnery Sergeant Tybertius Gerhardt, United States Marine Corps. What a name for drill instructor. I mean, how fortunate was I to have a drill instructor with that name? And, you know, his. 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 type 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, major in electrical engineering, played football at the school. And those are, that was not easy as well. I mean, that's, you know, football's a college. Football is a full time job and electrical engineering is 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, the determination of 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 got to want it, those type of things. My parents challenging me growing up, my, my Sunday school teachers challenging me growing up. You got to want it. And that kind of set the course and develop that level of determination that continue 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, I tried to display in the book as well, to try to, you know, be encouraging to people in life and the challenges and tough times and tough situations that come.

Man.

Right on. What, what, what age did you start

going to church from, from, 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. I was in the Seabees or whatever they called us. I don't remember exactly. I might have been three or four years old. And Rudolph the red nosed reindeer was on tv. That is my earliest memory. Yeah. In church. Yeah. Thankfully, I needed, like I said, mischievous kid. I needed that foundation. I did. That godly foundation.

I thought, I thought, when you were talking earlier, I thought you meant that they. 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 as Lord. Her sins are forgiven. Eternal hope. You know, we deal with this book and I talk about the book. Preparation, preparation, preparation. You know, God doesn't let go. And let God is a. 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 mean, I spent hundreds, almost thousand hours in the simulator preparing for things that I didn't know what would happen.

And that's kind of the. 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 got to deal with it now. But we're going to exist forever in 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 sins so that we would not have to. And embracing that truth and is what I pray this book will do. Dealing with the now, encouraged for the now preparing for the now, but also focused on what, what, 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 served his creative 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 +51 and -51.6 degrees latitude in 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.

Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. So what got you into aviation? Football, electrical engineering and then 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 understand military. I didn't know a lot about it, but in my mind's eye there was a jet. Turns out the jet, once I gained a little knowledge was an F16. In my mind's eye. That's Air Force. I didn't go Air Force. I have flown an F16. I'm grateful for that too. But the challenge of landing aircraft on, 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's the way to do that. So that's really what it was. I had never flown. I hadn't done taken any, any flight lessons. None of that. I'd flown once or twice in an airliner at the time. Wow. But just, you know, again, prayerful that the Lord would lead me. You know, there's a couple of things I was, I was a goal setter like many as a young man, as things that I wanted to do and experience.

But I always, because the Lord, you know, my parents, God's word had given me a good solid foundation there too. I Always wanted to glorify my Lord, whatever it was, with those goals in mind. And so prayerful. And it was. 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 event 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. 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 that. What I know now is that there was some, you know, an administrative person in the Navy is called a yeoman.

There were 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 automatrist in your. In your local area. I was in school at Cookeville. I went to the local optometrist, and I said, hey, I need. The paperwork says I'm 2020. He said, no, no, no. You're 2010. I'm like, I don't care. Please put 2020 on the paper. 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 the. And, you know, looking back, I'm. I'm grateful, you know, James tells us and kind of. You know, kind of Joe, when you come through trials and tribulations, because it's growing us, and it's. 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's. That's. 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 every. Like I said, every phase of everything I've ever done has been just the same. And I'm. 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. So I talked. 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 naval.

Oh,

so many factors again, the Lord staring me down, up 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 sets 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 marching. He had to have seen 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 portion of God's creation spinning behind him. You know, this is Lord's providence.

Wow.

And I'm. I'm grateful for that, man. I'm grateful for that system. I'm grateful for our nation, for those type of things that have been a benefit to me and now flow on as benefit to my 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? I go through flight school. I did really well. The Lord gave me the ability to fly number one in my class in all three phases. Primary, intermediate jet, advanced jet, and matter of fact, I accelerated and got and graduated with some individuals that didn't start with me. So when I got to the point of winging, 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, 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 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 bumped because I had 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 it 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 and 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.

I was number two, I wasn't number one. Quality spread. It was.

They're decommissioning it.

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 Lamour, California, Nes Lamour. I check into VA122 and it was the best thing that could have happened to me. That airplane, flying it, the people, the single seat guys. What was, 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, that's a recurring theme in my life as well. I didn't know that I didn't know. And. But when I got there, these guys were amazing. They telling their single seat stories and oh, in 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're flying combat in the A7. It was thrilling. Again, not knowing what I didn't know. The Lord, you know, he's directing our path. It says, a man plans his way, but the Lord directs his path. That's what Proverbs tells us. And it is true. I am so grateful that I got a sevens 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, it was, 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 we had certain deliveries that were classified with certain capabilities that were classified that we needed to be down in the weeds, not detected. And so that was a big part of the training because of that. Classified missions with classified weapons trying to maintain without being detected. Yeah, yeah. And these deliveries. I do, 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 30,000ft. Don't know, turns around, comes straight down. And one of my hits was 20ft.

