 Okay, I think we're ready to start. So welcome again everybody. My name is Dan. I'm the director of development and programming for the bed for Playhouse. Welcome to virtual Playhouse. We've been operating as most everybody knows since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted virtually. And this is one of the programs that we've initiated to try to sort of bring back to the community some programs of interest. And we think you're going to find this to be a really fascinating talk tonight. A couple of things just to take care of regarding some housekeeping. Please feel free. Some of you already have, if you have any questions, there is a Q&A button which you will find at the bottom of your screen. If you are on a computer laptop or desktop. If you are on an iPad, it is at the top of your screen. And at any point during the evening, if you would like to ask a question of Kevin, please post it there. We will try to get to as many of them as we can. I'm sure that there are a lot of questions for him. And we want to make sure that we get to all of them if we possibly can do that. A couple of things coming up. We like to always mention that if you enjoy tonight's program, we are closed. We are operating at a very, very bare bones level. If you would before you turn off your computer to devices this evening, if you enjoy this, please go to our website, which is bedforplayhouse.org. Consider making a donation to the Bedford Playhouse. There's a ways to give link. Every little bit is helpful as we try to get ourselves back up and running, hopefully sooner rather than later. You might also consider becoming a member members get discounts on programming such as trivia nights. There are ticket discounts. And we do our curbside concessions this Friday curbside concessions every week where you can order popcorn candy to get you through your weekend of streaming if that's what you're doing. And members get discounts on that as well. Just looking ahead very quickly to our next upcoming programs tomorrow night. We have our laugh out loud series, which is always a fun conversation about a class comedy film tomorrow night we're talking about the Steve Martin film planes trains and automobiles. Monday there's a program we're doing with bed for 2020 in the Wheaton Foundation, called the story of plastic, which is very, very, very compelling film about the impact of plastic is having on our environment. All information on all of this is available on our website on our homepage. Please check it out. And now I'd like to, without any further hesitation, introduce our guests for the evening. General Kevin Chilton was a four star general and commander of the US strategic command known as stratcom areas, which is responsible for the strategic nuclear and space operations. He flew three space shuttle missions as a NASA astronaut. That's kind of hard to say NASA astronaut, including the maiden voyage of the shuttle endeavor. And we're very glad that he's agreed to join us to talk about his very distinguished military career and unbelievable experiences in space. So please welcome Kevin Chilton, General Chilton. Thank you so much for joining us. Really great to have you with us this evening. Thank you, Dan. And I want to begin by thanking Doug Main for inviting me originally, and then you, Dan and Bijan for all the technical help you've given me to make this night possible. So I'm sure it's nothing like flying the space shuttle right then. Actually, you know, the space shuttle is pretty, pretty basic. It's hard to imagine that at one point we we doubled the random access memory on our computers on the shuttle and to 256 K. So we used to go to and from space in the space shuttle with 128 K for about 10 years and then 256 K. And you've got more than that. Well, way more than that on your watch. So it's a few short years. Look how far we've come. So Kevin has brought along a video that we're going to show now and Kevin, you're going to talk us through this a little bit. If I could tee it up first, Dan. There's an old saying in the astronaut corps that if you want to get an astronaut, if you want to shut them up, just unplug their audio visual. So we can't talk without showing a movie. So, so there's a movie tonight and hopefully it'll play well and I'm going to narrate it. And it's pretty short. It's about 15 minutes. And it's a quick summary of the first flight of endeavor. And so endeavor was a brand new vehicle that was built to replace challenger after that tragic accident 1986. It was assembled and prepared and we made our first flight in 1992. Of course, you have to have a mission besides just going up into space. And part of the mission was to make sure endeavor operated as designed. The other thing was we had a mission to go rescue a satellite. In 1990, a telecommunication satellite built by the Analsat Corporation had been launched with the intention of putting it in geosynchronous orbit over 20,000 miles above the earth so that it would stay in a single position over the Atlantic Ocean, and relay television signals between Europe and the US. It was a function on the launch. This was an unmanned rocket. And the satellite ended up in a 300 mile orbit around the earth, which meant rather than being stationary it was going around the earth every 90 minutes. And so it was useless in this orbit. And the way they saved the satellite was to separate it completely from the rocket motor that would have taken it to its intended altitude. Our job was to carry a brand new rocket motor up in the payload bay of the space shuttle endeavor. Get up next to this satellite above the low earth orbit rendezvous with it, and then capture it and attach it to the rocket motor and then launch the rocket motor and the satellite combination from the cargo bay. We had another couple missions. One was at that time we were thinking about building the International Space Station. And one of the great questions was, how much of it should we assemble on the ground and launch intact? And how much of it should we bring up in piece parts and assemble on orbit? And the big trust that you see in the pictures of the space station as you see it today was one of the areas we thought perhaps we could build rather than launch as an integrated element. So on this flight we carried what I call tinker toys, large metal objects that four of my crewmates were planned to go outside and assemble a truss and then disassemble it and see how easy it was or difficult as the case may be. And because of this, we knew in the space station program we were going to have to do at least three spacewalks on every mission to successfully build the space station in a timely fashion. And we had never done this before at NASA. So that was part of our objective too is, and to do that, we had four astronauts on the crew who were all qualified to do spacewalks, and they had four suits. And you'll see why I'm bringing this up now because it becomes an important factor later on. And then the last thing we had a little laptop on board with a software program that one of my crewmates had written a program for that was