What Will It Take to Get Back to the Moon w/ Andrew Chaikin #60

Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite. Throughout history, we've seen humanity undergo transformational shifts that are so impactful, they define entire ages. Just recently, we lived through the information age, and what an incredible journey it's been. Now think about this. You could be very well on the in the midst of another monumental shift, the transformation into the age of infinite.

We're talking about an age that transcends the concepts of scarcity and abundance. It introduces a lifestyle rich with infinite possibilities, established by a new paradigm that links the moon and the earth into a term we call Mearth. This synergy will create a new ecosystem and an economic model propelling us into an era of infinite possibilities. It does sound like a plot for an extraordinary sci fi story, but this is the story you'll see unfold in your lifetime.

This podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation. We look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon. By the way, we were named by NASA. That's how we got the name. Through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. Then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.

For more information, you go to our website, www.projectmoonhot.org, where you can check out our 40 year plan, the work we're working on, and so much more. There is a lot being generated on that website. As a matter of fact, you should check out the 4 the Project Moon Hut classification system right under the 40 year plan. Absolutely amazing work by the team. We are a nonprofit. So while you're there, consider making a donation by clicking on the button up on top.

So let's dive into our podcast today. The name the title of the program today is, what will it take to get back to the moon? And today, we have another fabulous guest with us. We have Andrew Chaikin. How are you, Andrew? I'm very well, David. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to it. So as always, we do a very brief bio. Andrew is an independent space historian, best known as the author of A Man on the Moon, The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts.

He's a visiting instructor at NASA since 2010, a member of the geology and geophysics imaging team of the New Horizons missions to Pluto and to the caper belt. He's also a member of NASA's Engineering Safety Center's Human Factors Technological Discipline team. I barely can get that out. He is a recipient of 2 NASA Group Achievement Awards and a recipient of the American Astronaut Astronautical Society's Ordway Award for Sustainable Excellence in Space History.

Those are a lot of tongue twisters in there. So be before we start, and this we've had to add this only because individuals have commented that I know what's going on in this interview, that how do I come up with all these questions? Let me be clear to you, and Andrew can attest to this. I know nothing about what Andrew's going to talk about. He and I and every guest since that have been on a program, we get on and we discuss the title of the topic. We don't go into any depth.

I don't have any of the content. Then Andrew is allowed to go out. He does his own thing. He comes up with his own program, and this is the first time I'm hearing anything. I do not know where he's going. I don't know what he's going to cover. I've not heard the bullet points. This is live. I have a piece of paper in front of me. And and during a typical interview, I take 13 to 17 pages of notes. So I'm live with you learning at the same time you are asking real questions in real time.

So let's get started. Andrew, do you like Andy or Andrew? Andy's fine. Okay. Because I just looked in this bottom of your corner of your screen, and it said Yeah. It's, okay. It's Andrew in print, but Andy to friends and and, So I've become a friend is what you're saying. I've I've I've crossed over that. You're on the inside, David. Okay. So, Andy, do you have an outline or set of bullet points for us?

I do, and I wanna say, before we even start, that this has been a very interesting and rewarding process for me because I the stuff I'm gonna talk about today, I've been teaching at NASA and other places like the Missile Defense Agency since 2016. So I have a lot of miles, on the on the odometer talking about this stuff, but having to come up with these bullet points really was interesting and rewarding because it got me to think about communicating this material in a different way.

So I'm really glad that we've that we're doing this. The the I have found, and you're not the only person who has said, this journey and I think you had about 2 months, but this journey for typical, guest on any of the podcasts, we've done over about 400 since I've started doing this process. Almost every guest said I had to rethink things. I had to change the verbiage. I had to change the the direction in which I normally deliver it.

And, we've had people after a program I shared with you just earlier. I would say, you've gotta send this to me. I have a book deadline tomorrow or the next day. He said, I need to add things in here I've never said before. So that's great. So I'm glad I'm glad you had an experience with it. I wasn't sure if you were gonna like me or not, but at least we're this far. So Yeah. So let's go over the, the bullet points. How many do you have so I know? I have 7 bullet points.

Okay. Number 1, the first one, please. Rocket science is not enough. Rocket science is not enough. Number 2. The stories we tell ourselves. Stories we tell ourselves. Number 3. Beware the reality distortion field. Reality distortion field. Number 4. Understand the risks. Stand the risks. Number 5. Number 5 is beware us versus them thinking. Versus them thinking. Number 6. Awareness has a shelf life. Has a self life. And number 7? Proper paranoia. Paranoia. Proper paranoia.

Sometimes people give me words that I I just don't know how to spell, so I'm glad that I I think I spell paranoia properly. Alright. So let's dig in. Let's start with number 1. Sure. Actually, before I do that, I wanted to just say a little bit about my path and how I got to this point because I didn't start out looking at the stuff I'm gonna talk about. And I don't think that when you and I spoke last time, you gave me a lot of your history. So this is great.

Yeah. Yeah. And and, you know, I I mean, David, you're you've said very clearly and and repeatedly you're not a space guy, and I'm glad that I have a chance to to, interact with you about this material because your reactions will be, you know, very instructive to me. I am a space guy from the time I was a little kid. I mean, I grew up with it.

I was 5 years old when Alan Shepard and Yuri Gagarin, actually not in that order, the other the reverse order became the first humans in space, and I was just captivated by the idea of going to another world. I had picture books with what it would be like to walk on the moon or go to Mars or float in the rings of Saturn, all of that stuff. When I went to I'm gonna I'm gonna let me just break it for a moment because it's a question. I say I'm not a space guy.

You've you heard that in the first time we met. I've told that to people all the time. I don't sit here and look up all the time. I I do admire people who've done the work, but I look I like the grass. I like the going outside. I like Earth, I guess is the way to say it. When you say Not mutually exclusive, though, by the way. Right. Right. Well, yes. I love when people will say, well, we're going to the moon, and they talk it as a, like, a a celestial body. We're on a celestial body. Exactly.

You you can't you can't you can't say what is a celestial body and we're not. You can't use the word lunar because we have to talk properly about the lunar. Well, when you pick up dirt outside, do you call it terraforma?

No. And you're you're you're, articulating something that I feel very strongly about, and that I think is one of the great gifts of being interested in astronomy and space exploration, which is I go outside and I love the grass too, and I love the blue sky, but I always am aware that beyond that blue sky is a universe, and it's so cool. I love that. I love that. I just what I was gonna ask you was that trigger.

Like, why are some people I guess it could be fashion or dance or music or whatever category it is, but that feeling of being in awe that made you pursue it. Yeah. I just would love to understand the biological, the psychological, the sociological components of how someone becomes in so much love. You know what I'm asking? I can only tell you that it was it was in me from a very very early age. I mean, I literally remember it going back to when I was 5 years old.

And I don't know what put it there other than the fact that maybe my my mom got me a book about space. I I I, you know, and then I started taking them out of the library. I don't know. And, you know, I've heard people I've heard space people say that trying to explain this to a person that doesn't feel it is pointless. It's like the the Louis Armstrong they this is what they said to me. It's like Louis Armstrong's quote about jazz. If you have to ask, baby, you'll never know.

But I have seen people become odd by looking at the moon through a telescope for the first time in their lives, seeing the pictures that we get from the space probes, hearing an astronaut talk about what it was like to walk on the moon. Those things can awaken that awe or just any But that's no different than anything.

If I if you don't like carpentry and then I showed you the nuances of carpentry or if you're not a good dancer and you had a good instructor and next thing you know, you were able to have a dance with your daughter for a wedding and you you really do you say, oh my god. I didn't know I I love dance this much. So that that eye opening side of it is the challenge. It's how do you get that eye opening? And and that's a challenge that, you know, is part of our obligation.

If we believe in this, we have to be able to spark that in our audience. So I've worked on it continuously for all of my adult life. I've been in this business of communicating space since I stopped being a planetary science researcher in 1980 and became a science journalist. So just Maybe maybe one day maybe one day, I will wake up and have that. It's been a long time. Hey. You know, maybe the day that you actually get to spend your 1st night sleeping in the moon hut, you know.

I don't even think about it. I just know that we have to do it. So let's go back. Let's hear your history. Give me give me some things about your history so that we can under I can understand you better. By the time I was in high school, college, the Apollo Apollo was happening when I was in junior high and high school, and I was glued to the TV for every Apollo mission, and I was really So so you're in the 5th you're about 5th in the fifties?

Well, I I was 13 in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. So I was born in 1956. So I wanted to be an astronaut more than anything, And I was watching these missions wishing I could just, you know, become part of the Apollo program somehow at age 13. And I by the time I was in high school, the robotic missions were kicking into high gear. We were starting to get unbelievable pictures back from the Mars Orbiter, Mariner 9. We had rocks from the moon that geologists were looking at.

You know, the the Mariner pictures of Mars were showing us volcanoes 3 times higher than Mount Everest and canyons, the length of the United States, and ancient river valleys, and all kinds of wonders. And I said, I wanna be a planetary geologist because that is I've all I've always been a science person as well as somebody who's very turned on by art. In fact, it was the artwork in my childhood astronomy books that really sparked my interest more than anything.

But I was also very fascinated by science, so I decided to study geology in college. And as luck would have it, well, not luck. I consciously applied to Brown University because, and I got in, and my adviser was the was the leader of the camera team for the Viking Mars landers. So I ended up being an intern on the Viking mission at the Jet Propulsion Lab, 3 summers in a row, including the summer of those landings, Viking 1 and Viking 2. And a really interesting thing happened, David.

It was unbelievable to be in inside for a mission like that, see the first pictures come back from the surface of Mars. But I realized as I watched the scientists at work that I wasn't sure that I wanted to do that. You know? I love I love the subject. I've never lost my love of the subject. But did I wanna be a practicing scientist day to day? I was too much kind of split between left brain and right brain. I I had too much going on with the desire to do, space art.

I was becoming a amateur singer songwriter. I was thinking, jeez, maybe I'd like to do that. And I didn't know what I wanted to do for a while. I mean, it took a few years after college before I landed, and and I had spent about a year and a half as a planetary science researcher at the Air and Space Museum in DC. But I finally, almost by luck, became a science journalist in 1980 at a magazine called Sky and Telescope, which is very well known to amateur astronomers.

And from there, you know, this was kind of a renaissance or a boom in in, science journalism at that time in the early eighties. I started writing for other magazines. By 1984, I really was setting my sights on writing a book, and what I landed on was a book about the Apollo astronauts. I wanted to know I still was so smitten with that Apollo experience, and I wanted to understand it. I wanted to get inside it.

I wanted to know what was it like to go to the moon, to actually walk on another world or orbit another world for the first time in human history, and how did it affect the 24 people who got to do that. So that's when I started working in in 1984 on a man on the moon. It took me well, from 1984, it was about 10 years before it came out. And it took part of that was just, number 1, getting the astronauts to talk to me.

Yeah. But part of it, I have to say, was learning to become a storyteller that would live up to the amazing material that I was writing about. And that was as much a reason why it took 8 years as anything else. So in the process of writing A Man on the Moon, I turned myself into a space historian. I already knew about the geology of the Moon, so I was able to comprehend the science. I basically had I had a basic understanding of the technology, and I learned a lot more.

I was already sensitive to human behavior and was of course, that was very helpful in interviewing the astronauts about their experiences and their relationships with each other and so on to the and all of this was in the service of being a storyteller that I could tell a compelling story. So I I'm gonna what's the once what's the biggest surprise? Doesn't have to be a story you've told before.

Was that actually wouldn't something where you've kind of never really shared it was the thing where you said, wow. I never even thought about that. What would be that one out of all of the interviews you've done? Well, it's actually true of many of them. Not all of them, but many of them. I had I had been thinking about this so much, and I hadn't been imagining myself going to the moon.

And I just was sure that if you got to go to the moon, that it would be what I called a a zap, you know, that it would blow every fuse in your head for a while. And, you know, you'd you'd be carrying around that zap inside of you for the rest of your life. And what I found was with a few exceptions, a cut really, just a handful of exceptions, it was not really that kind of a zap for these guys. They were first and foremost professionals.

They were doing this because they were the best at being test pilots, fighter pilots, and they were given this job that had tremendous importance to the nation, and they were all very all one of them had been military, and and that was very important to them. They did experience awe on the flights. I don't wanna paint them as people who were not Of course. Receptive to the experience. But several of them said to me, it didn't change me. I'm the same guy I was before I went.

Now, the exceptions, and you may have heard of Ed Mitchell, who founded the Institute For Noetic Sciences and was extremely interested in the nature of consciousness. He talked about a consciousness raising experience that he had looking at the Earth as Apollo 14 headed home from the moon. And that was a really interesting aspect of my book. Then Jim But let me I'm I'm I wanna for you, not what they so you heard all these stories.

Yes. What was the thing for you then that was I mean, you just mentioned this reality this realization that it wasn't as big. It was a big deal. I'm not trying to downplay it, but it was just another human going through another experience. What did that do to you? It was frustrating to a lot of the time. And I and I You you wanted to find, like, the you wanted to find the diamond. He ended up finding Yeah. I know. Normal normal digging. But but, you know, I also came to understand, hey.

My job here is not to impose my preconceptions on this experience. My job is to tell the story of how it really was for these guys. And I think, however, it ends up being, it's an incredibly rich story because even if you're talking about a test pilot who's just devoted to the checklist, that guy is still one of the first humans to leave the Earth and go to another world, and, by the way, he's experiencing his own moments of awe. That that's my point.

You are you are putting on top of these individuals your expectations. Right. But the and that's why I was that's why I was kinda digging to hear if you found something. And I'll it's a very short story. I'm with a multi billionaire. He asked me to go out and have some dinner as because I had been working with them and we sit down and we're talking. And at one person at one point, he just looks at me and says, I work late at night. And I'm looking at him, like, I'm not sure how to respond.

And I said, why do you work late at night? And he has a hun it's, you know, it's a 50,000, a 100,000 employees, whatever the number was. I don't remember. And he said to me, why I work late at night because if I work late at night, others will work late at night. And it wasn't about making money. It was about a work ethic that he thought if he stayed and worked late at night, others work late at night.

And when you when you hear that from an individual who's got 1,000,000,000, I stopped and said, like I have many times with individuals I've met around the world, I've said, just like us, the same. Different challenges, different obstacles to overcome. He's working till 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night just so that 50,000 other people will work late at night, not for money. Does he think that's the best way to run the organization?

Yeah. And you're you're you're taking aback for a moment and you're saying to yourself, okay, wait, what just happened here? And I didn't put him on a pedestal. I've been working with him already, but that was an out of the blue quest comment. So in your case, did that influence what you heard from these people in this matter matter of fact nothing you know, wasn't as big?

Did that have an influence on the activities that you are engaged in or the way you presented your content or the way you look at your life? Well, I'm I'm happy to say that I was able to come to this realization pretty early on in the writing in the research and writing process. While I was still interviewing these guys, I came to that realization. And so Okay. I adjusted.