Whoa.

From that. Oh, we call it over the shoulder delivery. 20ft. 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. Your pit, your. I say the pickle. I say that like, you know what I'm talking. Like people know what I'm talking about. There's the designate button where you. 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, 30,000ft, way up there. As you continue, then you go back to new egress. Thrilling, John. Thrilling. Absolutely thrilling.

What did you bomb?

Well, we're just hitting the targets here. We're just. We have a target out and, you know, this is a desert of El Centro. El Centro, California. Loom lobby targets that were out there. I'm sure they even have those targets anymore. This is a long time ago.

What were the targets? Conex boxes or.

Oh, they just have. Yeah, they put it. Sometimes they put a tank out there. You know, they got triangulation where they can give you the hits. The. The bomb is just a little blue training bombs.

Okay.

And when the bomb impacts, it blows up white smoke out the tail, impacts the ground. Now, we also trained with some live weapons as well, but yeah, different, different. 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. I Just didn't, you know, they're divvied out these. Good deal actually Drive, lap, drop live weapons. I never got one over the shoulder, but I got live weapons in many different scenarios, obviously in combat as well.

So let's talk about taking off and landing on a carrier. I've never. I've never even been on a carrier, really. 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. You got jets, aircraft that are taxiing, turning exhaust, going into afterburner jet black 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 1940s desert, I'm sorry, World War II time frame, 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. The. 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 and part it 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, 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.

So those, These type of things, it's just part of the environment. It's part. It's. 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, maybe in one of them. And landing on. That's one of the things I dreamed about doing when I decided to join the military, landing on aircraft carriers. And then at night, oh my. You talk about the challenge ramping up. You think about sitting 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, 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 a four, 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 that we call it the ball, the visual landing aid system. It's a amber lights. It's mirrors that have an amber light in the center. And it's got green lights called the datums out the side. And you want to keep that amber ball in the center of those green lights, right?

Okay.

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. 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 want to do that. So at night, 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 centerline and you're correcting back. And doing all that without peripheral cues is very challenging. At night 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.

You get like 300ft rollout, you touch down. Boom. 300ft. It stops you. So when you touch down, 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 your. In this. 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. The brain fart issue, and you pull back instead of adding power. We can't have that, man. Yeah.

How long? So 300ft. How long is a rough typical Runway?

I would say the. The landing distance is probably, you know, we could. We could look it up. It's probably 600ft. The distance, but the distance from where you touch down until you stop. 3, 300, 350ft. Yeah, it's. It's. It's not. 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. So normal. Normal landing in an F18. 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 2,000ft. But our runways are 7,000 plus. Holy. Yeah. Like in a T38, which I flew the last 25 years with NASA, we are not allowed to go to a Runway less than 7,000ft. Yeah. So the difference between a carrier landing and a normal.

Whoa.

Very different. Wow. Very different. That's. That's 300ft. Yeah. Wow. Roughly. Yeah.

6,300 foot difference.

That sets you apart. I mean, this is. You know, there's always that inter force, you know, cajoling, if you will, with the Air Force. You know, y' all got long runways to land on. You know, it's easy. We do that too. 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 avd. Do all naval aviators have to land on carriers?

No, no. This is just yet. There's also some propellers. There's the. The E2 Hawkeye. The dome. It's got the dome on top of it. It's a propeller airplane. And it lands on carriers. There's 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. 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 Navy.

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 helicopter.

No. I joined the Navy wanting to fly, you know, pointy, pointy nose aircraft off aircraft carriers. But even 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 in.

Oh, yeah. Flew F18s mostly. I flew more of that than the A7. F18. Another goodness amazing F18. You air to air mode. Select it on the throttles and the stick. Air to air mode. Fight your way in. Switch.

Single seat, too.

Pardon? It's single seat. F18C. Fight your way in. Air to air. Switch to 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 NASA astronaut, it has high highs. But if I can only do one, knowing what I know now, I'd be enabled every year 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 of 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 it's real. You know, you train like you're 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 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. I got many I was stupid stories. I met my very first squadron. We have a squadron function. Everybody's together at a, you know, just Friday night social. And this commanding officer, the, the, my executive officer's wife, I heard, 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 this orders and we. She was 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. Boy was I stupid. How 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 the hazards associated with that. And this is the family unit doing this together. 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?