intended to help us be more efficient if it worked in the way we conducted our rendezvous and by efficiency I mean use the least amount of fuel. And so with that I think that kind of tease up the video if we can go ahead and start it. I'll narrate it. I have to tell you that something really, really cool about flying a brand new spaceship. I mean, for one thing it looks just gorgeous shiny hasn't been through reentry yet so there's no scorch marks on it. And literally the inside of the vehicle smelled like a new car. And so that was that was really special. And it was a bond with endeavor because it was my first flight as well as hers. Here's the crew are great commander Dan Brandon Stein, his pilot, a younger me when I had hair. And Dan was the head of the astronaut office. And then we had also with us for the five other crewmates, Ricky, who had written that software program with a great engineer and one of our spacewalkers, Kathy Thornton, a PhD physicist from University of Virginia also a spacewalker. And like a Coast Guard aviator who operated the mechanical arm. Tom Acre is a flight test engineer from the Air Force, and Pierre through it, a flight test engineer and backseater from the Navy top gun kind of guy. Well, how are we going to capture this satellite that was never meant to be touched by human hands was supposed to go to its destination way above the earth. So that was one of the big problems and the solution that the engineering team came up with was to develop this bar that Pierre is holding here. And the bar the reason we had the bar was we needed to attach something to the satellite so that we could then grab the satellite with the mechanical arm and position it on top of the rocket motor in the payload bay. So they built a simulator that you just saw Pierre practicing on that simulated the mass the moments of inertia of the satellite. And we built a model that we could put in the underwater tank which is the closest thing we could simulate the zero gravity on earth. And every time Pierre attached attempted to attach the bar to the satellite simulator it worked. So when we launched we had pretty high confidence that this would work. Now you see Pierre standing on the mechanical arm, and we're going to fly the space shuttle up underneath the spinning satellite while he places the bar on. This is a launch afternoon we launched just around sunset, had some weather issues coming in, but they cleared as at the very last 30 minutes before flight we got to go to launch, which was reassuring that a very narrow launch window of five minutes so there was really a very short period of time where everything had to come together all the technical pieces, as well as the weather. I tell you, there's nothing quite like launching on the space show, and they prepared me a lot for what it might feel like at lift off but nobody told me what it was going to feel like before we lift it off and that main engines let. And I have to tell you the vibration in the cockpit was tremendous. In fact, the six seconds before lift off I thought if we don't lift off in a hurry, something's going to fall off this thing, we're shaking so much. And then when the man says zero off we went, you're immediately crushed back into your seat by the force of about three times the force of gravity. And the amazing thing about that is not the amount of force but the fact that you just stay crushed back for the next two minutes. So the acceleration of this giant vehicle which weighs 4 million pounds at lift off with 7 million pounds of thrust pushing it upward is tremendous. At two minutes the solid rocket motors would come off and the acceleration would decrease to less than a G have been slowly build up over the next six and a half minutes, you went from zero to 17,500 miles an hour in eight and a half minutes. And that's a hard number to comprehend. We're traveling at five miles a second. And these later this was the view out the window. For me, you know we had practiced so much in the simulator I couldn't believe that we were actually there and doing it. It was in color instead of monochromatic green and the simulator. We're traveling at 17,500 miles an hour we've caught up to the satellite peers on to the end of the arm 40 feet above the cargo bay. Dan is positioning the space shuttle, and Bruce is positioning Pierre on the arm. Pierre does a perfect job of placing the bar up against the satellite the mechanism fires, but it doesn't grab. And so, Bruce repositioned Pierre. He came in again, tried again, and after he tried the next time. We also failed the mechanism failed to grab on to the circular ring on the bottom of the satellite. And that the by contacting the satellite pure had slowed its spin. And so it became unstable, and the satellite started to go into essentially a flat spin. Now Dan did a tremendous job flying the shuttle around trying to keep Pierre underneath the satellite and not have us run into the satellite and Bruce did a great job with the arm. But ultimately that first day, we failed and had to separate and fly away from the satellite. We stayed away for 24 hours. Thought about what maybe we could do different and came back in the next day, changed the time of day of the rendezvous we had better lighting conditions, and Pierre practiced a little more with the bar he said it felt different than the simulator. And we were really confident that this time we'd be able to capture it. And this was the result, which was the same result as the first day. And B is not if you could stop the film here. So we were faced with, obviously, some big problems there, on the least of which we had only budgeted enough fuel for one rendezvous. And here we'd already done to and then unsuccessful. I've been watching the fuel consumption very closely, as well as Rick's program to make sure it was working. And what I realized was that we had 13% fuel remaining in our most critical area. And the last rendezvous we had done had used 11% of the fuel. So if we feel a perfect rendezvous on the third one, we'd arrive under the satellite with just 2% fuel remaining. And that doesn't leave you a lot of margin for maneuvering once, once you're there. So we were really hurting for gas. We knew we only had one more chance to try this. And we knew what we had practiced for a year and a half on the ground wasn't going to work. So that night, and you can imagine, we were morale was pretty low. That night, several of us stayed up late and kind of started doing what I call problem solving 101. And the problem solving 101 begins with step one, which is what's the problem you're trying to solve. And once you decide that is you all agree to it. And then what tools do you have available? What are the crazy ideas that you might, you know, brainstorming that you might use those tools to help you solve the problem and then pick a solution. And that's what we did all night long. And we came up with a solution that was unprecedented, had never been tried before, and was never tried again in the space shuttle program course there was no need for it. And our answer was, rather than have just PR out