And, you know, there might still be a moment here and there where I would be, you know, trying to get something out of them that I wasn't getting. And by the way, there were others who yeah. They were they were still test pilots of fire pods, but they were very expressive about the amazingness of the experience. Right. Right. It it's the type of thing you're having a conversation. He says, yeah. That was cool.

But but, you know, in 7 years ago, I was doing this flyby, and I was doing this, and I was flipping and averted. You know? So he's excited about that. Well, I have to tell you something. I have to tell you something. Dave's let's just take one guy and I won't I promise I won't take up a lot of time with this. No. No. It's okay. So Apollo 15. It's the first of the kind of full up science expeditions.

They had a a lunar rover for the first time, they had an upgraded lunar lander, they had enough supplies to stay for 3 full days on the surface of the moon. So, you know, they did 3 moonwalks for the first time. They went miles over the surface in this lunar rover. They went to the edge of a ginormous lunar canyon. They went up the sides of of lunar mountains. And one of the rocks they picked up dated back almost to the formation of the moon, it was nicknamed the Genesis Rock.

The commander of that mission was an air force test pilot named Dave Scott. Dave was phenomenal. He was a phenomenal interview. I spent, you know, sick 2 sessions, each of which lasted hours, hours and hours at a restaurant in Los Angeles.

It was amazing to hear him talk, not only about his experiences on the moon, but his perspective and how he taught me things about flying, like how you fly in lunar gravity, which is different from flying anything else, because the gravity being 1 6th and you don't have an atmosphere, all you have is the thrust of your rocket engine to to let you steer.

So you gotta tilt you gotta tilt to one side to get some of that thrust pointed off in the direction you wanna go, And then you gotta tilt the other way to stop, and it was just fascinating. So I went through that experience. I wrote the the chapter on Apollo 15. And a a couple years later few years later oh, gosh. 5 years later by this time. So the interviews were 1987, and now I'm at Dave Scott's house in 1992. And we're going over the chapter, which was great.

So I had these guys look at what I wrote, and they told me what I had where I had screwed up and where I had missed a nuance here that they wanted to, you know, illuminate, you know. And at one point, we're reading we're going through the section where he's setting up they're setting up their experiments on the moon and there was a Styrofoam packing material. No, it wasn't Styrofoam. It was some kind of pallet that one of the experiments had been sitting on.

And Dave decided he was gonna have some fun and he spun around and threw it in this one six gravity. And, of course, it's being captured by the rover TV camera and everybody can see it. But he almost fell over and he said to me, you know, it was funny because the mass of the backpack, I started to spin around and I thought I was gonna fall over. But the mass of the backpack kept going in this spin and it it held on my feet. No. It brought me back on my feet. I could put my feet under me.

And I had this moment of just, oh, my God. He's telling me about something that happened to him on the moon one day. Right. Yeah. That's exactly it. Those moments were the gold for me personally. Those moments That that's the goal. That's the human side. I I did look him up. I didn't he did Apollo Gemini 8, Apollo 9, Apollo 15, 91 years old today Yeah. To date. No. James 2nd is his birthday. Yeah. And he's still alive. So maybe we can get him on the program. I don't wanna say that negative way.

He doesn't like to do the he doesn't like to do the No. Okay. But he he I'm just saying that there were these What what surprised me? You know, I didn't know about any of these things. You said lunar rover, lunar lander, 3 full days, moonwalk over the Canyon, the Lunar Mountains agenda. I didn't know any of these things. Oh, it's it's it's amazing. And you see when I wrote the book, a lot of people didn't know we went back to the moon after Apollo 11.

So I had a feeling that And that's a big point Yeah. If you think about it. And I wanted to tell these stories partly that was one of the reasons I wanted to do it because I I really felt that we'd lost touch with this incredible adventure. But so let me just let me just get you up to now. So the book came out in 1994. The the book was read by Tom Hanks while he was making Apollo 13. He called me. I had a chance to visit the set of Apollo 13 a couple of times, the Ron Howard movie.

And Hanks was playing Jim Lovell. And we we kinda connected there. He's a he was a space fan when he was my age. We're the same age. And when he was a kid, he was a space fan. He called me the following year and got me in on the ground floor of what became a 12 part miniseries based largely on my book for HBO. That was my Hollywood moment.

And then, you know, I I wrote a few more books, and the thing that really got me to here was in 2010, I was I had been asked by NASA to teach their engineers a course on space history. And one of the people who took the course was a guy from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland named Ed Rogers, who was the what they called the the chief knowledge officer, which sounds like Star Trek. But it meant that he was the keeper of the lessons learned. And he kinda drew me into his world.

And before I knew it, he and his boss, the center director, were asking me to put down on paper, quote, unquote, how we do this stuff. And this was 2011. And ever since then, I have been delving into writing, researching, teaching the human behavior lessons on success and failure in space flight projects. And it's I never would have thought that I would be in this field, in this endeavor. I'm not a social scientist.

I'm a space historian trained in planetary science, but I have immersed myself in the behaviors that got us to the moon and the lessons from the accidents that NASA has has experienced. And that's what I'm gonna talk about today. And you are focused on, US. You or are you a moon or a space historian, meaning you're covering what the Chinese do and what the Japanese do and what the Russians do? Or are you focused you know the question. Which Yeah. Is it just one or is it, global?

To do this job, to really do this right, you have to delve so deeply. You have to be able to hear directly from the participants. You have to be able to really get inside what people were thinking, what was motivating them, why they made the decisions they made. So, I confess, I have not had the time and bandwidth to stray outside of NASA's history other than I have done some delving into SpaceX, not enough to teach it at the same level, But I that will come.

I will be doing that, in the near future. But, no, it has I went back to Apollo, David, because Apollo is really the closest thing we've ever had to a perfect program. It was not perfect, but it was the closest thing we've ever had. And so it is a beautiful lesson in not only success, but in recovering from tragedy because you may know that they killed the first Apollo crew in a a fire in the capsule while it was still on the launch pad.

So human behavior got them off track and led to that accident, but human behavior So when so when you're looking at Project Moon High Yeah. Talking about fires in the hall and the hatch. Now I understand when you got on your your facial reactions, and I can't see you now, but your facial reactions when you started talking about Project Moon Hut, I was keying into them because you had I don't know.

I felt like and I didn't really I don't do research on people like people would think that I would do. You had a sense of the fascination was in the architecture of what we're working on and how we're trying to do it, and we are doing it. So I thought that I I kinda got that sense out of you when Well we we do we we we do record all of our our calls. So we have thousands of hours. Well, I would say yeah.

And that would be very that would be very interesting, you know, when you when you actually put something on the moon, come back to me. Because then it'll be space history. But but no. I'm I'm, hey, man, I'm fascinated by all of it. I'm fascinated by what motivates people to do these things from the beginning. I'm fascinated by how they think up the concepts. I'm fascinated by how they do it and make it happen. I'm fascinated by what happens to them when they go.

I mean, the whole all of the dimensions and facets of this subject matter are fascinating to me. And I never used to think I would be interested in you know, management to me was always a a snooze. But I have to say, when you get into the behaviors that got us to the moon for the first time in human history, my god, management can be really captivating and gripping because you realize you're seeing decisions that people make that will have tremendous positive or negative consequences.

And it's interesting that you say that because individuals don't understand the complexity of a decision just based in business. You know, I think I sent you a copy of our book. That took 12 years to write. Is that the one decision you make has ripple effects across the ecosystem but the hard part for people to understand is when someone articulates it, they tend to forget the things around them that made that happen.

So for example, they forget that they had a bad drive into work that day or that there was a power outage in the morning or that they had a bad night's sleep or they fought with a child 2 days earlier and they're pretty upset and or they didn't do their homework and they tell you the story that they remember.

But the situation that happened around them is far more complex and and I'm sharing that only because there are many days, today was one of them, I woke up and said I don't even know why the hell I'm even involved in this. This is just so much freaking work. It is a Sunday we're doing this and we normally have 5 hours of meetings on Saturdays regularly scheduled and it's just so much freaking work that I Yeah.

So I I do wake up plenty plenty days and say I I don't want this anymore and I don't know why I keep on coming back. So the the fact that your your reaction, again, prior to our starting was just interesting, on this case. So let's get back to But I do wanna say, David, don't put too much weight on what you perceived from my facial expression because as I say, it's all fascinating potentially to me. Well, I look.

Yeah. Sometimes and and this is what, I'm gonna say a child might perceive is that by having people around you who have an awe or sense of enlightenment or sense of interest, it does change the dynamic of the rest of the day. And I woke up, I you know, I'm I'm asking myself why. I'm I'm walking around in the bedroom and down I'm saying, this is just ridiculous amount of work. And everybody's questioning everything your question your your decisions are being made.

Yes. And they're not in a bad way, but there's so many. And your facial reaction was, oh, wow. Well, maybe we are doing something. Oh, it's good. Because you said I went through the whole website and I saw this and I watched this video and I'm thinking Oh, yeah. Oh, so so you did and and I listened to the podcast from this one. I listened to this part. That was a good podcast.

Okay. You don't realize what that little influence had for me to start this call because I I was not in a in that loving feeling today. Okay. I I get it. I get it. I'm glad. I'm glad. So so let's get to this rocket science is not enough Yeah. Which I think is a good segue to what we just completed. So this is the funny part. You've heard enough of the podcast already. We're now on number 1.

Yes. Yes. So, you know, as I mentioned, I pivoted from being a space historian to being an investigator of human behavior in success and failure within the space flight world. And what I found as a historian is that when you delve into the history of space flight on this through this lens, what you find is that there is a counterintuitive lesson.

And the the the lesson is that it you can be the best person who walked in the door when it comes into the technical stuff, when it comes to the technical stuff. You can you know, the rocket science, quote, unquote, it's actually rocket engineering. Right? But but the phrase in the language is the common phrase is rocket science. You can be fabulous at the rocket science.

But history shows that if you're not paying attention to the human piece of the system, you're not inviting success, you're inviting failure. And this is not me talking. I'm not an engineer. I when I go into a room full of NASA engineers, I say, hey, guys, you know, I'm not here to talk to you because of my great engineering acumen. I'm here to tell you what the history is screaming at us. And the history is telling us that we have to pay conscious attention to how we think about the work.

That is to say, the attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions that we bring to the work. In other words, if you want a a bumper sticker for it, our mindset. And the the thing about it is that this is not stuff that most engineers are comfortable with. I don't wanna make a blanket statement, but but in general, you know, there's a joke that I heard So we we can make a blanket statement. We could say that Moe, in your perception, what you've seen Yeah.

Is that in the American, ecosystem space ecosystem, you find this because you're basically talking about an American personality style. That may be. I've not had the chance to give this class. My point. I'm I'm trying to kind of confine it to say Sure. I I think, you know, I've worked in over 50 countries. And in each country, the minute you land, you have to know, do you go left? Do you go right? How do you read something? How do you ask for something? And it's all different, globally.

So by you saying how we think about the work, we're talking about the idiosyncrasies of the American personality when it comes to, say, for example, NASA. Well, that's very interesting. So you're saying so so to put it another way, the engineers that that I deal with at NASA, at at other agencies, they are mostly left brained people who don't do, quote, unquote, feelings and and behavior. Are you saying that you have experienced a different makeup abroad?

I would say that the personalities of culture, individuals within cultures, bring a different type of response mechanism to everything. So I'm gonna be broad brushed here. My grandfather was Russian. I'm going to tell you if you walked in into a Russian meeting, you would have a very different set of conditions that you'd be dealing with in terms of leadership and personality traits.

And and everything the baggage is brought along from being a youth in their growing up in their society would be very different than if you're dealing with a whole set of Japanese individuals or Chinese individuals or Indonesians or individuals from from India or, you know, I can go I can list the countries, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, you know, you can go down the country list.

So the I'm saying that when you're what we're talking about, that's why the question was asked much earlier, do you spend much time understanding this other side? These this this the rest of the world that they're in, you said no. So I'm gonna reframe this. What we think about the work, the mindset that's brought in, that's it's gonna be very different. Yeah. It's going to be let me give you an example. It's COVID. It's not COVID. It's 2,011, 12. I'm walking down the hallway.

I'm living in Hong Kong. I'm walking down the hallway with the CEO of the largest luxury brand for a certain category in all of Hong Kong, very, very well known, worked with them for 5 years. And as I'm walking down the hallway to our executive meeting, he I make I do a little one of these, and he looks at me. He says, you have a cold? And I said, I don't know. Could be one starting. He says, you want a mask? And I said because I didn't know this at this point.

This was early in the time that I started. I was in Hong Kong for 10 years. I said, sure. So he hands me a mask. And during a whole day of meetings with this executive team, we wear masks. I wear masks. Nobody else does. And what I when COVID came about, I did a podcast and I shared with people. In Asia and I'm being broad brush here because Asia is very large. But in Asia, you wear a mask to protect others. In the United States, you wear a mask to protect yourself. Right. Right. Right.

And you would not know that unless you had gotten down into the idiosyncrasies of that culture and spent time with them, which brings me to how we think about the work and the mindset you brought up. I don't know how they think in those rooms, but I've not seen it. But I'm going to guarantee you it's different than the way it's done in America. I get it. I get it. It has to be. Yeah. No. And I I I that's fascinating.

And I I hope that down the road, I get the chance to travel overseas and talk about this material and learn exactly what you're talking about? There's a the, Alan Malely who ran Ford for a period of time, he had one of these scenes where he was bringing his team into an engineer, into a testing facility. And I don't know if it was external or internal.

It doesn't make as much of a difference, but potentially it could because external means you'd have to respect them one way, and internal, you'd have a different set of respect just because of that's conditions of organizations. And the person doing the testing started to make comments about the vehicle. And immediately, one of the individuals jumped in and started, well, we're doing this, and he said no. 1st and I'm not quoting this perfectly.

First, you learn to understand before you start to share what you know. Right. And he had to tell them, you're not there to tell people why it's not working. You're there to find out why, what's going on so that you can then share your purse your, your knowledge later. And in the same case here, the hard part for you, if you're just visiting, is you won't know the idiosyncrasy, the those little tiny things that make the culture the culture. Does that make sense the way I say it? Absolutely.

Absolutely. So but, you know, even if we restrict it to NASA and and the American aerospace arena, we're still talking about a subject that is so nuanced and so intricate. And at least in our world, in this country, you know, it's not something that is taught in engineering school very much as far as I know. It's not something that you know, there's a joke that I heard at one of the NASA centers. How do you tell the difference between an introverted engineer and an extroverted engineer?

I don't know. The introverted engineer looks at his shoes when he talks to you. The extroverted engineer looks at your shoes. So I walk into a room and I start talking about this stuff, and I I put them try to put them at ease to say, hey. I get it. This is not your comfort zone. But what I have come to understand about spaceflight is that it is a high wire walk. It is that unforgiving. That's the analogy I use.