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 into 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 carrier. 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 will be out of fuel by the time the 42nd.

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, KC135 or KC10s, they're stacked up from 18,000ft all the way up to 26,000ft.

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 a 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. At daytime, a missile launches. You Got to be looking at it or you don't see it. AAA anti aircraft artillery fired. You got to be looking at it. You don't see it at night. Your peripheral vision gets it 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 27,000ft, 23,000ft. It goes above me and it seems like it's way out there. And Scud missiles, that'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, 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, to the issue, to what happened. So I wound up kind of a little bit in front of the strike package as the. 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 type package. When it came time to turn and head back and leave, an SA8 gets launched and my radar warning receiver, the RAW gear, it's going nuts.

What's an essay SA8?

It's a surface to arrow missile, surface to air missile. And it's got a designation, Some an essay 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. And SA8 smaller, more of a tactical, close in but very maneuverable. Out to about 8 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 we're targeting, is to target them. But they fire as I'm turning and I. 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 different. Different sounds for different types of something, whatever. Different types of, you know, radars or whatever that is locking onto 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 hack the 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 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. SaaS I knew were only viable. The heart of their envelope was, 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 didn't get hit. 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 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 then to 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 launched. Wire 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. Of course people are hearing these missiles 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 this A7 will go.

I am giving it all she's got. Full power, full grunt we call it. And off we go again. I think 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. It wasn't, it was just below a half moon that night that we launched. 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 got 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, 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 14. My egress heading was destination number 15. I had put destination in destination 16. I 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 and the weather be bad and 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 flipped the needle. I mean I flipped 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 if a target is worthy to be targeted by us, then it's probably worthy to be protected by them. And it was, oh, they had essay. I think they had essay 2s and 3s. So I get an essay 2 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 didn't look back. 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 heat seeking missiles. 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 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 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 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 on good. So you keep them together. So this tactic we use kept me in a position I should 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 deconflict the air to air picture. And we use that instead of trying to just keep them physically keep the aircraft physically in close proximity. A lesson learned the hard way, at least for me.

Wow.

So you know, fog of war, that's.

And that's. Hold on. That's your first night mission?

First night mission, yeah. I had several after that. Where. 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 is wrapped around the 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, 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.

You want to. Anything stick out there?

Yeah. Night mission. Again, no air to air threat. Eight A7s going into a target area, just us. 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, Lou, two flares. The lead would drop a flare, the flare would fall, parachute would open under the flare, the flare would light up and it would illuminate the ground. And anything you saw in that underneath the ground prosecuted it again. Launching office, there's only eight of us. We launched, we had. This was one tanker for all eight of us. I'm last. I'm Junior. I'm pretty junior. You know, I, 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 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 90, 1884 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. Kind of the theme of the life here. So I'd been home for three months, but I went straight to sea. And this one was an eight month deployment, Desert Shield, Desert Storm. Excuse me. So I'm in the 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 dash 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 loadout 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 going to country. Drop your bombs, I'm thinking.

So I even asked him, I said, you want me to go? I think crank was the call, 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 the 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, when you get in situations, fear can be detrimental. It can be detrimental to 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 get 20 miles south of the border, there was apprehension. But when I got 20 miles south, the border, gone. Focus. This is a job. I got my responsibility. My friends and crewmates, you know, in their aircraft, 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 the stick between my legs. If I didn't have that stick there, My knees were probably hitting together. Because I'm going country alone. I've been 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.

Because my flight lead told me to, and he said, just drop your bombs. B52 style. B52 means straight, level, whatever. Altitude, 27, 23,000ft, whatever. I was just drop them, come on, 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 out, bound. 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. Aaa 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, murder?

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 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, prosecuted the target, they stopped shooting, and I went back to ship. I, you know, at the ship. You ever heard of Barney Clark? They 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. As you go to, you go to the boardroom and 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 go to debrief.

Right on.

Yeah. Damn.

Damn.

Wow. Would you.

The question about refueling so they stack them up, right.

If you got a lot of aircraft, 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 your daytime. You see eight huge airplanes stacked up a thousand feet. They're following the lead down at the bottom. And we're refilling 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 loadout 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 F18. 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 platform. C 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 smacking 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 still flying some C models, but they're all the, the newer E and F models now. Top Gun Maverick. Maverick was flying the brand new, you know, the E model, the newer one. I flew the C models, but there was nothing like a C 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 it 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? What is that?