there on the end of the arm trying to capture the satellite, we would send three people outside on a spacewalk, not just two. The airlock was only designed to carry two people. So we knew the ground would have a problem with us telling us we're going to send three out there. But we thought we could make that work. And there were a lot of other difficulties surrounding this that because no one had ever thought to do this. We were going to use those tinker toys to build a structure in the cargo bay so that three astronauts or two of the three astronauts could stand on that and attach themselves to it because you can't really stand up there you're floating. And be in a position to grab the satellite. And the problem we decided, most likely was that when Pierre pushed the bar up against the bottom of the spinning satellite, the satellite moved ever so slightly away from him when the tinker toys was fired, and the tolerances were so tight, they were just pinching and popping off the bar. So our answer was, well, let's hold the satellite, grab it by hand hold it fixed, and then with with its stationary and being restrained, then we'll attach to have Pierre attach the bar. We were up all night, developing this plan and then in the morning we called the ground and told them what we thought we wanted to do. And we told them all the reasons why we thought they would say no, and how we thought through all the answers to those problems questions difficulties. When we finished telling them the story they said, Why don't you guys go to bed, you've been up all night, we'll call you in eight hours and tell you what we're going to do. And they immediately took our plan, went over into the water tank and put three people in the water tank for the first time in the history of the program, and actually refined it made our plan even better. And the next day when we woke up they gave us permission to conduct the third rendezvous. Things didn't run smoothly in the third rendezvous we'd had two great rendezvous during the third rendezvous. We had a problem with the software on the space shuttle. And when we were getting to the most, the most important burn on the rendezvous approaching at about five minutes from the burn, the software stopped working. Without that software, we could not fly an efficient approach which meant we wouldn't have enough gas to do the rendezvous. And so we had to stop about 10 miles from the satellite and wait for an orbit while the ground worked on a solution to this problem, which we could not solve on board is to try as we might to fix the software. So that kind of brings us back to fade out of black and restart the movie Bijan and we'll see how this new plan worked as as we came in for our third and final rendezvous. Remember we had to put three people in the airlock so Pierre and Rick who had been our first two space walkers suited up and so did Kathy Thornton. Although Kathy didn't make the spacewalk she was part of the team helping us make sure we could fit three in the airlock and we could essentially buddy share the umbilicals in there to make sure that everyone could maintain their life support while they waited to go outside. And here's back at the Johnson Space Center on the ground three people in the water tank. They just so happened to have three hoses so that they could do maintenance. It was very lucky and they worked on new and different ideas on how they might, how they might refine the procedures we had come up with and sent down. Our Capcom with Sam Gamar and literally during the third rendezvous he was still reading up procedures as we came in, you know, quickly writing them down as we're coming in on the fly. Here's a view out the window. There's of course the earth. It'll sat. You can see in the center. And this is during the time period when Dan and I are still in the front cockpit doing the far out rendezvous and we ran into the software problems I described. We did everything we could think of we dump we dumped the software we reloaded the software went to different modes. And on the ground they knew we had 90 minutes to solve this problem. And they had never seen this problem before on the ground. And in mission control, the team was led by that group you just saw there. As they were scratching their heads. There was a miracle thing happened. This young man, probably about 26 years old bright young engineer was our guidance navigation and control officer admission control. And another gentleman who is our flight dynamics officer with their heads together and said you know what, we can run the shuttle software offline. And we can take data from the shuttle and put it in there and we can do we can calculate the burns the crew needs to do here on the ground. Now this is the boss, and he's playing 20 questions with these guys because again, it's never been done before. And here's Chris the other engineer and 25 years old. These guys, you know, talk about courage. They stood up stood by their guns said boss we know we can do this we're sure we can do this. And Al Pennington the flight director had it was his team he had built this team he trusted this team, and he gave him the green light to do it. And so we executed the final rendezvous using essentially a ground controlled approach. And it worked out perfectly that and with the help of Rick's computer program which I had decided by then was working really well. Dan use that to help him do the final approach and we arrived with exactly 2% propellant remaining. During the approach, the three astronauts went outside. Again, this is the first and only time it's ever happened and here you're looking back into the cargo bay from the cockpit, the black item in the back is the rocket motor. And in the foreground Tom is pulling out the bars and Rick and Pierre helping him assemble the trust in the bay so that this could be done where Tom is standing in the center of the bay on the trust. Rick is standing on the starboard sill of the shuttle. Pierre is on the robotic arm being maneuvered by Bruce. And this time instead of flying up 40 feet away from middle sat Dan had to fly the shuttle up to attend six feet of the spinning satellite. And he just there's Dan you fly this approach looking out the back window where the control there are duplicate controls to the front window. And Dan just did a phenomenal job of positioning us and saving fuel. One of the problems with three people outside the communication system only allowed two people to talk at the same time and if three tried that communication system would stop working. So we rehearsed a plan as part of the workaround for this for Pierre to use hand signals so that he could tell Bruce to move him up or down to help him get in position because he was really the only variable the other two guys are fixed in their foot restraints. And of course the team on the ground we're all cheering and pulling for us and the it was it was pretty tense. Rick was the quarterback over on the starboard sill Pierre is getting himself in a position to grab the satellite and Rick did one final poll asking everybody if they could reach it. I said