And to stay on the high wire requires sometimes that we step outside our comfort zone, and I will say more about this as we go on. So what I've done By the way, I'm gonna tell you the quote was something such as seek first to to understand, then to be understood. I love it. I love it. You know, they at at NASA, they say you can't be on transmit all the time. You have to be on receive mode. You know?

It's our culture, American culture, and I'm gonna be very broad brush here, compared to other cultures around the world is much more aggressive in their style of, communication. Now I would say that I'm gonna use I'll be using very broad brush here so can't get hopefully, I'm not in trouble with this.

You know, when you deal with a Russian, and I I worked in Moscow, worked in Saint Petersburg, amazing people there, again my family, I'm a Russian background, is Russians fight to fight because that's part of the culture. Israelis fight for a long time, and then they say, yeah. But we're just friends. Every culture has their nuances. So I love this with the the introvert and the extrovert. Yeah. So that's perfect.

Yeah. Yeah. And So how do you when you when you say that to your groups, what is their first reaction? Oh, they laugh because they get the joke. They know what I'm talking about, and they get the fact that, you know, this is not something that they usually talk about. And I what I've done is I've extracted a framework to talk about behaviors that invite success or practices. I call them success behaviors or success ingredients. I also talk about behaviors that invite failure.

And and in in the case of the High Wire Walker, it's like we're wearing a blindfold, and we're out on the high wire wearing a blindfold. But those the blindfold is elements of our human nature that are kinda hardwired into us, and we have to rise above them to stay on the high wire. And that requires that we go outside our comfort zone and pay conscious attention to our attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions, our mindset. Okay. So what comes to mind is this.

What has changed in the past 20 years in terms of the American space ecosystem, and I think you're more or less talking NASA, but, I guess, the the complex. What has changed that you see as positive, and what have you changed that has seen this potentially negative?

So the positive change and the negative change both stem from the same development, which is that the rise of new space companies, new space is a term that's used in the world of of aerospace to denote, companies with with atypical cultures compared to the old aerospace companies or or NASA, the startup cultures and so forth. So the rise of companies like SpaceX. On the positive side, there's been tremendous innovation. Right?

I mean, way back in 2010, an astronaut who had recently retired from NASA wrote an op ed in the New York Times that I thought was very well expressed about why NASA has had been slow relatively slow in its progress compared to the old days. And, you know, because just to give you the the cliff notes on this, I mean, in 2010, the International Space Station had been in continuous operation for a little more than a decade.

And they were still building it, and, you know, a lot of the resources of the agency were going into flying the shuttle so that they could finish building the space station. Of course, the shuttle was gonna stop flying in 2011. So my my friend, this former astronaut, wrote this op ed, and he said, in order to he said, the problem with NASA is that Congress approves something like the Space Shuttle and then says, this is the only vehicle you're gonna get for 20 or 30 years.

You've gotta just keep flying the same vehicle. And he said, if you can't iterate, you can't innovate. And the difference with companies like SpaceX was this start up culture where they said, hey. We don't care if the rocket blows up a few times before we get to success. Now, at some point, they they really did care because they were about to go bankrupt and go out of business. And then, fortunately, the Falcon 1 worked before that happened.

But they understood you got to fail before you can succeed. But the problem with NASA is that, politically, the cost of failure is very high, because it's Congress, it's a very publicly visible endeavor, and people don't necessarily understand what I just said, which is that you got you know, like, you saw the maybe you maybe you didn't, but you've heard about the Starship, the new vehicle in space. Yeah. Right. Blew up.

I've I just just so you know, my day my day is all beyond Earth, not beyond Earth, is all Project Moon Hat. So from start to finish, morning and night, we've got ITAR, EAR, CFIUS, we've got new technologies for the moon, got we've got models being built. I mean, we've but we've also got platforms and immersive technologies and all of that happening. So, no, I I hear about all this. I do watch them. And one of our teammates, his name, Andreas Bergweiler has a YouTube channel.

He had Facebook, but they all sorts of Facebooks just had challenges. He does all the streaming. So every single launch that happens around the world that he can, he streams it. So I hear about it. Every one of them. Okay. So you you you knew you saw it when Starship blew up the first time. You saw it when it blew up. I saw the ground being completely destroyed and and things being tossed miles away. Yeah. And yes, all of that. Right.

And then the second launch they did much better, but it still was not they didn't reach orbit. And, you know, people say, oh, they failed again. Well, yeah. But look at the progress they made, the tremendous data that they're gonna be able to use to make it even better. And, yeah, there I think there were some dumb mistakes, like not putting down a better platform the first time, So you wouldn't be raining concrete all over the the whole area. Right?

But what I wanna say about the last 20 years I I guess no. Wait. See, I would I rephrase that. I'm going to bet you that the people who built it assumed, and I'm not saying good or bad, but they made the they had a belief that what they build would work. So you're saying they should have and I'm saying no. In the conditions that were happening, they said, why don't we pour this? Why don't we create this? Why don't we set it up like this? This will be great.

No one wanted it to pour concrete down or have concrete come down like rain. No. Nobody So it wasn't they it it they just did it, and they thought it would work. Yeah. But but but you're putting exact you're putting your finger right on the reason I teach this stuff, which is that we have to pay attention to the lessons of the past and what people did in the past. Now it doesn't mean we imitate them blindly.

But every failure that happens, we're not you know, as long as we're talking about a professional organization with a, you know, a high degree of of of talent on on board, We're not talking about people who are stupid or incompetent. We're talking about people who are very smart, well meaning But was there a history was there a history of reigning concrete anywhere? Let me finish the sentence. Sure. We're not talking about people who are stupid or incompetent.

We're talking about very smart, well meaning people who suffered catastrophic failure because of flawed mindsets. Now in this case, there was an assumption on, as far as I know, and I can't I don't claim to have delved into this in great detail, but my understanding is that that Elon Musk basically said, yeah, we should be okay with just concrete. Well, they didn't have a water suppression system, which is what they used on the Saturn 5, which was much less powerful than Starship.

And so, you know, okay, guys, right there. I think I'm right about this. Somebody may write in and say, ah, Chaikin, didn't you know they had a water suppression system? The pool No. I did they didn't have a as far as I know, they didn't have a water suppression system. Yeah. So Absolutely. So, you know, it's one of my failure in ingredients is hubris, overconfidence.

And I'm not saying that you can always avoid an accident, but it you're more likely to avoid it if you say, are we being overconfident? Well, but that's not what again, the way you just shared it, I didn't see it as that. I saw that as, I don't wanna get in trouble by the boss who does have a temper or will dip into his way. Question, though. Culture And that is why it happened. So it wasn't the it could have been that there were people there who said, this is not gonna work.

And we don't We're gonna have some issues. We don't know the answer. But no one's gonna bring that up. Right. We don't know the answer. And if I ever had a chance to delve into that, I would very much wanna know the answer to what you just raised. And that's why I said earlier, we don't know the conditions around the condition Absolutely. That made that thing happen so we can get one perspective. But all of this is no. You're absolutely right.

But but but all of this came from your question about what's changed in the last 20 years. Mhmm. So all I was trying to say is that I think the rise of companies like SpaceX has been a a net a a tremendous positive for the level of of innovation and iteration.

The negative is that if you're NASA and you're trying to do something like send humans back to the moon with the Artemis program, and you contract out the capsule that takes the astronauts from Earth orbit from the surface of the Earth to Earth orbit or or onto a flight path to go to the environment of the moon, or you contract out for the the lander, which is SpaceX, that's what Starship is gonna do for Artemis, it's gonna be the lander, you you, NASA, no longer have the ability to look into the organization necessarily and see how they're doing their work, what kinds of practices they're using, what their test data is like.

Back in Apollo, the engineers at NASA were, in many cases, more knowledgeable than the contractors who had never done anything like this. Today, that that balance may or may not be be the same, but NASA has lived through a lot. But they don't always get the opportunity to tell the contractors what they're you know, to to be able to get get the contractors to listen to that experience or to share the data of their testing and so forth.

ITAR and all of that gets in the way, so it's made it much harder for the people at NASA who are trying to, you know, go back to the moon? You know, I, I I'm going to give an analogy, and I don't know what it's called. You probably do. You know at the, it's at the southern tip of Africa, I believe it is, where the waters don't mix. Oh, I There's 2 sets of water. Yeah. There's a a water mix at, by South Africa. The water is on one side, it's one salination.

The other is on the other because of the it's warmer and it's saltier and they don't mix.

I wonder the reason I asked the question was I was trying to find out what you thought on it, was that there's probably as much as we'd like to believe that there's a cross, crossover between agency work and commercial work or agency and, for profit organizations, I would bet you with still a lot of the this lack of understanding and lack of incentivization and lack of leadership skill sets to be able to make that crossover as powerful as it probably needs to be?

Well, it's a very complex subject, and I I'm hesitant to I'm hesitant to make statements about it, before I've had a chance to really delve into the details. And I hear things that that that alert me to the difficulties like I just described Yeah. Because, you know, core companies are motivated by different things than government agencies.

They're motivated by, we've gotta compete, we've gotta make a profit, And so, you know but nevertheless, I think by and large, you know, the people I talked to at NASA have very positive things to say about SpaceX. They've been through experiences where they had a really significant failure, and they learned from it with NASA's help. But we're we're we're talking SpaceX. We're talking, Blue Origin. We're talking Firefly. We're talking astrobotics. We're talking relativity space.

I mean, there there are a lot of moving pieces. And I wonder if we went across the ecosystem. You know, SpaceX is gonna do, what, a 150 flights this year and, Rocket Labs, don't quote me a dozen. No. So I wonder how that goes across the entire ecosystem. And you know what?

I'd love to be able to to, like I say, I don't wanna sound like a broken record, but I'd love to be able to to go into a a place like SpaceX and and talk about this material and see what they what it looks like from their side. When we get our interview, I'll ask for you. How does that I'll see if we can get you in. So So so when you say so rocket science is not enough. Yeah. Where do you where do you take us then? What's what's the enough?

Well, no. In other words, rocket science is essential, but but the human behavior piece is also essential. But what's the when you say human behavior, give me a little bit more. What do you Well expect from this new generation? Let me keep going. Let me Sure. Let me keep going with with our with our bullet points because I think, this will this will come out of the developer as they say. Okay. So we're on to 2, the stories we tell ourselves?

Yeah. So this is really something that that reflects a basic aspect of us as human beings that we are storytellers by nature. We tell ourselves stories as part of the way that we make sense of the world, way way we make sense of what happens to us. And history shows us that we have to consciously examine the stories we tell ourselves about the work, about each other, about ourselves too, because those stories have the power to skew our perceptions, such as our perceptions of risk.

And they can influence our decisions, including our technical decisions. So just to give you a couple of examples. So one example relates to the Apollo Fire, which happened in 1967 before we had flown any Apollo missions. And the crew of the first Apollo mission, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were going through a practice countdown, in their Apollo command module, on the pad, and nobody thought it was a hazardous test.

There was no fuel in the booster, that kind of thing, but they were sealed in that command module in a pure oxygen environment at more than 16 pounds per square inch. And suddenly there was a flash fire and they died and it completely caught NASA by surprise. And I have delved in really, really, great detail into the human behavior roots of that accident.

And just to name 2 of the stories that they told themselves before that accident, One was that their their whole fire prevention strategy in Apollo was based on the belief that they could eliminate all potential ignition sources, that is to say, damaged wiring. And that obviously was not the case. Right? And if you think about it, I mean, you can't you can't do that. It was only after the accident that they realized, what were we thinking?

There's no way that you can because you can't even tell if there's a wire that's hidden from view to inspectors behind an instrument panel. You can't necessarily detect by any of your instrumentation that there's a flaw in that wire.

The other thing that they told themselves, the story that they told themselves, decision makers believed that because they had never had a fire in the little Mercury or Gemini capsules that had flown up to this time, they'd never had a fire in those capsules in pure oxygen, and so they told themselves it was unlikely that they'd have a fire in Apollo.

But that ignored some really significant differences between those little capsules and the Apollo command module, which was big enough for the very first time for people to move around in, including technicians, while the thing was being checked out, and there were exposed wire bundles that were vulnerable to damage by that activity. So it was only after the accident that they realized they'd been telling themselves a story that didn't hold up. Okay. That's that's one example.

Mhmm. The other example has to do with both of the shuttle accidents, Challenger, which blew up during launch in 1986 and Columbia, which disintegrated during reentry in 2003. What I found in my delving into those accidents is that both of them stemmed from a narrative that NASA bought into long before the shuttle started flying in 1981. Way back in the early seventies, they bought into a narrative.

In fact, even before the shuttle was approved, they were kind of coerced into this narrative that said that the shuttle was gonna make spaceflight routine and affordable, which meant that they had the way the economics worked, you have a fixed program cost. How do you make it competitive cost competitive with the throwaway boosters? Well, you gotta fly a lot. Right? You gotta have very high launch rates.

They were talking about flying 55 times a year, and yet they didn't design a vehicle to do that. They didn't design a pickup truck. They designed a Formula 1 race car. And even after they started flying and they saw, hey. You know what? We said they were gonna be able to turn this thing around for another flight in 2 or 3 weeks, and the best case is, like, 3 months. They didn't adjust. I mean, they they adjusted slightly. They they they said, we can't fly every week. Let's be more realistic.

We'll fly every other week. So there was still this tremendous schedule pressure on that program, and we'll hear a little more about this in the next bullet point. But but that's again, you're I'm wondering more just in both these stories. How much was leadership responsible for making the story hold? Let me as as you move from ideation into bringing other people involved, the cost becomes exponentially higher.

As you move from bringing people involved to say, for example, building prototypes or building design work or starting engineering, it's exponentially higher. And as you move down that timeline, the costs and the risks to people's careers become exponentially more impactful. So who's this you can't get all the way to the end and say, oh, by the way, we have a Formula 1 racing car. It's not gonna be done in 2 weeks unless there were people there who were willing to say, David's a real jerk.

I'm just he doesn't listen. I'm gonna go with it anyway. I'm just gonna we're just gonna do what they say. Well, you you you Which was it leadership versus the people they the stories that leadership told us compared to the stories that people tell themselves? You're you're asking exactly the right question. And, you know, something I learned in talking to some very smart people about organizational behavior is that culture comes from the top.

And so what you're putting your finger on is the fact that, yeah, the culture of the shuttle program came from the top. And if you'd had people in the top of NASA who looked at the turnaround time, excuse me, and looked at some of the problems that were surfacing as the shuttle began flying, and said, you know, maybe we need to rethink this. Maybe we need to stand down from this kind of high flight rate that we're pushing you to do. That would've history could've been different. You know?