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 purpose is flying the aircraft. But we also have division officer jobs in charge of the troops and various, you know, ordinance 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. So you send some fleet guys, a couple of a guy or two from your squadron and then you send those back to the fleet. And we have a weapons school and at the different locations like the, the East Coast F18 rack, strike fighter wings.

Atlantic has a weapons, at least when I was there, had a weapon 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, 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 that fleet is trained, ready to fight if called into, call into that Action.

Right on. Right on. Well, Butch, let's take a quick break.

Break time.

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hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilance Elite's the Watch Floor, where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it was matters, and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Terrorists, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime. Not everything is urgent. But this show will focus on what is need 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, in all the missions that you went on, I want to get to space.

Sure.

And so why did you. 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 of 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 few easy things in life. Not easy, but I didn't have to apply multiple times. I just applied that one time, 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, this might be something that would be interesting to maybe see if I could maybe 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, another from University of Tennessee Aviation Systems. With 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 year 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. Like several thousand dollars to a background check. Go through that process. Looks like I'm going to get selected, got the background check done, but they didn't select me. And so three days after I found out that like security clearance, background, everything. Okay, they're checking everything.

The SF86 type. Probably way better than that.

Yeah, I mean I've got a, I've got a super secret clearance, but still they're doing that type of background check for NASA to make sure 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?

Get one hour? Yeah. And. And basically they set the room up in a tee, so. And they set you in the corner of the tee. 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 had. He flew later in space. He had 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.

And 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. That's what it did. Kind of set me at ease, though. It did. The first interview, I, 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 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. I was going to shore duty, from sea duty. I was in Virginia Beach, Virginia. That's where they moved all the F18 squadrons. And I was going to be the exchange pilot instructor, Navy exchange pilot at Air Force Test Pilot School in Edwards Air Force Base in California.

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, we'll 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, because 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 had never heard. 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 list the first interview, you know, and I'm thinking back. I shouldn't have said that I'm. And, you know, I shouldn't have said that. The second interview, I had none of that. I didn't feel like I. And you knowed. And there was nothing that I said that I wished I hadn't. There was nothing I didn't say that I wish I had because I just got accustomed to talking about me with my wife.

Bless her heart, praise her 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, and I'm grateful for that. 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 NASA. 25 years later, here I am, just left NASA. 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?

Mm.

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, though it 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 huge day for me and yourself and others as well, because, you know, we enjoy what we enjoy because of them. And I am patriotic, and I know you are, too, and those other individuals I've mentioned earlier, and a privilege to serve and then to serve your nation in 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 is 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 had. Came in a. Had 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 when the first thing I wanted to be. First thing I wanted to be was a garbage man. Because the garbage man was strong. You could pick that can up and put it on the shoulder, and that's what I wanted to be first. But as I got older, be a garbage, being an astronaut. And something was in, you know, your mind's eye. You dream of 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 camaraderie in the squadrons, the other spouses is just a, just a special bond. And those, those that people may not be aware of 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 over the course of time, you know, you, croquet is a game. You 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 got to 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, the moving components to fly in the atmosphere and all the reaction processing jets. Like I said, that 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 trainer sstt. And we go into that, we learn a 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 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 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. There's some people may have that mental capability. I don't. And that's where the team comes together. The trust in 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. 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, you know, 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 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?

STS129, Space Shuttle Atlantis. I can tell you, laying on your back for 3 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. 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, I didn't look it up. The guy sitting behind me, our MS.2 was Randy Bresniks. He was 506 because I was a nanosecond before him getting to space. And we had another guy on the, on the mid deck, he 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 been sitting there and it was me sitting in that seat, Sean, that, that's, 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. You know, my wife sacrifices and, and all that goes into that. My daughters were born, though they were young, 5 and 2 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 you know, the solid rock, the launch went well. The solar rocket booster separate about two minutes in, you got another six minutes of powered flight and then you separate from the external tank and that's all. All these events are jarring and the pyrotechnics are firing and there's blasts going out. I'll share that. So we're, we finally do all that. We're in space, we're separated from 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 I'm my, my. 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 then 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? You know, how did I get here? And I 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, 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 when there's millions that would love to be in there talking again. Humbling. 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, 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, indeed privileged.

Man. I can't imagine just looking out and seeing the. 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 unstrap, as I'm sitting there, just to continue real quick, Mike Foreman, our prime, my premier spacewalker, was strapped in on the mid deck. There's a ladder over here comes up from the side of 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 in 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 still. I'm not floating. 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 came absolutely normal, and every mission after that. But the first time I saw it, what's 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 are. 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. It feels very empty. And you feel like, wow, we're just a little speck in 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 Trust 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, to replace on the outside of the station because things fail right where things are not going to last forever. And so in subsequent years, we installed two of them, the ELCs that were called express logistics carriers.