yes, and he said okay ready ready now, and all three of them grabbed the satellite and you can see it stopped spinning. And now we had our first real capture of the satellite. However, nothing was going to work if that bar doesn't attach if we hadn't identified the correct problem. Bar Rick had the bar over on the starboard sill. So the plan was then to move Pierre underneath the satellite. And while Rick and Tom held it. Rick would pass the bar to Pierre and he would press it up against the now stationary satellite so here's Rick, getting the bar up and in position. And then take it from him. And then and Bruce here is operating the mechanical armed is a phenomenal job. He hadn't trained at all for this type of effort. And so this was all a first. And everything just worked out terrifically and sure enough with Tom and Rick holding the satellite fixed when Pierre pushed the bar up against it and fire the clamps, it worked. It allowed Bruce then to grab the pin on the end of the bar carry the satellite back to the and settle on top of the rocket motor, which and then literally you're, you can see it's either Rick or Pierre here hand cranking the attach fittings to attach the satellite to the rocket motor. Next came the time to deploy at Kathy Thornton was in charge of this is a very simple mechanism that the motor is pushed down on some springs and held in place by a metal wrapping that an explosive charge blows apart, and the springs push the satellite out. Well it's going to separate here but what really happened was Kathy. She went to system system and be arm fire she went arm a fire a and nothing happened. So the procedure said wait 10 seconds try it be. So she went to system be arm be fire be and nothing happened. Well, the satellite was stuck in the cargo bay above the cargo bay we couldn't close the doors we couldn't survive reentry in that space. So the only answer would have been for the crew, the EVA crew to go out and push the satellite overboard with the rocket motor, which would have been mission failure. When some bright young engineer back on the ground said called up and said tell them to do arm a fire be. Now Kathy had memorized the wiring circuits and she said well that'll never work. She said what do we have to lose. She went arm a fire be and the satellite as you saw deployed. Turns out they switched the wiring down to Kennedy Space Center and it never got into our procedures. And again some young engineer probably right out of college. Figure this out looking at the blueprints and save the mission down on mission control. So what it was just a tremendous team effort. A few days later after we did the assembly of space station exercise we actually did for EBA is on the flight endeavor we brought her back to Edwards Air Force Base in California. This was another first for endeavor and for the shuttle program was the first time we used a drag shoot on landing to help slow the vehicle so you didn't have to use as much break pressure to bring it to a stop. Later flights we would deploy with the nose in the air to help cushion the nose during during touchdown about 45 minutes after landing we found ourselves standing on the ramp outside and to a lot of a lot of chairs and back slapping for having completed a successful flight. And the rest of this is just another couple minutes of a video from from the flight and we'll just let her run out to the end so you can enjoy it. You'll see the work here, the assembly of the tinker toys. I call them on our fourth EBA and the great team and mission control. Every one of these people contributed to the success of the mission and couldn't be prouder to have been a part of this organization and this first flight of endeavor. So, with that Dan why don't we go ahead and switch over to the Q&A part. That was great. I don't know about anybody else but that shoot did not look very big to me when it deployed. I guess it worked but I think it's relative right? It slowed you down. You sound just like my wife you know I was. Sorry, I'm watching it very carefully. It does not look like a big shoot at all. I was one of the developmental test pilots for the development of that. Of course we did it all in simulation and you know she knew I've been working hard on it and she was there watching the landing. And so I come up to her after we land and I walk up and there she is she's holding her brand new second daughter is six or three months old I think at the time I walk up and I and I'm so happy to see her and the first words out of her mouth is boy that parachute was small. I said thank you. She's right. She's kind of right. She brought me right back down to her. Alright well we actually have quite a few questions were coming which are great and I'm going to start with some some basic ones. When you first joined the service and you went to the Air Force Academy correct you with the Academy for a while. I did we always we always aiming to become an astronaut or was that something that you thought about later on. You know, no I wasn't aiming to become an astronaut in fact, most astronauts that I served with had wanted to be astronauts since they were children. And I was, I wasn't the only one but there was a handful of us who weren't that way I mean when I, I, my parents. I remember they woke my sister and I up to watch Alan Shepard's launch and of course we're on the West Coast he launched at 6am on the East Coast that was a early get up for a couple little kids and you know sitting there watching on my TV at three in the morning. And then we watched Gus Grissom and then we watched John Glenn and then we complained enough that they said okay you don't have to get up in the morning anymore to watch these things and for me. I'm glad they did it but for me it was never anything that I thought I could ever do. And maybe it's because I wasn't a morning person and the thought of getting up that early to go to work in the field. But so I took a kind of a circuitous route and actually Dan if you measure my success in life based on what my goals were in high school. I'm a feather growing up in the shadow of LA airport father my father was a great aeronautical engineer. My mother was a stewardess they called him in those days for American Airlines and before she married my father they had to quit when they got married in those days. Her best friends some of them, their husbands were United airline pilots and dear friends of our family so I was exposed aviation at LA airport going to the beach watching planes overhead and I thought I thought that would be a great job to be an airline pilot. The problem I had was I couldn't figure out how to get flying lessons couldn't do that at LA international airport and the next nearest airport was too far away for me to ride my bike to. And, and then I heard about this place called the Air Force Academy one day literally hitching a ride to the beach with a friend. His brother was home from college, and he said hey my brother's home and he'll drive us to the beach I rode my bike over there I think I was 12 years old. And on the way to the beach, I was in the back of the station