The the problems with the o rings, and we've all heard about those o ring problems that caused the Challenger accident. That surfaced really early in the program. They started seeing and I'll talk more about this in the next bullet point, but they started seeing this problem early on, and then it got to a kind of a different version of the problem about a year before the Challenger launch that was more serious. But there was no let up in the in the schedule pressure.

In fact, the pressure was increasing to get to closer and closer and closer to this goal of flying every other week. And I'll tell you I'll tell you a very revealing story that I heard from one of the shuttle astronauts. One of the things that NASA told the world and itself was that the shuttle would become, quote unquote, operational. And you you know what that phrase means in the aerospace world. Mhmm. Yeah. It would become operational after just 4 test flights. Okay?

So the astronaut who told me this story was a former navy test pilot who was selected for the shuttle program in 1980. And he and this is about a year before the first shuttle flight. He comes in and he hears them talking about shuttles can be operational after 4 flights. And he has just come out of the navy as a test pilot, where everybody knows that when you have a new navy jet, you have to fly it a 100 times or more before it's ready to turn over to the fleet, right, before it's operational.

So this new astronaut goes in to see one of the veteran astronauts, who's also a former Navy test pilot, and he says, let me get this straight. We're gonna fly this thing 4 times, and it's gonna be operational? And the other astronaut, the senior guy says, don't pay any attention to that. That's political stuff that's coming out of headquarters. Between you and me, this thing is gonna be in flight test mode for a 100 flights.

Now, that reveals a disconnect between the people at the top and the people who were right down there in the trenches who were actually closest to the reality. And by the way, that didn't happen in Apollo. No no astronaut went into another astronaut's office and said, I know they say we're gonna land on the moon by the end of the sixties, but just between you and me, it's gonna be more like 1973. Nobody said that I bet you I bet you there were people who said that.

Nobody said that because nobody thought that. Nobody thought that it it might not happen in the timelines that they thought. I mean, when the Apollo fire happened what you're when the Apollo fire happened, there were a lot of people who were afraid the program might shut down. Right. Well, that means it could be delayed till 7th. Right. But when that didn't happen, I guess, you know, that's a caveat there.

My point is that the story about these 2 shuttle astronauts reveals this disconnect and perception of reality between the top of the program and the people who are actually closest to the reality. And there were people even in the mid in in the early eighties, after the shuttle began flying, who were saying, this thing's an airline and we gotta fly it like an airline. I mean, this is not public consumption. This is behind closed doors at NASA. Fly like an airline.

And you wonder, you hear this stuff and you think, how could they how could they think that? This is not uncommon, Andy. I as as part of the word when I speak, I have a very different modality than most speakers. I don't give the same presentation over and over and over and over again. You've probably done a lot of speaking. You similar presentations. I never do. I do upwards of 10 interviews. Speech I give, I'm I'm doing it on the fly. I'm I'm doing it Oh, on the fly.

Okay. I'm doing it from I'm doing it from my from my my slides. I I put up the slides Okay. To basically get my rolodex dialed up to the right things, and then I just let it rip. What I meant is that you have a series okay. You have a series of slides and things that you follow. Every presentation I give has been completely different. I do 10 hours of interviews from prospective members of the audience, and then I present using the data that I learned from these 10.

But all the interviews are private. Nothing is ever shared. And I one client working with, Illinois, 2 works. And we can mention this because David is a great guy. David Speer, he ended up passing away. But he had after those 10 calls, we had a call about something we were working on. And he said, how did you learn all of this? Because he had never heard these things.

The people on his team, because they knew that there were 10 they they they don't know how many calls, but each person was having a private call with me. I didn't record it. It was all just taken by notes. But when you hear 10 you know, CFO, CEO, c, CEO, COO, Talent Management, when you get them, you see a very different web. And he was surprised that the answers that I was able to pull out.

And that's my point is that while you're saying that in the 19 seventies or sixties, I'm I've gotta believe there were people in there who were getting paid saying, there's no way this sucker is gonna make it. But they would not have shared that publicly because they would have lost their jobs. You know, you might look. I can't say that you're wrong, and I just haven't come across it. And I've I've I've Yeah.

Well and you probably will never come across it and that there's always going to be that challenge there. Yet, I I agree with you with what you're saying is that there's a disconnect often between departments and individuals within organizations. Expectations of what's supposed to be the outcome, in this case, getting to the moon, and the type of work that has to be accomplished.

Now when you go to SpaceX or you go to these other organizations, how is NASA dealing with, for example, because you know them well, how is NASA dealing with the fact that Elon says, gotta try it again. Let's put another one on the pad. Let's see what happens. Well, you know, again, it would be great for me to have, more of an inside view of those conversations. But what my sense is that, you know, they're they're frustrated with the amount of time.

I mean, they don't they don't question it from a philosophy standpoint. They agree that you have to fly and get the bugs out. You've got to experience failure before you can succeed. I mean, they that's part of NASA's DNA and even before NASA. But I think, you know, just to give you something that's been in the news and, has been talked about quite a bit is that last fall, what came out was and keep in mind, when we talk about Starship, Elon is is doing that for his own purposes.

He believes that that's the vehicle that he is going to use to take humans to Mars. Yep. So he's doing this anyway whether or not NASA wants to use it. However, Starship is in what they call the critical path to getting humans back to the moon with the Artemis program.

And one of the things that came out last fall was that and I think this came directly from Elon that they estimated anywhere from 12 to 15 Starship flights to refuel the Starship that they launch into Earth orbit, and you saw this. Yeah. That's a 44 it's 14 right. Fourteen refuelings to be able to get one Starship to the moon. So, you know, that's a bit of a problem for NASA and I it's not clear how this is gonna play out. That's a lot of launches.

And And by the way, I'm a I'm a CPM, a critical path method person. I absolutely love the technology. Yeah. It's a big thing for the Artemis program. Yeah. And so So are you You know, one of the stories that we tell our you know, that that they've been telling themselves is we're gonna get back to the moon by whatever it is, 2027, 2026, 2027. They've had to adjust that date, and that's normal.

But this idea that you're gonna have to fly all these times and by the way, the whole refueling, concept, when you're talking about propellants that are, you know, liquid oxygen is a cryogen, very very cold, 100 of degrees below 0. Yeah. And so you have to it it experiences boil off, you don't have a perfect Yeah. Thermos. Right? So you've gotta make up for that loss before you can fill the tank. I mean, we don't have the refueling technology nailed No. No matter how many flights.

And not to do 14 on Yeah. It's a 100 ton, but sometimes using a a even though you could use a sledgehammer, sometimes using a hammer is a better tool. What would that look like? What what do you mean? Well, what I'm saying is the it's a 100 this is a large transport vehicle. Yes. And, potentially, having 1 large transport vehicle with 14 refuelings, which I think or Elon said, no. It'll be more like 8. And, again, don't quote me on that because I'm talking out the side of my, whatever.

Is maybe there are other technologies that could fit that need where the starship is really I'm gonna go back to your case. It's designed to go to Mars. Where you had said earlier, this was the the, the shuttle was designed to be one way. It ended up being a we call it formula 1, and it wasn't the normal transport vehicle.

Well, maybe we're trying to take a square peg and stick it into a round hole where it could be Bezos' Glenn might have a smaller it does have a smaller capacity, but it could do some of the things that are necessary without those restrictions. You probably know, Bezos and I think it's Northrop Grumman, but I may be wrong about this, are partnering to do the lander for the second Artemis mission. But I don't have much visible. I mean, really, I know very little about what that concept is.

All I'm talking about is the storytelling. We're telling the story that Artemis just the story. It doesn't matter who's involved. That I'm not trying to pick on any player. We're telling a story that will get to the moon with the Artemis program. The Artemis program is gonna use this heavy launch vehicle that can do a 100 ton to whatever the the the math that goes into this, and they can deliver this, but it's 14 refuelings. Yeah. Well, maybe someone should say, does that story sound right?

And what I do every time I teach my class is I say, okay, gang. After we've been through all the case studies, I say, what are the stories that we're telling ourselves today about our work that we need to pay attention to? And it's supposed And that's exactly what I'm trying so when you hear the story, if you were the one to change it, what would the story be?

Well, I mean, you term it specifically with Starship or with Artemis as a whole or I mean, I think, it's Just the the we just talked about Starship being the the 14. The we just talked about the challenges that happened in multiple accidents with Challenger. Are is a story being told when it comes to the Artemis program or the Artemis, the first state, first phase, whatever the the terminology is, is there a story being told that should be changed?

If you were to change the story, what would it be? Well, I don't think we know how much the story has to change yet because we don't but, I mean, I think it points to this I think the basic story that NASA told itself long before now is we're gonna contract out instead of having an in house development program for a lunar lander, we're gonna contract out to a private company that's gonna deliver lunar landing as a quote service.

And Mhmm. And I'm not saying you know, this price quality deadline pick any 2. Right? You've heard that. Yep. So I'm not saying that that by itself is an unworkable story. The nuance is, can you hold to a particular schedule that you thought you were going to hold to if you are doing that? I'm I So You probably had a lot of you probably had a lot of interviews over the course of I'm not interviewing. I'm asking serious questions. And the reason is looking at project Moon Hat.

We have a box of the roof and a door of the moon. We have 4 phases of development. We have plans and and designs that schematics that have been done. We have scale models that have been done. For us to be able to achieve the box of the roof and the door on the moon, we have to be able to tell the right story. So I'm really asking that story. But our story is much more complex. Our story is not about getting to the moon.

Our story is about improving life on earth, and this is one piece of a puzzle. Yeah. And so I'm asking the question if you could change that story. We're a story of coopetition, not competition, but coopetition. Maybe, for example, in our case, we're gonna have multiple scenarios, and I'm not gonna give all the pieces out now is we're gonna have multiple scenarios where the desired outcomes are gonna be achieved. But in achieving them, they turn back on earth.

So when I say what story would you tell with Artemis, I'm really trying to find out if you've said to yourself, this is the story I would tell at this point based upon the what we've seen happen, whether it be Starship, whether it be Well, let me put it Rocket Labs Let me broaden it let me broaden it a little further. NASA has talked about going back going back to the moon. They've also talked about going back to the moon as a stepping stone to go to Mars, to send humans to Mars.

Yep. And the story that they've told, I believe the world, as well as themselves, is that we can decide now a lot about how we're gonna go to Mars and try to have some commonality between the hardware that we use to go to the Moon and go and the hardware we use to go to Mars. And we can make a lot of key decisions now about what will be required to go to Mars. And I my feeling is that the story they ought to be telling themselves is we need to be on the Moon for a while, maybe 10 years Okay.

Before we know what we know don't know now, and then we'll know much better what we have to do to go to Mars. We'll have technologies hopefully, we'll have some technologies that we don't have now. We'll understand, the human, you know, what it takes to keep humans alive on the surface of another world. We'll understand that better.

I don't I don't I have a hard time signing on to the story that says we're gonna go to Mars in the 20 thirties because I just think it's gonna take a lot longer before we really are ready, and it's gonna depend on what we learn on the moon. Okay. Thank you. That's what I wasn't looking for that answer. I was looking for an answer. That was an answer. So I agree with you more than you can imagine because and I'll give you a side story.

1 of the our teammates was at an event with Bill Nelson, walked up to Bill and said, hey. Here here you're going, gonna go, what's going on with NASA? And he said, we're going to the moon. And he said, why are we going on the moon? And he was he was just trying to find out being a part of our team. And Bill said, so we can go to Mars. And he said, why why are we going to Mars? And Bill looked at him and then turned away.

Just walked right away from the conversation with several people in the group. Not that it was a question and answer session. This was a conference. They were just talking. So the next day, Bill was on stage. And this kid's son was one of 3 kids who were asked to ask the people on stage questions. It just so happened that his son was matched up with Bill. So Bill was asked the question. He he did the same thing. He said we're going to Mars. We're going to moon to go to Mars.

And the kid said, why are we going to Mars? And this is a no joke. So we could beat the Russians. Well, I've I've heard it's I so I agree I agree with your commentary, but that doesn't tell me there's a story Well that we should be following. Well, I think I think I think we have to we have to always have the awareness in the front of our minds that things are all often, maybe not always, often harder than we expect they will be.

And so we make, you know, if we become schedule driven we do that at our peril if humans are involved. It's one thing if you you blow up a rocket and you lose, I mean, you hate to see this happen, you know, multi $100,000,000 or or even $1,000,000,000 spacecraft, that's that's bad. You do not want that to happen. But if, you know, what I feel like my goal is I wanna help people avoid the mistakes of the past, especially if it can mean that we avoid an accident that could kill people.

So So I'm gonna yeah. I agree. I I'm gonna change it. It's I don't believe the the statement that you said, I don't believe we should be schedule driven. Well, you have to be the sun that's not what you meant. You have to be the sun Right. That's what I so I was gonna say, I believe that you believe so. I think we have to be better at planning and better at implementing earlier on so that we don't have the delays that happen. And I think we could be better at that.

Let me let me let's go to the next bullet point because this will will advance the the middle it'll So we've got, beware of the reality distortion field. Where is the reality distortion field? What program was that? Well, my only the only use of that phrase, I I kinda coined it myself in this context, but the only other place I've heard it was that it was used to describe Steve Jobs, that that he was a walking reality distortion field.

And I use it to refer to the effects of external pressures like cost pressure, schedule pressure, and political pressure. Now, as you've just pointed out, you know, these pressures are a fact of life, right? You're never gonna have a program that doesn't have schedule pressure. You're never gonna have a program that doesn't have cost pressure.

Even in Apollo, which was funded like a war because it was in fact a battle in the cold war, it was funded like, you know, it was a proxy for a shooting war. We didn't fire a shot, but we were basically fighting a battle in the Cold War. And Absolutely. Even in Apollo, they had cost pressures, but they had more than enough resources to do what they were told to do. That was not true in the shuttle program, by the way.

But these pressures, the thing is we have to be vigilant about the effects of these pressures because, and again, this comes right out of the history, when we're under these pressures, they can skew our perception of risk. We're more likely to indulge in what I call false perception of risk, which I'll talk about in a in a second. But it's like you said, you can't do away with schedule pressure, but you've got to pay attention to what that's doing to your culture and to your mindset.

Because if you don't, this reality distortion field, you can think you're being very mindful of safety and and mission success, and you'll be thinking that right up to the time you go over the edge of the cliff. And I can give you examples of that. Why don't you give me because I I've got something to add to it. So by the way, you were right. It was 1981 by Bud Tribble, Tribble, who said that about Steven Jobs.

Yeah. So I I thought that was fun to to find that out, that that Steven Steve Jobs was a walking reality distortion field. But So what are the examples that you have? So so false perception of risk, which you're more likely to indulge in if you're under this reality distortion field of cost pressure, schedule pressure, and political pressure. What that is is that you have a problem that you didn't expect. It starts to show up when you fly your vehicle, but you kind of you get away with it. Okay?