We installed a couple of them and in the suing 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 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, of building the space station before they end, before the space shuttle program end landed.

Damn.

Yeah, yeah. Thrilling mission to fly the space shuttle. I mean, I said, I've asked people this, 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% 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 gonna fly that spacecraft. Oh 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 of spacewalks. But as far as the space shuttle pilot 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 end of February, March of 2015. Go do a spacewalk, let your body heal for a couple of days. Because you know, you get beat up in these suits. I mean it's, you get bruises and everything else because it's, it's just that environment. Get three days to recuperate, do it or another and get three days recuperate, go do another one. That's great. That's great. Again, wonderfully great. But if only get to do one, I'm flying. I mean, what, I mean how.

I mean the anticipation of exiting the shuttle.

So I've got 32 hours outside in the vacuum of space in a, on A spacewalks. 32, 32 hours total in 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 have a tether, a 85 foot cable. You put two of those together, you got 170ft 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 170ft from that point. We have other ways if we have to go further than 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 work site, you have a local tether.

So you actually local tethers about 3ft 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 spacewalks 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. My safety tether is clear. 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. My. I'm sorry. My local tether down. My safety tether is clear. My local tethers down.

I've still got. I'm still holding on. Okay, my safety tether is clear. The second time, my local tether is down. Third time, my safety tether is clear. My local tether is now. Okay, now I'll release because I'm not going to go floating off, you know, 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, we have a jet pack that's attached to our spacecraft, our spacesuit. It's called safer. S A F E R. I forget what the Necron stands for. Survival. Something, something effect. Basically, you reach back here, you lift a 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 jetpack is going to try to orient you 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 I practice flying back to the space station before I look, run out of gaseous nitrogen.

And it's got a little counter. 93%, 85%, 7%, until you got none. 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. Most people aren't watching when you do a spacewalk. But I did my. One of my first spacewalks, and 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, which you don't want. You don't want to do, man. Yeah, yeah. So this.

Are you out there all by yourself or never? Partner.

Always go with one or the person. The first person. Lexi. Leona. Leona. 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 as being a spacewalk for them. Them, since they weren't outside the spacecraft. Extra vehicular 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 five spacewalks, 32 hours.

32. A little over 32 hours, yeah. Total.

What do most. What do most, I mean, is that, is that a lot for the profession

or it's, it is. Sunny, who I was with on Starliner and with on the space station, I, I wound up with this last mission, excuse me, it was two long duration space, space flights that I, 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. Sunny, 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 ten 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, if you got six, you've really done many 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 man, things changed.

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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, you know, 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, 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 on, you know, sound 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 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, just happened to be the timing. I was there when that experiment was going up, and, and this was just plastics, but we're 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 type 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, 32.2ft per second squared. That's the acceleration we feel sitting here in this chair towards the center of the Earth. Mars is about 0.384 10 the size of the Earth. It's smaller, right? So it's got less mass. Its mass is less. So it's got less, 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 16 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 1/100 the density of our atmosphere. We use our atmosphere to slow down. Friction builds up. You saw the video earlier. It's got 3,000 degree, you know, plasma ball that says you're coming in, slowing you down.

The Mars atmosphere, the mass that we're taking to the surface now, slows down in the atmosphere the same, but it's only 1/100 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 surface of Mars, we surmised that it would take six supersonic Paris, I'm sorry, supersonic parachutes the size of six football fields to slow down enough or we would look at balloons, inflatable deceleration devices, and the math. The physics just doesn't work out. It's hard to do. So getting the amount of mass of the surface that it requires to support human life and then leave the surface, it is tough. I applaud people like Elon Musk that says 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 go on to settle other planets?

The Lord created this planet to be inhabited, right? But he also has given us 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. Coming to light, right? Abundance of knowledge. And that's all because the Lord is enlightening us, so to speak. And he gave. He's the one that gave us the ability, enhanced our capability to go to the moon, which we've 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 four 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. 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.

In.

In.

I mean, just from being out in space, you were just talking about how you get the 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 is.

I mean, low Earth orbit.

Who's been 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 spacesuit. And all the, you know, advancements and even that technology we're trying to bring on board for future programs. So that will be, 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. You know, flying in space Starliner, we had an issue, right? We had problems. Space flight 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, 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'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? And 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 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, 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 was the sixth first crude 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. 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 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 dock, 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 deorbit 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 deal with 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 test 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. Yeah.