wagon I yelled up front I said hey Dan where do you go to college and he said, I go to the Air Force Academy. And I said what's that. And he said well it's a school in Colorado you go there for four years when you graduate, they teach out of fly jets and you fly jets for the Air Force. And I said, well, how long do you have to serve. He said five years. Could you get out and be an airline pilot after that he said yeah a lot of guys do that. And that day in the back of the station wagon built to me and Dan to me driving. I decided I was going to go to the Air Force Academy that was my goal, but not to serve my country, not to be an astronaut. I mean not for noble reasons, but because it was the only way I could in my 12 year old brain rationalize how I could get flying lessons. And worked out. It did. So you know you talk about, you know, they used to say, you know, back in the day the right stuff right there was the original Mercury astronauts, they called the right stuff. How would you define that I mean obviously there's only a fraction of people who actually get to go into space. What are like the, you obviously must be in great physical condition. What are the other requirements for the men and women who want to be part of the space program what kind of a background or they have to have and what kind of training do they go through. Well, so in the shuttle program. Of course we had to fly the vehicle and land the vehicle so the kind of going back to the history of Mercury Gemini and Apollo, every astronaut, except one in that program that flew were test pilots. And so the right stuff piece was really Tom Wolf's book talking about the test pilots, and what they needed to have to be test pilots and so on the show program that was still true. So I went to the Air Force test pilot school, other most for all the pilots now the mission specialists didn't have to be test pilots and we had like Kathy Thornton, a PhD nuclear physicist. And we had Ricky, a, an engineer, master's degree in engineering tremendous engineer and who had who had developed rendezvous software in the early stages of the shuttle program. We had flight test engineers who also graduates of the test pilot school like Pierre and Tom Acres who were on on this flight. So that was, that was what we needed then. And we had medical doctors as astronauts we had other kinds of engineers and scientists, but what you'll find is NASA is going to always recruit the talent they need for what they're about to go do. So, when we go back to the moon, it'll be probably a different talents that we're going to go back to the capsules and away from a winged vehicle that you have to land. And so, perhaps there'll be less emphasis on the test pilot requirement, more on other areas. And we'll see what what NASA recruits. This is a question from Jacob Felden who's in ninth grade at the Fox Lane High School. This is kind of this is sort of there's actually this is a there's another question is related this I'm going to ask both of them, and let you answer them. Do you think that as a nation, the United States should be dedicating more of our monetary resources to space exploration and innovation. I think it's better spent in other branches of the government or military. And on a related note to that, given current events what's your, what you take on the SpaceX program and, you know, the whole, the whole privatization of spaceflight. Great. Thanks for your question. You know, I don't think it's an either or I mean clearly we have to spend money to preserve our freedoms, national defense, national security. But I think part of national security is American global leadership in areas that you know as President Kennedy said that are very difficult. And we choose to do things that are difficult. And human spaceflight is difficult. And exploration of Mars even with robot robots is difficult. And for all the other exploration programs we have for on man that JPL runs are so important. And I truly believe it's important for America to lead in this area. And if you look at the budgets, the budgets today for NASA are more than twice what they were when I was flying the space shuttle in the 1990s so we have invested and increased the budget and we're moving off on what I think is the right path, which is the right transportation to and from the International Space Station with alternative means and something like a space shuttle and we just saw that happen with SpaceX which was tremendously exciting and we'll see Boeing do the same thing with their craft here later this year. We'll have two different types of vehicles that can take us astronauts to and from the space station, and then we're going to develop the space launch system and the Orion capsule, and many more vehicles that will take us back to the moon to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, and then ultimately on to Mars. And I think it matters that the next person to stand on a moon plants a US flag. It matters in the way people look at it as global leaders. Absolutely. Absolutely. A question I'm sure you probably get a lot is, what was your most frightening experience for you personally was it during training, you get the jitters before every launch. I've ever had a moment where you've been, you know, very nervous about what may or may not happen. On launch day, I called myself the most fatalistic human on the planet. On all three flights after strapping in, I fell asleep. That's how relaxed I was. And I was so relaxed because, you know, spiritually I'd taken care of what I needed to take care of. I'm a member, I'm a Catholic. I've been a confession. I've received the Eucharist. In fact, I carried the Eucharist into space with the blessings of my pastor on all three missions. So, you know, I was right with my God. And I was good there. I also had great confidence in my crews and in the crews on the ground. And I knew that everybody in NASA, who was involved in this program had done their very best to make sure we would be safe and successful. And there's still the chance for mistakes. And we know that tragically from two shuttle missions that we lost. But that, you know, people were dedicated, really dedicated in NASA. And so that gave me confidence. For me, the hardest thing was, which is different than frightening is was seven days before launch, we went into quarantine. So we wouldn't be infected by people. Now it's 14 days, right? Because of COVID. 