So you keep flying. And the little voice in your head says, it hasn't bitten us, so we must be okay. And what I tell people that I teach is you better pay attention to that little voice in your head because if that comes up, you need to ring the alarm and really look at what you're doing. It's the common thread in all three of the human space flight accidents at NASA that killed astronauts. The Apollo Fire, Challenger, Columbia.

In each case, they had a problem, a vulnerability that was known, but they said to themselves, it hasn't bitten us yet, so we must be okay. I mentioned in the fire that there were people decision makers at NASA who believed, hey, we've been using pure oxygen since the first astronauts we flew in Mercury. We've never had a problem with oxygen. We've never had a fire. We're not gonna have one in Apollo. And they believe that right up until the day of the Apollo fire.

I like to use do you remember, David, you'll remember this. I think we're close enough in age that you you may remember this. Remember the arrow book of brain teasers? All the little books that we used to get from Scholastic Book Company, and they were great. Right? And there was one book that had some optical illusion. By the by you're about, I was born in 60 3. Yeah. So you've got a few years on me because Yeah. So so there was one book that had a bunch of optical illusions.

And and the one of the illusions was a picture where if you look at it one way, you see a vase. And if you look at it another way, the same picture, nothing's different. You see 2 faces looking at each other in profile, and it is all about perception. It is the same data, but you perceive it very differently. And perception is shaped by expectation, perception is shaped by belief. Cognitive scientists have shown, have done experiments where this comes out very vividly.

So the example I wanna give you has to do with the telecom the night before the Challenger launch. And you may know this story that they'd already had I don't. They'd already had problems with the o rings on the solid rocket boosters. The the boosters were made not in one piece because you couldn't transport the booster in one piece from where it was made in Utah at Thiokol. The company was called Thiokol. Couldn't transport it in 1 piece by rail, so they broke it up into segments.

And what they do is they'd assemble those segments at the launch site at Kennedy Space Center, and the segments were joined with this, this configuration called a field joint because it was assembled in the field. And within that joint was a pair of o rings that were supposed to make sure the joint was sealed.

There was some material made out of a very high temperature putty that was supposed to prevent any of the very hot gases of ignition from reaching the joint and and getting to the O rings and and, you know, destroying their ability to seal the joint. But they started having problems with this joint on the second shuttle flight in 1981. Problem was not constant. It would happen, then it would go away. Happen, and then it would go away for a long time, come back.

The year before Challenger launched, there was a new kind of twist to that problem, where there was very severe damage to the o rings, where the hot gas was actually getting right by the primary o ring and and starting to attack the secondary o ring, which meant that this redundant joint, they thought they had a measure of safety because there were 2 o rings, but that went out the window when they saw that the gas could go right by the primary under some conditions and start attacking the secondary.

And as the the engineers at Thiagol started to look at this and they did some very basic, you know, tabletop tests, not really tabletop, but you know what I mean, not a not full scale booster hardware. Yeah. They just started saying something's wrong here. Let's try to see what's going on, and they figured they saw some issues. And they started to get the the the sense that it was related to temperature, which makes perfect sense if you think about these O rings.

They're made out of rubber, And and, you know, as Richard Feynman, the great physicist showed in the session of the accident commission, you know, you put it in ice water and it loses resiliency. Well, the night before the Challenger launch, there was a telecom between the engineers at Thiokol in Utah who were very worried about the next day's launch because it was going to be much colder than anything they'd had before. And they said, we're really scared about this.

We don't think we're comfortable launching if it's below a certain temperature, and we think the launch should be delayed tomorrow until it's warmer. And the managers at the Marshall Space Flight from the Marshall Space Flight Center, who were on the call in Florida, said, you don't have enough data to convince us. They said, you you've got to prove that it's not safe, which was a complete inversion. I mean, they didn't say it in so many words, but that was what everybody took from it.

They're making us prove that we are not safe to fly instead of making us prove that we are safe, which was the the safety logic all the way through Apollo was prove to me that I don't have a problem, not prove that I have a problem. So this is the reality distortion field in action. It's taking the same data, and one side is saying, we're really scared about this, and we're starting to we're we're we we've come to the belief that this is a temperature related phenomenon.

And the other side is saying, what are you telling us? You're telling us we have to delay the launch until it's warmer? You know, what what the Marshall, project manager said was, good god, Thiokol. You telling me I have to wait until April? You know, this was end of January. So this shocking inversion of the launch safety logic from prove it's safe to prove that it's not safe is a hallmark of what can happen to you when you're under these kinds of pressures. So it's but it's the but.

I'm I'm sorry to go for the but. I'm sorry. It's a it's a distortion of the distortion. Let me explain. The people who were from Thiokom who were on the call Thiokol. I Thiokol, I could tell you based upon the way you've said it, the people didn't have a great story. So the individuals on the other side said, you know, I hear you, but everything we've done on our side and everything we've looked at sounds good. If gonna toss this out.

If they had the CEO on the call and the CEO brought up a slide, showed an error, a test that was done very quickly to show that there was something, they might have balked for a moment. So here is an example of leadership per teams not sharing the story properly. Yeah. But let's go all the way let's go all the way back to where more nuance. Right. It's it's more nuance, but let's go back all the way to the beginning because the first note I wrote down was excuse me. Language here.

Why the fuck didn't they build it near build these rings closer to the facility because they were so important so that they wouldn't have to be cut up into slices? That was another decision that was made. Question. So while we you used are are you I'm gonna ask you this, and this is not an insult. It's just a question. Do you know what a CPM chart is? A c critical path method chart is? I don't. You mentioned it before that you're a big believer in that.

Okay. There there is a, okay, in the 19 fifties, it's, it's unpaid to think that I sent you. In the 19 fifties so you could look it up. I'm not trying to belittle you. We could look it up. It's not paid. It's not paid. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. I think.

In 19 fifties, approximately, I think it was 3 or 4 organizations including like General Electric, Lockheed, major companies were having challenges with large scale projects where they weren't coming out on time and on budget. So they created this technology. It's a it's a project management tool. It can be converted to a leadership tool. That's why it's presented in the book.

But it's a tool to allow someone to be able to manage complex interconnected sets of activities to find out which is your critical path that determines the end state of an activity. So let's say you and I were gonna going to go we were gonna build something and we saw that it's gonna be we're supposed to have it December 31st, But when we look at the path, we add the times to it, we're gonna end up January 12th.

Someone might say, well, this is the critical path which it is, the longest path in the sequence. And what you can say to yourself is, what can I do to impact that path? So maybe you go to a vendor and you say can I pay you more? And you'll get it done in 6 days. And then you go to another vendor and get it done in 5 days.

However, critical paths are kinda complicated because you could be paying 1 vendor to get it done but it actually won't impact the rest because there's another activity that has to be accomplished that intersects. So a critical path tool is a visual, you could look it up, that allows an individual to do complex tools. I use them all the time. I mean, you wanna do a project with me, within a day or 2 I'm gonna create a critical path method critical path. So it's very powerful.

The reason that I bring it up is because my first my first question was if this was such an important part I don't like the word critical. If this was such an important part because it's overused in the methodology of putting the shuttle together then it should have been done closer to the facility so it wouldn't be cut up into pieces because that was already an unknown.

And some person could have made the decision for economic reasons, their cousin worked at the place, the bid came in late, it wasn't quoted right, they took the log they took the lowest bid instead of the highest bid. There could have been a variety of variables that we'll never ever know. And bringing it back to what you're talking about in terms of this reality distortion field, you have to also be careful. You you I'm sure you're familiar with the DNA sequencing with Watson. Correct?

Not on the level that you were on because I was not a biologist. Well, it's a simple thing. It would they were they they came out and said they'd be able to get it done in 15 years. And by the year halfway through, literally halfway, they'd only sequenced about 300,000 DNA sequences. And everybody said there's no way they can get this done. The reality distortion field would've kicked in.

However, they didn't realize the exponential learning curves that happened from the beginning of the development ended up being exponentially faster at the end. They actually got it done about a year and a half earlier. So you there are times where and I'm gonna give you very quick the that's number 1, the DNA sequencing. You have to be careful because people can say it won't be done because they didn't do the planning. They didn't understand it.

Number 2, how many times have you gotten something done because you had a deadline? Oh, sure. No. No. Deadlines are are very important. In fact, we wouldn't have gotten to the moon when we did if we didn't have Kennedy's deadline. Right. If we didn't have a deadline. So that also comes down to culture.

We are some culture where so it it was the last one let me give you is that the hard part what you what's tough in what you're saying, which, like, smacks me glaring bang in the face, is that timelines intersect and it's very difficult to understand that often. So let's say I said to you, we're gonna work on a movie. Tom Hanks, You have to get it done by the 5th by the when could you get it done? I ask you in June. And you say, I'll have it done by end of year. And you say, great.

And you're working on it. And you're working how's it going? Oh, it's going okay. Not as good as I like. It's going okay. Going not as good as I like. But because you gave me the end of the year, I've told the film crew, I've hired a production crew, I've spoken to the actors, I've gotten all the the location set. And as we're getting closer, you say, yeah, but but but come on. You gotta understand it's creative process.

I would walk you in the back corner, Andy, and say, you've got to get this done. We have $15,000,000 riding on this and you can't just say, hey, by the way. So the so my question to you with this reality distortion field is how do you know when it comes to these type of technologies if it is 1? Well, look Given what I've said. I'm sorry. No. Look. No. A very good question, and and I wanna fold in what you asked.

You made a comment that if the CEO of the company had been on the call and made a great case, things could have been different. And in fact, you're right in saying that the case that the engineers made didn't cross the threshold of convincability or convincing power to to shift the mindset of the people at at NASA. In fact, there was even one guy who was even higher up in the food chain, who was on the telecom, who said, I don't propose that we go against the contractors recommendation.

What you need to know though, is that the really damning stuff happened at the contractor, because they initially voted. The the engineers said we're not comfortable launching if it's that cold. And the vice president of engineering sided with his engineers and said we're gonna recommend against launch if it's colder than 53 degrees. It was gonna be 26 degrees, and they said, we're not Oh, wow.

So at that point is when the NASA program manager said, my god, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April? And what happened was that the Thiokol guys said, let us go offline for a little bit and talk about it. And as soon as they went offline, the corporate VP got up and said, am I the only one here who wants to launch? How's that for a charged question? And And and he pay and that person pays a lot of these salaries.

He does, but he's not in a mindset that can leave him open to what the engineers are trying to tell him. And the engineers Oh oh, no. But he could He also could be afraid of not being able to meet payroll. He's afraid. Could be afraid. He's afraid of pissing off, pardon my language, Thiokol's biggest customer. And they had gotten a letter Right. They had gotten a letter a couple of weeks earlier that said that NASA was gonna look for a second source for these boosters to There you go.

Their flight rate. So all this stuff is where you need So right. And that's going back to what I said a lot earlier. You don't know what happened to the child. You don't know how they had a what happened to the night before. The letter It's not even that obscure. We know it. Yeah. The letter. We know it. And we and we know it because the people in the room have talked about it.

And so the guy who voted with his engineers under great duress changed his vote, and they came back on the line and they said we support the launch with no temperature constraints. Now did they know somebody was gonna die? No. They didn't. They what they felt was They would never if they knew someone would die, they would have all been screaming and jumping up and down saying someone's gonna die, someone's gonna die.

And what they knew was the engineers who were closest to the problem were really uncomfortable. They said we're going in the wrong direction. We're getting colder than we were a year ago when we had this terrible erosion of the o ring. Now you wait wait. You asked another question and I wanna answer that too. Sure. I love it. So you said why didn't they just build it closer to the launch site and ship it in one segment?

Well, there's plenty of information about how they made that choice, and I can't remember now why what the, you know, the the you know, they do scores. They they rate them on management. They rate them on technical prowess. They rate them on, you know, all these parameters, and then they they make a decision. Well, there was one company that wanted to do a 1 piece design, but they lost out to thiacol.

Part of the psychology was it was based on a segmented booster that had been used with tremendous success in an unpiloted rocket called the Titan, the Titan 3, which launched, you know, the Viking Landers to Mars, and the Voyager missions to the outer solar system, and a bunch of huge, DOD spy satellites. It had a stellar record of success. But what they didn't have, they never got those boosters back, like we did with the shuttle. Oh, so they couldn't even see if there was damage. Exactly.

They never knew if there was a close call. It was only after Challenger that some testing material some testing information was made available to NASA that said, you know what? They did have close calls. You know, and so thank you for the dimensionalization, because this is a you're talking about the distortion field, and one of the things that I I often teach when I'm working with people, it's not my main job, but, I've worked with executives around the world in all sorts sorts of conditions.

And I say, look. You create your pitch, but your story and it has to be good. But then you sit back and you say, each individual who's in that room, if it can be done, what might they say or ask? You hold it back because if you tell the whole story, you don't always get those questions asked because they it's kinda brushed over. And you hold back a few of them knowing that, for example, Andy's going to say, what about the reality distortion field?

And you say, that's a great question and you pull it up completely repair prepared. Now if they don't ask it, you can pull them up anyway. You could say, look. We prepared a little bit more for you to help you. The reason is people learn things in chunks and sometimes they have to absorb it. So they could have shared about the challenges that they're facing and then heard a question and said that's a great question. We did a test very quickly in the lab. We took the rubber.

We put it at this temperature and this temperature, and this is what we had. Great question from Steve. Love it. This is the answer. And so a lot of this is it's storytelling, it's example, it's being prepared, and I don't know and I'm trying the only way I think you can start to stop this reality distortion field is by being much better at planning early on. You know, you're you're making an excellent point. And and, you know, I don't even come in with the expertise on how you plan.

I don't pretend to be any kind of, you know, sage, giver of advice on that. What I can tell you is that at a very basic level, the way to make ourselves less vulnerable to what I call failure ingredients like false perception of risk or the reality distortion field is to make them part of the conversation like you like you would any other technical issue, you know. If you're building rocket engines, you ask each other, are we vulnerable to metal fatigue here?

Well, I'm my takeaway my I'm not trying to, you know, advocate for some world in which you don't have schedule pressure or in which you don't have these patterns of human behavior. What I'm saying is we gotta talk about them to make ourselves less vulnerable to them. So so here's here's the change. What you just said is part of the planning. The planning is we have a question session. We have this session. These are the questions we have to answer.

Here's a interesting thing, Andy. You've been to college. You've been to university. You've gone all the way up. It sounds like you did you you did grad school? Not. Because I You've gone all the way up. It sound like you did you you did grad school? Not. Because I had my little, okay. So you got you got through college. Let's just use that as a number. How many courses, considering planning is one of the most important tools you could have for your entire life?

Planning your wedding, planning a vacation, planning with your family, planning your finances. How many courses did you take in planning? 0. I have this conversation with my wife all the time because I try to share with her there's a difference not because she's doing it because there's a difference between an idea and a plan. And most people have ideas. Let's do it this way. What you're talking about, Andy, which is fabulous, is baking into the design and infrastructure.