How many people were up there with

you or 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. Right. There's no reason to put anyone else at risk 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 PLT 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 hiker of time. You go on 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 of the pile when I got back in 2015, worked my way up, had specific qualifications as test background, but I wasn't in that 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 due 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 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 goals in mind. When I spoke to the media and the nation and the world, I wanted to honor 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. 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.

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 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 in space, in open space, testing out the capabilities. And this spacecraft was precise as it could, 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 buggies that are racing in the desert and they're bouncing and that, but they're great capability. Sturdy, 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 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 cars. But my goodness, you talk about sturdy and reliable. Did everything you wanted it to. It wasn't a sports car. You don't get into dragon, a SpaceX dragon and 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 our tasks was to see if I could point my velocity vector, the vector in which we're 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 17,500 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, so 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 pointed at the sun directly so I can maximize my ability to 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? These are part of the test that we were doing. Part of this was how can I orient myself with my lick vector? If I'm in a rendezvous scenario where I need to get away from the, from the space station, I need to make sure that I'm in line with the velocity vector 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 online 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 in port. And there are seven thrusters at each location. They're called doghouses. Kind of stick out on the sides of the service module. So top, bottom, starboard in port. And these thrusters point in different directions so you can control the spacecraft. Six degrees of freedom. Pitch, roll and yaw. 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, or 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 pitch and yaw 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'd had two.

There's only supposed to be one, but we had two. We'd 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 deorbit burn, use the service module engines to do your de orbit burn. To slow down, you go from 25,000ft per second to about 24,700. So now you start to come back to Earth. Once you do your deal, but burn, you detach that service module and it burns up in the atmosphere. The only thing that comes back is the module. So 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 downlinking 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'd 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.

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 it is I want to do. For control, we'd 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 tolerant to single fault tolerant. And it was a bottom thruster still aft firing. And I'm thinking, oh, this isn't good. This has happened. You got to realize what's going through my mind. I've got thousands. 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 broadly. And I'm thinking automation, we're under the automated sequences. This 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 we'll lose a third thruster. 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. 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 it. Just 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. Be certain. 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. Flight 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 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 day 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 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 Dolph 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, Duff. I don't have six DOF 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 to the point 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 orbital 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.

Later they're seeing the space station 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. Sonny 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 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 in 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 and 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'd 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 that are taking 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. Sonny's doing the navigate and communicate wonderfully well. So focus. Loss of 6 DOF control. What is this control input going to do with oral 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. I don't want that. Very challenging. What if we lose a fifth thruster? Is 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 with Burn and get back to Earth in this. You know, 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 safely dock, I'm gonna leave because I can't. I can't endanger the space station. But if I do, even if I can't talk to them, if I think I can do it, I'm gonna dock. That's really the only option we had. Even thinking back on it, there was not another viable option. It was this 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 want to emphasize this. 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? Can I control it all? I don't know. I have no idea. Matter of fact, I even asked the flight director mental court, 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. Anyway, 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, Dolph control. But maintaining the attitude and the position, like I just shared, 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 going to. It's going to corrupt the data, and they're going to 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, orbital mechanics, all this going through my mind, and don't touch the controls. That's pretty challenging. Wow. To go off the controls so they can send this test firing. But by God's grace, again, decades of preparation I didn't even know existed was, this is looking back hindsight now, I can see it. I get a little bit of drift, little bit of drift. Little nothing. Okay? And I'd say, hands off. Sonny would say, hands off. They sent the signal to the thrusters. I came back on too quickly. Initially, the story goes on, 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. Sonny 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. 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. 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 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 laboring. Eventually, 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, 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 tried 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 mentioning 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. 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 fail 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, 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, there's 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 a moment 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.

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a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services A secured Chime Visa credit card and MyPay line of credit provided by the Bancor Bank NA or Stride Bank NA. MyPay eligibility requirements apply and credit limit ranges $20 to $500. Optional services and products may have fees or charges. See chime.com feesinfo advertised annual percentage yield with Chime+status only. Otherwise 1.00% APY applies. No min balance required. Chime card on time Payment history may have a positive impact on your credit score. Results may vary. See chime.com for details and applicable terms through this whole process. Like I said, we got a dock. 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 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 could 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 we. This was June 6th. The decision to come back or not come back on starliner was late August was probably early July that I told my family, I said, I didn't say anything initially. I finally said, you know, the most likely scenario is we're going to be here till 2025. This was July 2024, which. 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 I, again, I knew it before we ever docked, that it was. It was. Chances were slim just how difficult these to figure these things out are.