17 days to a piece of cake. Yeah, they quarantine. We were just seven days. But the night I went into quarantine every time was tucking my children into bed. And then leaving them. Because, you know, there was a lot of risk involved in this, this job. And I wanted my children to have a dad. That was really hard for me. And I think most astronauts will tell you that's the most difficult part of spaceflight is kissing your children and your wife or husband. Goodbye. Before you leave. Um, before we get some great questions. So everybody, thank you very much. Keep it. Keep it coming. We're going to ask Kevin as many of them as we can. Before we get into some of these, can you talk a little bit about Stratcom and a little bit about what it is and what it does. Yes. So Stratcom has changed over the years. A lot of people confuse it with SAC, Strategic Air Command, which went away. SAC went away actually in 1991 when the Cold War ended, or went on pause, I should say. And a new command was set up called US Strategic Command. And it had most of the same missions that SAC had before, which was the nuclear deterrent mission. But later it grew, the missionaries grew. And when I was in command in 2007 to 2011, we not only had the nuclear deterrent mission, which put us in charge of all of our nuclear armed submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the bomber force. We also were in charge of DOD cyber. So defending the DOD networks and if ordered conducting offensive operations through cyberspace. And we were given the space mission. So we were in charge of all DOD space operations. And so it was a very broad set of responsibilities and a great organization. And just then we have a brand new command that stood up called US Cyber Command. So that mission left Stratcom. And that happened just a couple years ago. And then this year, this past year, US Space Command stood up and took that mission away from Stratcom. So Stratcom today is pretty much back to mainly doing the nuclear deterrent mission. But when I was there is a little more complicated and really excited. It's less stressful than flying into space, right? I guess with the responsibilities that come with that. I don't know. I don't know. We had some pretty interesting times there and some exciting missions we had to execute. One was the intercept of a wayward satellite. I don't know if folks remember that. There was a satellite that had been launched by the National Reconnaissance Office and it never turned on. So it too is stuck in low earth orbit. The problem was because it never turned on the rocket fuel inside the satellite froze. And we knew it would re-enter eventually. And when it did, we were highly confident that that fuel tank would survive re-entry and when it hit the ground, this rocket fuel is very toxic. And so the decision was made to have Stratcom pull together a plan to intercept that satellite before it re-entered. Just before it re-entered. We wanted to do it low so we didn't create a lot of debris like the Chinese did when they did their anti-satellite test. That was a cliffhanger. And it was a great mission that this tremendous team, I think we had 16 different agencies of the US government participating to make that happen under Stratcom's leadership. And we successfully accomplished that mission. So there were tense moments every time. All right, let's go to some questions from some of our audience here. Ben Trotta, who is eight years old, wants to know how long does it take to build a spaceship or I guess a shuttle? What's the construction time? Yeah, Dan, good questions. For Endeavor, fortunately, what Endeavor was birthed out of spare parts. So when they built the last shuttle, which I believe was Atlantis, it turned out it wasn't the last shuttle. It was the newest shuttle at the time in 1986. They also had a spare set of wings, a spare tail, and a spare landing gear, a few piece parts that in case they were anticipated, if they had a problem on landing, a landing gear collapse, damage the wing, it would be nice to have a spare. Well, of course, sadly, we lost the Challenger and the crew, and the decision was made to replace it. So Challenger was lost in January of 86, and we flew Endeavor in May of 92. So that's how long it took to build something that already had some parts put together. So it's not uncommon to take close to a decade from conception to first flight. And it goes, and first flight is literally first flight. There's no shakedown crews. There's no, you can't really, right? You have to just, whatever the mission is, is the mission. You don't have the opportunity to really test fly it. That's a great point. On the capsule flights for Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and even SpaceX, there were unmanned flights that were flown with the capsule to make sure it would work. With the space shuttle, that wasn't the case. And that's a great admiration for John Young and Bob Crippen, who were the crew of the first space shuttle flight on Columbia. That was the first time in history someone launched into space on a rocket on its first flight. And it is a very complicated vehicle. You think about it, the space shuttle is a rocket for launch. When it gets to orbit, it becomes a spaceship. On reentry, it's a hypersonic glide vehicle, and ultimately it turns into a subsonic glide vehicle that doesn't glide very well that you land on a runway. And to make that all work, to design that, the engineers who came up and designed that were just brilliant. A couple of people are asking kind of a similar question. How did it feel? Like how's weightlessness, how is the whole experience of being in space? Well, my two favorite things are being weightless and the view out the window. When you're weightless, you're Superman all day long. That's the easiest way to put it. You don't walk around the space shuttle. You want to go down the ladder to the mid-deck, you fly down there. You want to cross the mid-deck or cross the cockpit, you push off and float across. It is the most, I mean, it's just so liberating and fun. In fact, you do things, you know, for all the young people in the audience who have been told countless times as I was not to play with my food at the dinner table. We found ourselves playing with our food every night because you could do really fun things in zero gravity. Well, that's actually the next question. The next question is, what's the food like and how did you eat it? I mean, is it the same as you used to be able to get at the Smithsonian, the freeze-dried ice cream, and have they improved at any since then? Actually, that was a commercial venture. We did not fly freeze-dried ice cream, so that was not part of the menu. But hey, you know, if you've ever had a meal ready to eat, which is kind of what the military uses, that was typically our main courses. So a packaged main course, maybe it'd be spaghetti and meatballs, maybe you'd be stroganoff that you just heated the package up, cut it with scissors and ate it with a spoon. A lot of the other foods were freeze-dried. So you added water, heated it up, maybe kneaded it a little bit. Some things were right off the shelf, pudding cups, M&Ms, beef jerky, things like that. They just bought at the store and packed in our pantry and ate. You couldn't take bread up there because there was no way to keep it fresh and the crumbs would be a problem, so we carried tacos. And so lunch was typically jar of skippy peanut butter and you'd slap a spoonful of peanut butter on a taco and get back to work. Morning and evening meals were a little more, we had a little more time to enjoy them. And we tried to enjoy them as a crew and eat family style, which was nice. So the food was good. And back to the view out the window, my second favorite thing is it is so humbling to be in