Is a timeline variable in the CPM chart that accounts for asking the questions about this. And if you don't build it in, you get crunched, and you don't ask the questions. Does that make sense?

And and, you know, it's a great it's a great thing that I, you know, maybe can go into organizations and advocate for now to say, when you start a project, build in you know, there the guy that I mentioned who put me on this path, Ed Rogers, who since retired from NASA, the the chief knowledge officer at at NASA Goddard, he used to do sessions that he called pause and learn, where he would go into project teams Yep.

And they would take some time out from the intensity of the work and sit down and talk about what was going on on the team, and were there concerns that people had that weren't getting voiced, and were there other things they needed to talk about. You I mean, you need to advocate that that happened on a fairly, you know, frequent regular basis.

And as long as when the conversation starts in the beginning when they're sitting down creating the plans, someone says, I wanna bake in a few of these points where we have a day. Ah, we don't have a day. No. No. No. No. No. We're gonna we're gonna make a day here. We're gonna make a day there. We're gonna bake it into our planning. And so that becomes one of the checks that you have to accomplish to get there.

If you don't bake it in and you ask for people to do it on the fly, that's when you end up with your reality distortion field because the but the hey. It's gotta be done by Tuesday. Hey, we've got a 100 we got a $1,000,000 resting on this. Hey, we just got into something where they're looking for another vendor. Hey, we've got all of and I give you 400 of them probably without stopping. That's the plan inside. And that's And I would I I agree with you. I agree a 100%.

I just say bake it in the cold plan. And and, you know, thank you. I'm I'm I'm glad that we're in violent agreement as they say. What I wanna do, and maybe you have some advice for me on this, I wanna get into engineering schools. I want kids who are studying engineering to be exposed to this stuff while they're still learning. And, you know, that's a whole other arena that down the road I hope to be able to enter.

So we have what's called a billion hearts and minds, and we have another program with inside of that. The billion hearts and minds is to get a 1,000,000,000 people around the world to change based upon what we've worked on. And it's not change space related. It's change just in paradigm shifting and understanding. There's another one called a little bit of space. What does a little bit of space mean? It's a double entendre, meaning it's got two meanings. We wanna go to teachers around the world.

It's part of this program we're working on. And Pierce is Pierce is one of the people working on it. Andy Aldrin and I have we've had 8 months of conversation on this. Is that we wanna go to schools and say, let's teach let's take your, schools are taught in blocks. You have a block of this, a block of this, a block of this, a block of this, all over the world. What are you gonna teach in each segment if you wanna think about it from a different vantage point, a different language?

We wanna say, can you give us a little bit of space? And what that means is, can you give us 3 days about this? You have a whole year. And they say, I I don't have time to teach it. Well, let me ask you something. How influential has music been to pop culture that's dealing with space? Oh, my god. I mean, you got the Star Trek theme, you got the the Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I mean, music and space have tied together. The themes from many movies have been perforated.

How about psychology? Looking from the world from afar. So I can create. There's a lot that goes into it. And I if you want, it's about a 25 page paper. We can get that to you. It's that we ask the school we have to demonstrate to the school what the value is. And if it's a combination of planning and asking the right questions. But you have to go in with all the tools put together. So if you would like to potentially hear more about that, absolutely. It's not just engineering schools.

It should be what a planetary what was your discipline? You called it planetary geology. Geology. It should also be Geology science.

It should also be in engineering, and it should also be in life support, and it also should be in, you know, you could take all the categories that it takes to launch or to go beyond Earth, and you could find where you would need to have a whole new set of Well, you know, that's another point that I I forgot to make at the beginning, which is that the stuff that I've been able to derive from the history of NASA, particularly Apollo, is applicable to any area of human endeavor. Yeah. Absolutely.

Okay. So why don't we move on to number 4? Yep. The understanding the risks. So all of the accidents that I mentioned, the fire that killed the first Apollo crew, Challenger, and the Columbia shuttle that disintegrated on reentry, they all happened because NASA accepted risks that were not sufficiently understood, but they could have been understood if they had done sufficient testing. So with the fire, if you can believe this, they had a blind spot about oxygen at 16 pounds per square inch.

They were focused on the in flight atmosphere of £5 per square edge. But flammability goes up directly with the concentration of oxygen. And there were plenty Okay. It's a it's a it's a exponential I don't know that it's exponential Correct. But it is it is directly proportional. The flammability risk. Okay. The the the the the intensity of the flame, the all of those things go up with the concentration of oxygen. Do you know why it was 16? It's because Why?

They they originally thought they were gonna fill the cabin with air during Mercury, and the astronaut would be given pure oxygen in the suit, and so you wouldn't have a fire risk while the spacecraft was on the ground with 16 PSI oxygen. But they had a problem with their environmental control system where air was leaking into the suit, and the little gizmo called the demand regulator was being fooled by that.

And the result was that nitrogen built up in the suit, which is, you know, that'll kill you if it gets high enough. Yeah. And they almost lost a test subject. Thankfully, they got him out in time, but they decided we don't know how to fix this. We're gonna just have to fill the cabin with pure oxygen during countdown. And the reason it was 16 was because they wanted a slightly positive pressure above ambient, which is, of course, 14.7.

Do you know when they realized that the air was leaking into the system? It was 1960 ish. No. No. I mean, in in terms of timeline, meaning, if they realized it 4 weeks ahead Oh, no. Or if they realized it 4 months ahead. They realized it before they'd even tried to put anybody in a mercury capsule and send them up. I mean, Alan Sheppard flew in May of 61, and this was, like, sometime in 1960. I can't give you the month.

But it was So they were not able they they realized this condition, and they were not they decided not to to solve it this way. This was the answer. The answer. And as I mentioned to you, they had this belief that, hey, we didn't have a fire with this in Mercury. We did the same thing in Gemini. We didn't have a fire. Right. But see, the thing is that they never tested for pure oxygen at this elevated pressure.

What they one of the guys that was running NASA said in an oral history many years later, he said the thing we should have done was have a boilerplate capsule, fill it full of all the stuff that we'd have during a flight, all the materials that could burn in pure oxygen, which they had been testing, but they didn't test them at 16 PSI. Put them all in there, light a igniter, see what happens, and see if it was something we could control. And they never did it.

They never tested at this elevated pressure, and they never even tested what would happen if you put all those materials in a spacecraft and lit it off, even at a reduced pressure. And people had this blind spot about the ferocity of things burning in 16 p now this was I have to tell you something. In my research from my class, I discovered a film that had been made way back in 1947 by the Defense Department called the Chemistry of Fire.

And in the film, which is on YouTube, you can look it up and watch it, there's a demonstration, a guy takes some steel wall and sticks it into an open mouth flask, which is full of pure oxygen, and then oh, no. He he he, ignites it. He gets it glowing with a with a a lighter or bunsenburger bunsenburger. Yeah. And he sticks it into the pure oxygen, and it goes up like a match head. I mean Yeah. It's just gonna come crazy. Appreciate that if you've never seen it. But they knew it.

This is 20 years before this accident, and people outside NASA were aware of this. But within NASA, there was this amazing blind spot about the the hazard at that pressure. I I would I see, I'm I'm I'm wrestling with these terms, because I'm trying to figure out for us. I mean, that's the reason I these calls are so I learned something here. Trying to figure out for us, there are so many things that you could be testing and testing and testing and testing.

And we're talking about things that have never been done before. So for example, a box of the roof and a door on the moon, the 4 phase development of the moon, what we've got, has never been done before. There is some historical reference for certain types of activities, but there's also not for many others. And you've even mentioned it. It's just one thing could go wrong out of 1,000.

And what are the what are the So there there's there's You know, I've I've puzzled about this, and I've talked about it with the people in my classes. How do you spot the golden bullet that's gonna bring you down? But the in Vietnam, they the the the guys who flew helicopters in Vietnam used to call it the golden BB. How do you spot the bullet that's gonna bring you down?

And if you're a program manager or project manager, you've got people storming into your office every day in a in a fraud Yeah. About, oh my god. We've got this problem. We've got that problem. How do you even triage it? And I don't claim to have the answer except to say a start of how to how to do it is to look at history, You know? It's it's a start. We just had, there's another podcast series on the same website for, for Redefining Tomorrow. We just had Kevin Sarrais on.

He's brought 3 companies from 0 to, a $1,000,000,000 in valuation. And in the call, we talked about entrepreneurship, and he said, well, the CEO's job is just always taking care of things that go wrong. And I said to him, you know what? My you've not heard my my title. It's the CSO. And what is CSO? A chief strategy officer. There's a bunch of terms that you come up with. No. It's chief executive officer. I figured you were going to.

Because my my job is my role is to take on all the things that go wrong and try to figure out a way to solve them or address them and to clear the path for the people in front of me. That, you know, I wanna make sure that they could be successful. My point is that that golden bullet, it depends on there are probably many decisions made in this world and someone went into work and they had a bad day at home, they had something go wrong, and they just said, let's go left. And they say why go left?

You know, I've been thinking about it. Let's go left. And the reason they went left is because they didn't get to sit at home and go over the reports and they didn't wanna look bad and they knew that something was on the line, their job, their role, the finances, the their health, they could have found out their mom just got canceled that day. Maybe there was an incident, and this relates directly to Challenger.

Maybe there was an incident 2 weeks before where the boss yelled at them and said why the hell didn't you go left? And so they're they're damn sure not gonna be making that mistake again. Which is Elon saying, we've you know, let's go with this.

And it's not I love that we're having this discussion because it's it's an the own the one of the case scenarios that I keep on going back to, and I'm playing this over in my head, just so you know, it's not this is not just sitting on top of a a a no way like, we're just having a conversation. I'm interviewing. I'm just saying myself.

Okay. How do we get people to understand that the real importance is making sure in the beginning that you have the time that you don't you're not pressured the same way so you could look at the options. Maybe there are 4 different vendors and 6 different materials you could try. Maybe if you scheduled it properly, it's no it's there's no guarantee. But it's much better to have found out 3 months earlier that there's a challenge than it is to find out 2 months earlier or a month earlier.

And I I share I I agree with you. I love the fact that we're doing this. We're kind of and you're doing we're doing together exactly what I try to do in the class because I don't come in with all the answers.

I come in with a body of of of knowledge and a perspective that I've gotten out of my deep dives into history, but I there's a moment in every day that I that I teach this class, every full day session, where I say to a room full of aerospace engineers, you guys help me figure this out because I don't have the answer. And I I wanna say to you, David, what do you do to get through?

Let's say you could go into a room with people who are starting a project and they say, yeah, we did the you know, they did this 20 years ago. It can't be that hard. What how do you break through the mindset and get them to realize that they don't know what they don't know? So I I'm gonna give you a kinda counterintuitive approach to start, and then I'll answer that question. Every meeting we have in Project Moon Hut, we start with how are you?

Okay. Now that might not seem like a very big question, but it's not about business. It's not about how's work. It's how are you? And the reason is during that call, at least for me, I'm hoping with others, that they're getting to know what's going on with this person. And I'll give you a scenario and then I'll come back to, where this kinda comes from. We had a person on one of our teams. I won't mention the team because it's they've done a phenomenal job working with us for over 2 years.

They have a ton of people working with us. And we got on and this one guy just didn't look right. And we have this how are you? And I said, no. No. No. No. No. How are you? And he just put his head down and he said, oh, this is not good and this is not good and this is not good and and you could tell he was hurt. We spent 45 minutes of that call working on how are you and then we cut the call because it's normally an hour and half.

There's a this one CEO of, of a major company had just flown into Italy. I don't know if I've shared this before. She'd just flown into Italy to renegotiate a major deal. They needed to drop the cost because the economy had changed. And she when she walked into this meeting, the CEO and she were they were talking. She said she asked the person, how are you? He said, hi, and she gave the pitch. And she came back, and it was a terrible meeting.

And I was working with this organization for quite some time, and I said, did you ask him how he was? She said, yeah. I did. And then we got to business. I said, no. No. No. No. No. I wanna know, did you ask him how he was? And she said, well, I I mean, how much can you ask?

I said, if he had said to you that every other vet client of theirs has come in and asked for a discount and that they're they're really I mean, they don't know how they can manage this, would you have given your pitch differently? She said, oh oh, yeah. I mean, I definitely would have if I knew that was the condition. I said, you didn't really care about how he was. You were asking to be polite. So I said, we're gonna try something. 2 of us.

What I want you to do is this weekend, this week, I want you to just manage by asking questions. You can't give any advice. Nothing. Just ask questions. She said I don't know if I could do that. And I said no. No. You can. Just people will get to their answers. You know, do you wanna do red, blue, or green? Do you wanna go left or right? Do you want just ask questions. So the next time we sit down we sit down and I say, how are you? And for 13 minutes she told me all about business.

And I look at her and I said, so how are you? She says, oh my god. And I she said, you know, I did try to do that at work, but I couldn't. But I did go home that weekend, and I did it with my children. Do you wanna have spaghetti, Chinese food, or whatever food? She gave she said, I always gave them options. And it was the best weekend I can remember since they've been alive because they felt like they had choice. They they were being heard.

I said the challenge with you is you're so busy getting work done you're not listening. You know what that makes me think of those days? Go ahead. What are the most important questions you can ask about an organizational culture is what are people rewarded for? And the woman that you were just talking about, in her mind, is she working under a belief that says I'm only gonna be rewarded for my productivity? Well, you you're asking a great question, but so I'm gonna complicate it for you.

800 she her department was 800 people. She had a really dynamic, great, executive team, yet it's in Asia. Yeah. Okay. So now I mean, I I spent 10 years there, so I have an understanding of what was going on. But the average, white faced person, they call him guilo if it's the negative term, the average person who was an expat that came in might not have understood the nuances of culture. And so you're at you asked this question, how do you get people to ask these questions?

Well, what I asked was It's counterintuitive. Was how do you break through a mindset that says, I don't have time to pay attention to behavior. And so the first part is you have to go slower to go faster. That's the asking the question because now the people know that you care, that you're working with them. But it's the there's a saying in front of my desk that says the smartest person in the room is the person who asks the best questions of themselves and of others.

Yeah. And so in order to get these individuals, if you would needed it, you could do, an example of a role play where something comes in and says, hey. Well, there's a fire going on. Or, I mean, you can't yell fire in the without being but you could create a dramatic experience that happens. You could, have them watch a a video that explains I just watched a great video the other day on LinkedIn. I a lot of people have seen it.

This professor writes on the war board 1 tie 2 times 2 is 4, 3 times 3 is 9, goes all the way up to, 9 times 9 is 8, 8 times 8 and then goes 9 times 9 and screws it up, the last one. And the whole class the whole place laughs. And he says, it's funny. I did all 9 of the other ones right, and the only one you paid attention to is the one I did wrong. And I did that intentionally because I we have to remember to praise the people who've done the good things.