And that's obviously the way it turned out.

How did your family react?

I tried to build resiliency and that type of, you know, mindset into my daughters from day one. 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 in preparation, like I've said. But our Lord is sovereign. He's in control. 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 got to believe that that's what God's word says. And so I'm not saying there weren't tears. There were. My old 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 happen. 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. 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. She was like, she was fine with not, say they want her tear to, but because the reality of it sets in. This is really, really happening. But persevering through it all,

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Yes, it did. We have eight manifolds and one of them had a very, very small leak. There is debate on this, but I'll say it anyway, realizing that some people may push back. But leak, A leak is a leak. 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, 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 and there's, 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, 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, is 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 were supposed to launch in May of 2000, 2020. May of 2020 was the launch date. We had a failure on the test flight in, in, 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 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 that, the gentleman that was the 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. SpaceX had a whole crew of engineers. They, they trained out at Hawthorne, California. Whole army of people would go out there. We had nothing. We had 20 of a couple of, 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 the simulator. 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 from 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.

You can't have an iron bird connected to thrusters and actually fire 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 evaluate it. So we wanted to get in the avionics software integration laboratory ASL and do some testing, but we couldn't. It was hard to get. I won't go into all the nitty gritty details. When we finally did get in there and it was, it was a struggle initially. When we finally did 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 fact 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 belt no spiral 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 like helium seals and thrusters. You know those evaluations for those capabilities or 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 to. That's all we can. That's what this business is about. Trust is imperative. Absolutely has to be there in this business. And, and that's where we were entrusting. I can guess what your next question is. Then what happened? I said earlier that 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 you and probably others are aware that NASA has changed its stance on the classification of the mission. You're aware of that?

I'm not aware of that.

Yeah, they initially they called it a low, high visibility close call and 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 is not right. 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 of high visibility close call or is it a type A mishap? Mishap classification gives a completely different avenue 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, 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 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?

What was the answer?

It was the wrong answer because that's what's happened now. They changed. 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 forefront of our concerns. And if we're making decisions where we're losing trust. And, Sean, this is, you know, it's a long story. I'm not going to go into it here, but that's just one of the points that, that just, it just, it can't happen. When you, when you have an NPR based on controllability and you're saying, well, we lost six. Dolph 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.

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. I mean, what the. What the.

What do you.

I mean, it was okay.

I mean, so many questions. I mean, he packed for eight. You're there for. Well, there's 86 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. 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 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. So people say you ate trash for four months? No, I like ship food on aircraft carrier. I'm probably one of the rare people that do. So I like ship food. So no, I thought it was great. I was fine with it because 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 just go every couple of days and I go to that area where that food was stored and I 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?

No, no, no, no. I.

286 days. Yeah. No, you gotta realize 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 lacourt. 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 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 situation. In a situation we run into this where we have to leave. I got, we got a six spacecraft here. What do we do? He said, butch, it's never happened. I'm like, yeah, I know that the chances of it happen are slim, but if it does, starliner is 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, eclss 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 close the hatches, waiting to see if we got to go. So we're actually in that scenario. It wasn't optimal, obviously, the spacecraft. We were still didn't know what the, what had caused the problem 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, the ground SpaceX to create engineering with what we had on board.

And we built seats for, for us.

You built seats?

We built seats in the bottom of the Dragon. Yeah. And that was then. When we had that sufficiently done, that became our safe haven. Now we didn't have the ability to plug in the eclss and all, and I don't, I mean, sure, if we had the ability to plug in communication, I don't think we did, but at least we had a seat that we could strap into, made out of foam and everything else. Yeah, yeah. Mike Barrett, medical doctor, he worked wonderfully well with the ground and basically built these seats while the rest of us are doing space station stuff. And, or he did too. But as a, as a side job, he did a lot of extra work on his own to get these seats built for us so we would have a viable way to return other than Starliner. Yeah.

Holy.

Yeah.

So you had to build your seats.

We sure did. And it was, it was a great feat of engineering. This type of stuff happens and again, the world doesn't know that.

So are these all. These are. There's essentially, there's three aircraft.

Yeah.

Connected to the space station. What, what is the space station like? Do you get in.

Think about, think about five or six busses connected end to end.

Okay.