a position to observe the Earth. You know, we're not, we didn't have the view that the Apollo astronauts had from the moon. We're en route to the moon, we could see the whole planet, we're only up about 250 miles. And so you could see about four, you can see quite a ways around you and quite a bit of detail. And it was just absolutely gorgeous. The site's just, the sun rows are set every 45 minutes and every sunrise and sunset was beautiful. Believe it or not, you know, I had visions of what I thought would be the most beautiful places on Earth to see from space. And of course, I thought of mountains and forests, because those are beautiful on Earth, but they weren't. The most beautiful area to look at in my view was the Sahara Desert, which in every geography book is shown as just yellow. It's not. It's, I call it God's Palate. It's like an artist palates with brushstrokes for the sand dunes running for hundreds and hundreds of miles and orange sand dunes and yellow sand dunes and sinkholes that are salt domes that have collapsed giant lava flows. And in the low light of morning or sunset, just spectacularly beautiful. This is a question that's related to the clip we watched earlier. What would have happened if you had run out of fuel on that third try? Or was there, I guess, a backup plan so that you wouldn't know you would not run out of fuel? No, if we'd got down to where it looked like we were going to run out of fuel, we would have separated from the satellite. And the fuel tanks that were that were most critical for that rendezvous that we were keeping track of the remaining fuel where the fuel tanks in the nose of the shuttle, which are right under the cockpit, and they control the forward jets. And you have jets in the nose and jets in the tail and they have to balance. So as you approach, now the four jets fire and the aft jets fire to break or accelerate as you're approaching the satellite. And the fuel on the aft tanks. And in fact, those tanks are the fuel we used to do our deorbit burn. So that wasn't the problem. The problem was just in the front. And we didn't need those front jets for reentry. So it would have just been mission failure. And the satellite would have been stuck in low earth orbit and never would have worked. By the way, the satellite, the rocket motor successfully took it to its geostationary orbit over the Atlantic. And it was the relay satellite that brought us the Barcelona Olympics to the United States. So you can watch them on television in 1992 that summer. Dream team. Thank you for the dream team. What was the temperature outside the craft when they were working on the satellite. You know, this is why those spacesuits are so well engineered and so special and why you saw a cafe when she was floating around she was wearing a white suit with tubes in it have liquid running through the garment to keep the astronauts body temperature, either cool when you're in the sun or warm and on the dark side of the earth but can be over 200 degrees above Fahrenheit in the sun and 150 below Fahrenheit in the shade, or on the dark side of the earth. The suit had to be able to tolerate that. So a big part of the backpack on the back is not just the air you breathe, but it's the life support system that keeps your body temperature at the right at the right temperature. If someone wants to get a job at NASA today. How do they do that today, can they apply directly they need to join the military what's the procedure. NASA NASA needs all kinds of talent, not just astronaut they need engineers they need secretaries they need, we need, you know, sanitation specialist they need all every just you can't imagine all the different talents they need. And, believe it or not when I applied to be an astronaut I filled out a civil service form, and in the little blank on the form that said what position are you applying for, I wrote astronaut. So it's a civil service job. And, and you know, you could look it up online or contact NASA and tell them what you're interested in and apply. And what are the, if someone is interested in joining the academies you were the Air Force Academy. Why, what are the, if someone is a high school student looking to join the Academy or attend one, what are the qualifications that they look for is it. Is it a combination of academics and other things or is it at least the beginning straight academics. Yeah, no, it's, it's absolutely a combination, you know, they, when you at the Air Force Academy, the most difficult thing at the Air Force Academy is time management, and they do that intentionally. And the product from the Air Force Academy besides a college graduate with a great education is a lieutenant who is meant to be a leader of men and women. And so they want somebody that has done very well in academics and school, but at the same time has played sports, athletics has maybe been part of student council has been in the church choir has done volunteer work in their community. They're looking for someone that is very well rounded and shows that they have the talent to not only be good academically. But there they can be good academically while doing other things and have shown leadership potential. There's a lot of cadets that come in that are Eagle Scouts. It's another great opportunity to demonstrate that you can set a tough goal for yourself and achieve it. And that's the kind of people that they're looking at for both the men and women who go to the Air Force Academy today. That's a great institution to get in. You know, you can go online and find out who the local liaison officer is for wherever you live, there should be one and contact the liaison officer. But you also have to be nominated by either your congressman or a senator from your state. And that's one of the first things I did is I wrote my congressman and I wrote my two senators and said, I want to go to the Air Force Academy what do I need to do. I went back and said, take a civil service exam, send us your SAT scores. We want to see your GPA tell us about yourself and eventually led to an interview process. I actually never met any of these people. They had somebody interview us and that's how I was selected. We have a question here. What, what are you allowed to bring if anything, like in terms of personal effects when you go. Yeah, you're allowed to bring a little sack about this big little cloth sack of items and so I brought little pieces of jewelry for my children and my wife, and my parents and siblings, and, and you could bring in NASA flew patches for the crew, and which we then gave out to people who supported our mission, and, and also the family and friends made a montage afterwards so there was very strictly controlled everything was inventory that we brought and, and you had to have permission to take everything on board. There's a couple of people, Owen who's in sixth grade and Ashley who's in sixth grade are kind of asking the same question, you ever get motion sickness, either I guess on takeoff or landing. That's those are great questions on and Ashley, you know in the shuttle program, about 50% of the astronauts when