So it's taking there are many ways to be able to my point is there are many ways to get a person to get there, but I think the counterintuitive one is to just teach them. It is to give them the tools to equip them to be able to make those decisions on their own. And, we talked about planning. I called the top 10 business schools in the United States and asked them if do they teach any courses on planning. Time management, one of the most important skills that you could learn to be in business.

The top 10 business schools in the United States, undergraduate, not a one. I then called the top 10 graduate schools in the United States and asked them, do they have a course on planning? Not a one. Wow. And you had didn't but but it should be across every discipline, shouldn't it? We're talking we're talking the same language here. We both see a gap in Right.

Yeah. It's it's it's, So so you could actually go in and talk about planning before you talk about the this, this field, this distortion field. You could talk about planning first and say to everybody in the room, show me you know, draw out explain to us how you Well, you know, I do And I guarantee you they would I do feel that once you get somebody's attention and you start talking about the behavior stuff, they really do they really are fascinated by it. I think there's an opportunity there.

I just have to get out from under the current, you know, I'm writing the companion book to the course, and that is consuming an awful lot of my my bandwidth. But when I get beyond that, I'm gonna try to do the things that that we're that we're talking about. Well, we can talk and there's also you have a copy of Paid the Things, so you could read it.

Yeah. Chapter 3, Read the forward, the intro, and the first two chapters, and then read chapter 3, and you will I don't make any money, I gave it to you. So it'll give you a whole different perspective. So let's get on to this, beware of the us, them, and I and I'm here for you, so you could always reach out. We want you to become part of Project Moon on the team, so we're helping each other. Thank you. So, no no worries. Number 5, beware of us them thinking. Them thinking. Versus them.

Yep. There's a v s in there. So Yeah. So so just to put a fine point on my last one, just to sum up there, I talked about the fire, but Challenger Columbia could have been prevented by sufficient testing of the things that brought them down too. And you're right. The engineers didn't make a good enough case because they had not been given permission to do enough testing. Yeah. So us versus them thinking. This is something that is absolutely epidemic in our culture today.

We are wired, you know, we're all tribal beings. We come from tribes. Families are tribes, ethnic groups are tribes, sports teams are tribes, religions are tribes, and we are wired up to be tribal in our thinking. We we evolve the capability to to run a subroutine, which is always running in the background, whether we're conscious of it or not, to evaluate someone who comes across our path and say, is this person one of us or not?

And if you think about, you know, when we were living in caves, right, somebody comes to the mouth of your cave, you it it's advantageous from a survival point of view to be able to tell very quickly if this person is there to bring you food or to steal your food. So we are hardwired to do this us versus them thinking.

The problem is that in a technical organization, or really any organization, when you start to make members of your own organization the other, when you start to think of those people as them, you're asking for trouble. And the way it surfaces in the context of NASA, one example is something that they call not invented here syndrome, which you may or may not have heard of. So Yeah. Somebody comes up with an outside the box idea.

I know you don't like that expression, but but Well, because it doesn't it doesn't work. Okay. Yeah. But go ahead. Yeah. And for the context of this, yes. Go ahead. Continue. I understand. Understand. Yep. Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna go with you. I'll go with the flow. I'm writing notes. Go ahead. Great. So somebody comes up with an outside the box idea as as happened more than once in Apollo, and and the the people who were being pitched this idea say, why is he even talking to us?

He's not one of us. He couldn't possibly know how to do it. Right? That's tribal. Another example and by the way, one of the things I talk about is that we all have, because of the limitations in the way our brains are created or constructed, we have what I call a limited spotlight of awareness of of conscious awareness. We can only perceive at any given moment a tiny subset of our reality on a conscious level. And so we need Have you been speaking to my wife? I have not.

Is this is this touching a nerve, David? I don't know. Did I say that out loud? I I thought my mic was off. So I I I I really I really think that that the history shows us that we have to have multiple spotlights of awareness on the problem to be able to get to the to the finish line.

Another aspect of this us versus them thinking is something that we hear about a lot in organizations, which is called stovepiping, where people stay in their own little, what they call swim lane, and they don't talk to people who may be in the next cubicle or the next section of the of the office area or whatever. You you don't have these water cooler conversations where people cross pollinate.

And, again, you're depriving yourself of the multiple spotlights of awareness that can bring you perspectives that you wouldn't otherwise have. Now just to give you one example of how this played into one of the accidents that I teach in the Challenger disaster, I mentioned to you that telecom that happened the night before the launch. Well Yeah. Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama was responsible for those boosters and therefore the o rings.

The the management of the whole shuttle program was at the Space Center in Houston. There had always been tribal tension between Marshall and and the Houston Space Center, and Marshall never communicated with Houston about the concerns about the o rings and temperature. Houston didn't even know about that telecom. If they had, they might have said, wait a minute. What what what happened? What what what did the engineers say? Why did they say it? They never said one word about it.

And so there was a missed opportunity there to delay that launch. And that was And it could have been behind closed doors that one of the people said do not say anything. It was understood. It was We're going forward. It was it was Yeah. It didn't have to be said explicitly because it was such a part of the culture. I mean, I asked one of the shuttle commanders, who obviously was based in Houston. That's where all the astronauts are based.

I said to him, how would you describe the culture at Marshall? And he said, what happens if Marshall stays at Marshall? So I'm gonna ask you a question about Tribal. What do you think is the number one thing that space people see tonight? Space people what? People who are enjoy beyond Earth, who are what's the number one thing people say about me when they're talking to me? They'll say it right to my face. You're not tribal. They say you're not a space person you don't understand.

Oh, sorry to hear that. I get that all the time. Well, that's that's unfortunate because it closes doors to what could otherwise be a shared experience. Correct. I am because I'm not in love with space, I therefore can't understand the technology. By the way, my background is organic chemistry, physics, calculus. I did got straight a's in organic chemistry. I mean, I I have a background in biology and a dual major in psychology.

Got an MBA, but I've worked in over 300 different industries, nanotechnology, aerospace, water, and sewage construction retail, but I don't understand space. Mhmm. Now how do you think how do you think collaboration starts where someone doesn't have an under and I'm using it as an example to because I wanna take it further. How do you think it feels if you're not in the space ecosystem, if the people in the space ecosystem think that if you don't love space, you can't really do any of this?

Completely unproductive and and, unfortunate. It's I hate I hate hearing that. It's it is so ubiquitous. It is so challenging that it is one of if it is one of the challenges within Project Moon Hut for me is that it's almost like I have to grab my seat when I'm making a call to a space person because I'm not sure if they're going to be open to the fact that maybe we do have a box of the roof and a door. Maybe we do have some of the most complete plans as we've been told by people.

Mhmm. Maybe we have some things here. We can't even get that far. Yeah. I mean, this is very unfortunate, and the only thing I can say I mean, it makes your job that much harder, and you have to Think of think about history. How many innovations have come from outside the industry into an industry? For example, someone comes from another country. It's some number like 56% of the Silicon Valley, startups were startups by people who were not American, not US citizens.

They came to America, and they looked at the world differently. That's a huge number. Now it could be 52, it could be 57. Please don't kick me for it. But it's that a lot of ideas, Waze, the, you remember Waze for GPS for your car? They everybody was trying to build in sensor road technology to know where people go, and these people at Waze said, hey. Everybody's got a mobile phone. Why don't we just leverage everybody's phone, and we'll use the data that comes off of that?

Because they looked at the world differently. And that this beyond the earth ecosystem could have some benefits from people who don't see the world the same way. Oh my god. Absolutely. So so the so the this tribal thing, you hit me really hard when you said that because I'm thinking, god, how do you I haven't come up with an answer for that. I I can I tell you what I'm doing? Well, I I was gonna say and then and then I I wanna hear what you're gonna say.

But I I was gonna say, you you just have to work that much harder to build a person to person connection outside of the the space subject matter. And I would say we're doing a little bit differently. We're putting the the term here is Thor, Wonder Woman, and Hulk. It's not David. It's that we know that Andy Chaikin has looked at the website. We know that you now know about us. You've heard some of the quotes from some of the people that we're working with.

And it's one of the big surprises where sometimes we'll say, we'll be on a call, say, for an interview. And they'll say, well, I've never heard about you. That doesn't mean anything. But could you open up the page of the podcasts? And you see their eyes go scanning and they say, I I know, like, 30, 40 percent of the people on this list. My reaction is always the same. How did they know about us and you don't?

So we're building Thor Woman, Wonder Woman, and Hulk because it's not about Project Moon Hut. It's about Kirkland and Ellis, the 7th largest law firm in the world, KPMG, Deloitte, PWCEY, JPMorgan Private Banking, Maples Group, Carta. It's about we just brought on 17 law firms around the world to do office actions. We have the guy who invent who created the, software.

When you get a text message from Amazon that says that your package has arrived, the guy who built that for all of Amazon is on our team. The number one ontologist in the world is on our team, Barry White. And if you go down the list, what we're doing is we're building an army of individuals like yourself who learned about us and said, So that's it's kind of a softer approach because I I couldn't win. I can't win. Why is it cool? They you have to love space.

Why is it cool Thor, Wonder Woman, and Hulk? Because, you know when you're about to go into an alley and you're about to fight, like, 8 guys and they're, like, pumping and they're they're ready to fight you, and then right behind you walks Thor Wonder Woman and Hulk. And they go, wait wait wait wait. Okay. Okay. Well, maybe we're not gonna fight you right now. We're gonna listen. So it's we're bringing the army, what's the one with Mel Brooks where they come over the hill? Blazing Saddles?

You know, the the fight. The no. No. Mel Brooks with the the fight, the the big scene where he's battling in Ireland or Scotland. We There's one scene in in History of the World part 2? I'll I'll look it up in a moment. No. It's a it's a battle. It's a warrior film. Mel Brooks? Over the ridge and he's going to fight not Mel Brooks. Sorry. Mel, not Gibson. Is that his name? Mel you know, the the guy who was, Oh. Yes. Mel Gibson. From Mel Brooks. So I was thinking Yes. Very different. Mel Brooks.

I'm sorry. That was my mistake. It's Mel I I I Mel Gibson. Right. He's the guy what's the one there? He's the guy. He slaps Braveheart. Remember when he comes over the hill and they're kinda laughing at him like he's only got these few people and then the whole crew comes over and it's okay. This is the army. What we're doing is we're quietly, we're meeting with people like you.

And I can't even tell you this past week the people we're talking to, they're just over the top because we're just trying to do the work in the background. So to answer the question about this tribal, it's not an easy thing to get over. You have to have successes behind you. You have to have accomplishments behind you. And it's a the beyond earth ecosystem because the topic is, what will it take to get us back to the moon?

Well, one of them is, anybody who's listening to this podcast, is to open up to the fact that you don't have to love space to be interested in creating a box with a roof and a door on the moon. Because you could be a lawyer who's helping us to navigate something. So for example, Maples Group out of the Cayman Islands. They've done phenomenal work for us but they're not space people, they're just people.

Carta, which is the company in California that does the options trading pools, they gave us a deal that's absolutely beyond imagination. Feet Fiduciary Services in Luxembourg became our fiduciary. They know nothing about this because you need all of these people to get a box of the roof and a door on the mountain. Right. And so we're we're gener we're trying to generate them in our own way. But so it's a tough one.

And if we're gonna get a box of the roof and a door on the moon, we have to have us working together. Us versus them is a terrible way to to build that. Well, so we're we're speaking the same language. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So what's this next one? Awareness has a shelf life. I was interested when you said that. Yeah. What does that mean? You you know, one of the things that we see is that when we have a catastrophic failure, it shifts our awareness. I call it a window of clarity that opens.

We can see things differently. We say, oh my god. How could we have done x y z? How could we been that that stupid? You know? Sometimes we say that to ourselves. And and yeah. I mean, it's just the way the way we're wired up. The problem is that that window of clarity doesn't stay open forever. And what the history shows us, unfortunately, is that it is shockingly easy to lose those lessons that we acquired so painfully in the wake of the last accident.

And just one example is that, you know, Challenger happened in 1986, and it really took very little time, only, you know, a relatively few years, like, less than a decade for those lessons to be to start being lost at NASA and pave the way for the Columbia accident, which happened 17 years to almost to the day after Challenger. Very, very similar human behavior lessons.

The fact that, again, this false perception of risk, they had a problem with foam coming off of the shuttle's big external tank and hitting sometimes hitting well, very often hitting the orbiter, the shuttle orbiter, where the astronauts were during launch. And they had some very close calls. They had one flight just 2 years after Challenger, where foam hit the bottom of the orbiter and damaged the protective tiles, these silica tiles for reentry.

One of them was damaged so badly that it got down to bare metal, And it was only because there was a extra piece of metal underneath that spot that they didn't kill that crew. Yeah. And yet, even with close calls like that, they started to think of the foam strike in the same way they thought of the o rings. Well, it's not the way we designed it, but we can get you know, it hasn't bitten us yet, so we're we must be okay.

And by the time Columbia happened in 2003 because of a foam big piece of foam that broke off during launch and hit the leading edge of the wing on on the Columbia shuttle, you know, it had been classified not as a safety threat, this recurring problem, but a, quote, unquote, maintenance issue. And so the lesson is that awareness has a shelf life, and we must you know, not just every year.

NASA has what they call remembrance week every year, because all the 3 accidents happened around the same time at the end of January, beginning of February. And so they have every year, they look back, and they talk about the lessons. My point is you've gotta build this into your culture. That you're you've gotta create a learning organization that remembers the lessons and lives by them. It's very hard to do.

And these you know, the the conversation has been more about the technological, lessons. No. No. It's really not about it's about the human behavior lessons. No. No. What and that's not what I meant is the accidents around technology conditions. It there there we are not saying there was a budgeting error. You're not saying there was an error in hiring. You're not saying there was a contract challenge.

Because in each one of these departments, you could probably relate back like I did with the O ring. Well, how was this selected? Or the fact that they sent out a letter to the company, by the way, we're looking for somebody else. I mean, how would how would you react if your company let's say, I'm gonna get your relativity space. You you had contracts. You haven't gotten rocket off. You're looking at your cash flow, and you get a letter that says, hey. You don't ship.

We're not gonna do any more business. And you're absolutely right. And, you know, if I could go back in time, I'd be standing in the office of the person who sent that letter to Thiokol saying, by the way, we're gonna look for a second company to provide our boosters. And I'd say, and what is it you think is that's gonna do to the to the mindset of Thiocollo? Do you understand the implications and the repercussions of the letter you're about to send? And No. They don't.

And the and even if you have this whole scenario planning But see, it goes back I'm sorry. David, let me just say this and then you can continue. Yeah. It goes back to the stories we tell ourselves because everybody at NASA was in the grip of this narrative from that had existed for Yeah. Decade you know, a couple of decades. We're gonna make space flight routine and affordable. The overarching goal is the flight rate, and everything else flows from that.