As far as volume, the Russian segments a little smaller. I think the, I think the outside diameter is 14ft of the, of the, the volumes. The lab, the node 2, node 1, Columbus, Japanese experimental. Experimental module. I think it's 14ft. 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 2 with the forward and the zenith. The top one, the Dragon was on the top when we were on the forward. And of course, the Russian segment docked to the Russians. The Soyuz docks to the Russian segment. And so it's. 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 one. Yeah, it's a pretty amazing. When you think about all that's taking place in low Earth orbit with a 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 being.

I mean, when I launched in 2014 on the Soyuz, up for five and a half months and came back on the Soyuz, we touched down in 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 10ft 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 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. Oh, man. 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 america. And within 10 minutes before. Before they'd even gotten us to the boat, my neck had already started hurt 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. Takes my breath. I don't know what it is. So that's one of the leftovers from. From space flight. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Neurovestibular. Your balance, you're not stimulated by gravity. All of a sudden, you are. 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 are. Gravity pulls it to our lower extremities. And 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 like. And so my face is always puffy. You come back to space from space. Excuse me. Come back from space. Now the gravity's pulling you nervous stability, 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. And I worked out every. Even the day I did a spacewalk, I worked out. I got up early and worked out. You got to keep your muscles from our. From atrophane. You got to keep the calcium from decalcifying.

You got to do all of that. And every single day you got to do it. And so. And I. And it feels good to put some stress on your body. But coming back, your little muscles, we can't work out. Your. Your body often has a hold of 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 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, it's. 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, 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 it is.

What's your daily life like for 286 days.

Busy is.

Is it?

Yeah. I mean what are you working on? Stuff breaks. I mean things breaking.

Your house, building a seat.

Yeah, stuff breaks. Potty ops, you know, you gotta, the. 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. You get trained to do all that. So phlebotomy, I do it myself, take my own blood and assessed. We freeze it, we send it down on the cargo spacecraft that returns. There's a, there's a SpaceX dragon that returns in the atmosphere or we take it down with us and it's assessed for various 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. 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 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 weeks, months, which was great, until they launched another one. Those type of things are ongoing, always, always doing those type 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, I launched in the shuttle way back when, minimal to nothing. The last time I launched on Soyuz 2014, 2015, when we had the right coverage, I could make a phone call through my computer 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. I don't know if we're using Starlink or not, but into 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 you know, 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, 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 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. But not that. You can hear. There's a lot of sound on space station, ambient noise. But I'd sing with them, worship with them. Felt apart 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. You know, we, they have space station, been up there 28, 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 when a bull, you know, we got big old ML, ML4, big old 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. But, 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. 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, the set. 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 6ish months, 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 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 that 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 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, 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 that came up in September? We climbed aboard, said our final farewells and undocked. Seventeen hours later we did our deorbit burn.

How was. I mean, what did it feel like to undock?

Oh, what 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? There's 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.

No, I'll tell you this, Sean. 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 have this situation ever happened. I mean, I got. You ever got extended on a deployment? Yeah. Did you fret over it? No. Maybe initially, but I can't change it. I can't do anything about it. And therefore I'm not going to fret over and I'm not going to put myself through that. I'm not going to fret over 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 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 going to fret, they're going to 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. I'm gonna do what I can for it these days. Whatever meant it is 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 4, 6 and 7. 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 understanding, 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. John 3:27. 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. 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. 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, and 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'm saying, 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 139 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, 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 in all of that, he's not like, give me another lash. That's not. That's not what 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 passes all understanding, is that passage I just quoted says, and it's true, passes all understanding. And I think I said it earlier. I'll say it again. You know, this book, we even talked 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 contacted me while I was still in space. Through my brother, through my church, all kinds of different things. And I'm 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 going to go with him if we're going to. If I want to publish. I wrote it for my daughters, but I published it because of two words. If I could break in. Two words. Encouragement and perspective. If. If events in this life could be an encouragement to people that this life is about preparation, commitment and preparation, 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. And 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 what. That's why the book is sitting here on the shelf in a. 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. 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 and. 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 but 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 a 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, 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 about me, 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. But what this life does, it sets the tone for all eternity.

And 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 it anyway.

You're welcome.

Because they are my daughters, are the legacy we'll leave behind. That's really it. And that's the big scheme of things. Life and existence in eternity. Glorify my Lord. And what do I leave behind? A lasting, eternal legacy. And 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 and paying the price for our sin. And my daughters know that. Praise him for it, man.

I love that.

Amen.

Butch brother Honored interview.

Honor is mine. Thank you. Thank you.

God bless.

God bless you Brian.

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