they flew got sick. And it was an experience that we weren't really used to and Gemini and Mercury didn't happen at all. It happened in Apollo, and it happened. It didn't happen in the first two because everybody was strapped in so tightly and Apollo was the first time they had room to float around inside. And we had a lot of room in the shuttle. And it's really interesting, because I had flown fighter aircraft I was a test pilot. I was used to high G's. I love roller coasters. I've been sick in my life in any of those circumstances. And here on my first flight I get to orbit in about 90 minutes after we're up there I get nauseous. And 90 minutes later I get nauseous again and 90 minutes later I get nauseous again think thankfully then we went to bed, and I took some medications some anti nausea medication. The good news is the 50% of us that have these symptoms, they usually are gone in 24 hours so the next morning I woke up. Didn't feel much like eating but I didn't feel sick and by lunchtime I had lunch and everything was fine. But there's no, there's nothing we can do to predict who's going to have that problem or not, which is still kind of interesting. Since you just mentioned it how do you sleep when you're up there. And so we had sleeping bags that were very light canvas, and they were kind of like a mummy bag so you'd call and say to put your arms out there are arm holes, and you zipped it up and your head stuck out the top. I like the feeling of a pillow so NASA thinks of everything of course so there was a foam block on the back of it, and you strapped your head to the phone block with a strap and a piece of Velcro. Otherwise, your head wouldn't rest on the pillow so I had this pressure on the back of my head from the phone block which fell like a pillow. The corners of the sleeping bag were French hooks, and I would just hook those to the instrument panels on the flight deck, and I would float about three feet off the floor of the flight deck, and with a view out the overhead windows of the earth. And I would sit there and fall asleep, looking at planet Earth going by, which is great. What is the longest time that you were actually in space and what were the effects. How did you readjust when you came back. So the first mission was nine days the second was 11 the third was nine. I found my readaptation and I measured that by saying okay, if you asked me, you know, do you feel like you went into space today is not the moment I could say, or have just come back from the space moment I could say no I know no feelings of that at all. That was my recovery time and the first flight took about 48 hours. And some of the symptoms are balance issues, you feel incredibly heavy it's difficult to sleep you lay in your bed you feel like you weigh 1000 pounds. You're, you're, you're recovering from dehydration. And some neuromuscular issues which relates to the balance issue as well. The second flight which was two years later, and longer, I recovered in 24 hours, half the time. And the third flight which was two years later, I recovered in 12 hours. And so and none of this was anything had anything to do with me consciously doing something different. It was my body, knowing what to do to recover and read that which I found very fascinating. And the same was true going to space I adapted more quickly on each flight without doing anything consciously. But I think that's one of the fascinating things about the human body is its ability to adapt to different environments. All right, we have, we have time for a couple more. Here's a couple of fun ones I'm going to ask these both together. Can you actually see the Great Wall of China, like people say you can. Did you ever see the UFOs? No, I didn't. We did see some other things up there, but they were pointed out from the ground they said if you look at your window at this time you might see another satellite we did. We did see a comet on my second flight. And one of the most beautiful things on my second flight was to see the southern lights, which we're and we were in the dark side of the earth and this down at the southern tip of South America, and saw what's called the Aurora It was like the Aurora Borealis, but at the South Pole, and we were about 110 miles and it looked like we were flying through the curtain. It was just gorgeous and unique. And so now I look for the Great Wall of China and the reason you can't see it is because it's made out of the same material that it's laying on top of, and there's no contrast and it runs along the tops of mountains and so that doesn't stand out. Let's do two more Kevin if you don't mind. This one is just a comment. This one is from Morgan Chilton who says hi dad. And then this is, we'll close with this one. Did you ever get to meet any of the earlier astronauts, whether it be the Mercury or Gemini Apollo guys. And if so, what was it like to meeting the meeting them I mean, did you ever get to meet John Glenn or any of those guys. Absolutely first I love you. Yes, John, John Young was there the whole time we were there and what a fantastic guy you know he flew the first Gemini mission. He flew another Gemini mission. He went to the moon on Apollo 10, which just circled the moon. And then he went and walked on the moon on Apollo 16 I believe. And this guy, and then he flew the very first space shuttle mission and then he flew another time. So he flew in a space six times. One, two, three, four different spaceships and walked on the moon. And he was just a wealth of knowledge and experience. And when John Glenn came back to fly in the shuttle. I was still in the office at a chance to meet and John and a chance to meet Neil Armstrong buzz Aldrin. You know, Harrison Schmidt, Jack Schmidt who walked on the moon. All those guys they'd come for reunions. And they were happy to share their experiences and their stories. And the same with the mission control Jean Krantz, the story flight director from Apollo 13. He was still working there. And so you just learn so much by being able to be with these great, great heroes of the 1960s and early stages of the shuttle. And thank you very much. This was really, really great. Speaking just for myself as a fan of the space program. It was a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you to everybody who submitted questions. If I'm sorry we didn't get to all of them maybe Kevin will come back at some point and we'll do the rest of them down the road. So we really, I always say the next day our next day in the life series is June 15 with news 12 TV reporter Lisa Larroca. So if you're interested that you can register for that on our website. Kevin, this was great. Again, thank you so much. We really sincerely appreciate your helping us out. Thanks for Playhouse.org is our website where you can get more information about all of our upcoming programs streaming films, donations, memberships, the whole nine yards. So thanks again and have a good night everybody. Thanks Dan thanks to all who joined and Dan I hope you open up soon and get back to doing live performance. Thank you Kevin knock wood. Have a good one. Bye bye.