Yes. The the there's a perception that I'm trying to get through because I I I'm gonna bring you back to a number 8, so there will be an 8. You you gave 7, but there'll be an 8. Had a company just recently. I had to do 3 speaking engagements. I had to show up on time. I had to do the work on time. And great reviews. I'm gonna throw that in there. Great reviews on each one.

Even the person who ran the program said some of the best programs she's ever run-in like 7 years at their event at this organization. So the But they don't pay on time. So I wrote to them and I said, it's kinda funny. If I showed up 10 minutes late, didn't show up for a half hour a day, you would say I don't get paid. But you don't pay me as if that's okay. I didn't hear back. I saw online payment authorized. But it still was late. It was still was late because I even gave him a warning.

I said your bill's due in a few days and I did my work on time. Are you gonna get a time? And she didn't ignore it. But then I wrote this kind of direct letter saying if I showed up late you would not have paid me. So what's the difference here? So this remembrance, I'm gonna dimensionalize it. I think that the remembrance if you are going to go in this way has to be in every department. Meaning purchase orders. How did you select your your vendor?

Did you select you have this list but did you put in there this category of x? Maybe that's missing in the evaluation and therefore you ended up with challenges because you brought that up. You said there's that that thing that they have to they get scored on. Maybe there's a missing variable in there such as proximity to launch site. Mhmm. That could have been one of the variables that would have changed everything. So what about the proper paranoia?

So proper paranoia is is is a phrase that I heard from one of my great mentors who is, by now they would call him a gray beard at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a fellow named Gentry Lee, who I first encountered when I was a college intern on the Viking Mars landing. And Gentry was just a is a fabulous person, a great thinker, very broad thinker. And today, he is somebody who can look over the shoulders of project teams at JPL and say, are you considering this?

And they have to stop and think and say, wow. No. We haven't, you know, or you're not facing up to the reality of what you're doing. You're not going to make the next launch window to Mars. You have problems that are gonna delay you, and you need to stand up and say that now. He's done things like that.

Anyway, I interviewed Gentry for a book that I wrote called A Passion for Mars about people that I've known in my life who were passionate about the exploration of Mars, including my college professor, including scientists who sent cameras to Mars, orbit Mars, and completely overturned. One of the reasons I love the story of Mars exploration is that every time we've looked at Mars more closely, we've seen a completely different planet than the one we thought was there.

And this started when I was in high school when we discovered they started seeing, you know, these enormous volcanoes and giant canyons. Up until that moment, they thought Mars is like the moon, sort of, but it's got a very thin atmosphere. It's kinda boring. Well, you know, they looked at the whole planet with this orbiter and it was like, where did that planet come from? Right? So I wrote this book and I interviewed Gentry about the Viking mission that that I had been an intern on.

And he told me about the man who ran the project at the, contractor that built the lander, Martin Marietta, it was called at that time. A fellow named Jim Martin who looked like General Savage. The guy had this crew cut, he could be very intimidating. He was a lovely guy underneath it all. I I got to meet him and talk to him when I was a student.

But Gentry told me that Jim Martin's philosophy of how you run a program is that you hire you you you you practice what he called proper paranoia, which is to say that you hire the best people you can get, and you turn them loose, but you are scared, pardon my language, shitless, then it won't Mhmm. I used that word earlier. Yeah. I said I think you dropped an f bomb. Yeah. Oh, I did? Yeah. Okay. Might have So I figured I could come in under the radar with shitless. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah.

So we'll we'll we'll I it it it I only use it when it's really appropriate. So hopefully I use it at the right time. So so you've got to be running scared a little bit that this that it won't work. And you have to be saying to yourself constantly, what am I missing? You can never afford to say, we've got this nailed.

And one of the reasons for that is because space systems are so complex that you will never I've literally had this said by a NASA, engineer who investigated a a a near catastrophe on one of the space station space walks where, you may have heard about this. An Italian astronaut had a water leak in his helmet during a space walk, and he almost drowned. Right?

I mean, he got back to the airlock in time, and the thing is that there were warning signs of this problem on a space walk by the same guy a week before, and they missed the warning sign because of the story they told themselves about what that water leak meant. And what this guy, this engineer who had investigated this mishap said was, you can never know everything about your hardware. There can always be something that comes up that you haven't seen before that can bite you.

So proper paranoia is a mindset that you must have if if you wanna avoid failure. And that, I'll say one other thing, and it relates it relates to what I call failure behaviors. One of my failure behaviors is closed mindedness, and that's another thing that we see a lot in our culture where people live in thought bubbles where they seek out information that confirms what they already believe.

What proper paranoia tells us is that you must be open to information that conflicts with what you believe, and you must be willing to pay attention to that. And people say the hardware talks to you. You gotta hear what the hardware is saying even if it challenges your beliefs. Easier said than done. I I I I have jokes about this. I've been with my wife for 37 years is I often ask people have they changed their wives or their husbands or whatever, if they're spouses, mates.

And people look at me and say, oh, no. And I said, so you can't even change a person you're looking for. Get divorced and remarry. You mean change how they think? Well, actually, the last call I was on last interview, I said, well, have because he brought something up, I said, did you change your wife? He said, I'm on my 3rd. I said I said, well, then you definitely changed your wife. So I always use the expression I'm on my first.

It's not an easy thing to see what you don't know you're not seeing. And you're asking someone to see what they don't know that they're not seeing because we are human and that's a challenge. And maybe it's I use chat all the time. I will dump something into chat and say this is what I've written, created, designed, what am I missing? Or can you give me 10 ways to do this? 8 of them I'll know but 9 and 10 I didn't think about.

And I'm using chat as my, my right hand person to question the things that I'm working on. So I might dump it in and say, give me a counterintuitive Well, what you're saying what you're saying is that yeah. What you're saying is that AI has become the spotlight of awareness that you could that you're bringing on to your team, one of the spotlights of awareness to give you that diversity of perspective. Oh, yeah.

I I because if I it's taking my content, what I've written or somebody else has written. I dump it in and I'm saying, okay. What did we miss here? And it might you know, can you give me a series of questions that we missed? And it's always gonna come up with questions. It's always. But you have to be open to dump it in there and have it challenge you. So just the other day I did we were working on a paper for something that we had to do with, our Mearthl, our platform. And I said, okay.

If you were to do this and you had to do it globally, what would be the top ten things you would do? And he gave it to me and I said, what if I gave you a budget of a half a1000000? Gave me. What if I gave you a budget of a1000000? Okay. What are we missing here? What am I not asking you? Like 10 things that I wasn't asking. So okay. Let's go down each one of them. And it's a conversation that I'm having with AI to find what I might be missing. But I'm always saying go to project moonhat.org.

Here's the here's the copy of Paid to Think. Read the book. Understand what I know. I have to now the large learning language model gets to know you, so it's now able to give you more information. So when I say, do you know project moonlight? It says, yes. Okay. Do you understand this? Let me give you the let me give you the 1,000,000,000 hearts and minds, And it's 32 pages. Or let me give you what we're working on in this area. Okay. Got it.

So, yeah, I'm using it to question myself all the time. All the time. So I wanna get to number 8. This is gonna be one that'll be fun. At least for me. Okay. Let me okay. We're going to get to number 8 and this is I will pause for one second. Just got something in from one of our teammates in in Asia and Pakistan and he wants to continue writing a document. We've got some great things happening so it was nice to see that. Okay. So here's the question.

The title of the program is what will it take to get back to the moon? And I want you to push aside because a lot of what you talked about was the challenges of making sure we do things right, that we don't make the mistakes of yesterday and that we clear those those paths away. My question is so that we deliver on the promise of the title a little bit more. Taking what you know about the ecosystem and we're just making this up, we're just talking as friends.

If you had to design it, Getting us back to the moon. You you could even you were saying some great things about project moon. It's a great throw those things in too. What do you think it would take to get us back to the moon besides being cautious, watching out for, being aware on a what do you think it needs for us to act to make sense? Actually take issue with just one tiny element of what you just said, which is that caution is important, but so is boldness.

And if you'll remember earlier in the conversation, I talked about space flight, the analogy that I use for space flight is being on a high wire. And I I talked about it in the sense of how unforgiving spaceflight is and and one little, you know, false move and you fall off the hard the high wire. What I always say when I teach the class and I put up a picture of a high wire walker and I say, how do you stay on a high wire? And and, the answer that I'm looking for is balance.

So, really, these things are dynamic conditions. Balance is not set it and forget it, and there's nothing about spaceflight that is set it and forget it. You have to constantly be asking yourself, are we doing what we should be doing? And so I would say there's a balance between caution and boldness.

One of the reasons we got to the moon in Apollo when we did was because there were bold ideas like, sending the very first Saturn 5 with astronauts on it into lunar orbit, which was not the original plan, only the second Apollo mission. But they had enough testing under their belt and they had the confidence, well placed confidence to do it.

So I would say with project Moon Hut, you want to strive for that dynamic condition called balance and recognize when boldness is called for, and recognize when caution is core called for. Recognize when you've done enough testing to try to reach farther versus when you haven't. You know, one of the things that you hear sometimes these days and testing costs money. You know, I said before that the accidents that I teach could have been avoided if there had been sufficient testing.

But testing costs money, and so, you know, under the cost and schedule pressures that we talked about, you know, there's a reluctance sometimes to spend the extra money on sufficient testing. And people have a mindset, there's a mindset these days that you hear sometimes that says, well, just run a computer model. Well, that that may get you, you know, 80% of the way there, it may get you 75% of the way there, but it's it probably won't get you all the way there.

And so, I guess what I'm saying is, you know, we talked about the how tough it is to spot the golden BB. I feel like there's a secret sauce that successful project managers have that's born of experience. You really wanna have people in the decision making positions of your project that have been through failure and have learned from failure and have had hands on experience.

The thing you don't wanna have, and this is part of the problem that NASA has had like during the years before Challenger, the guy at the top had never done human space flight, he was a business guy, his second in command had never done human spaceflight, he came out of the robotic spaceflight world. You don't wanna end up in that position where people making key decisions don't haven't experienced the realities. Does that help at all?

Yeah. It's intere because if you look at the average age of a SpaceX employee, it's 27 years old. You look at the average age of a and I won't list the names because but they're a lot older. I mean, they're in their forties to fifties. We need both, don't you? I mean, we need the young enthusiastic people. What I what I tend to hear about SpaceX though is that they tend to hire these young people and burn them out, which is unfortunate.

Yeah. And well, it's but it's it's part of the game of speed to to to mark in this decision making. Burning out people is that you lose the expertise born of experience. But well, the the once something is embedded and it's in the cult, it's already been built, then you don't meet that person for the next phase, for example. That the people who lived through it are there to talk about it to the newer people. Oh, because it's the the mechanism is there.

They've the what is the, the the rocket that they're using currently? What's the name of it? I keep forgetting. The Falcon 9. The Falcon 9 is what? 19, times it's been used? They planned on it only being used a few times? Something was Falcon was coming to my mind. I couldn't figure out what was the number. So the the challenge is or the the misconception is that we need those people there who are there early on who are going through the phases and you don't.

Once the assembly line is put into production, once all the mechanisms are put in place, once the supply chain has been established, once the processes are done, to some degree, you want a new person to walk in and say, how do we do it? Better, faster, cheaper? And you hope that the culture allows you to be able to do that so that you end up with the next generation. Otherwise, you're gonna be stuck in the past.

So it's not a and I'm I'm making this very highly simplistic and I'm not trying to let me give you an example. I don't know if I'm ready to buy into better, faster, cheaper, by the way because No. No. It's not better that's what I'm saying. It's a bad example. If I if you came to Project Moon Hut or any of the companies had over 20, if you came in the 1st day, we'd be facing certain challenges.

Getting something set up, putting the systems in place, putting the hardware, the software, whatever it may be in place. Okay. You come on a year later. Software's already in place. The decisions have been made. Things are running smooth enough. You come in 3 years later. It's gonna be different. So today if you came into Project Moon Hut, let's say you said David, I wanna be a part. I wanna work on this. It is a completely different experience than it was 5 years ago. Completely different.

Because all the entities have been formed, the financial models have been established, the design has been put together. So you come in at a different starting point. And to some degree, some degree there are 3 different types of positions. The first one is oftentimes let me use a a river. Let's say you have to go across a river. Sometimes you have to teach a person to swim across the river and come back. They have to do it regularly. They're gonna transport people back and forth.

They need to know how to swim. Sometimes you need to get them strong enough to be able to get across the river and maybe come back occasionally. And sometimes you just throw the person on your back and say, I've already been across the river. I'm gonna take you across the river. You don't have to know how to swim. You just have to know to take us from that point forward. And you as a leader, you have to determine what are those skill sets that you need.

So what we're doing in Project Moon Hut is we create videos of experiences. We have about a 114 videos. So if you you're watching 2 of them right now. You can watch a video and hear firsthand what that condition is. And so we're trying to create the tools to have things move forward because we're coming at it very differently. And the skills that we needed 2 years ago, we don't need the same way today. I well, I'd I'd like to, you know, I'd like to see it in action.

I'd like to see more about how it works. It's it's intriguing. In all the companies, you know, one of the things we had a a screen printing company long time ago, printing machines. And we had manually printing. And we're going back 30 years. You'd mantle manually print. You've probably seen someone Oh, yeah. They take a little squeegee and they pull it.

Okay. That was a skill you need to know how to put the pressure on, how to put the ink in, how to play it down, pick the right screen, do all sorts of things. We then bought a high speed automatic machine that could print 14 colors and up to 800 shirts an hour. Okay? So the person who knew how to do the squeegee pulling was no longer the person we needed because that machine could print an oversized image and can do it in a timeline run by a 30 horsepower screw compressor.

It was a behemoth machine. And let me tell you, they didn't have to know those old skills. They had to know different skills. So as you evolve as an an organization, you wanna bring some things forward, but others are just passe. They're yesterday. Oh, absolutely. A little bit? I totally get it. Yeah. Because you're there. I mean, you're there. You already know it's already done right now, and we've got so many things in place that we're working on next phase development.

So when it comes the reason I was asking this question is we always wanted to come back to this title of what will it take to get back to the moon. And, you know, we've got Artemis. We've got there's a few programs out there around the world that people are working towards. What what's your take on else that that is a is a crucial ingredient of of success in something like this, and that's the story you have to tell to the world.

And I've been asked many times, why we need to go back to the moon because if you remember, it wasn't very long ago that the moon was kind of the Rodney Dangerfield of the solar system. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Respect for your listeners who are too young to remember Rodney Dangerfield. No. No. Actually, when we started project moon hut, it was all about Mars. We had no respect. You wanna go back to that moon? There's nothing there for us. There's no value to us.

It's only 3 days away in current technology. But don't worry about that. We we wanna go to we wanna go to Venus or we wanna go to, to Pluto. I know it's not a planet anymore, but we wanna go there. It's a planet. Let's not get into that. I I I'm I that's why it was a good question. My 3 pronged answer to why the moon matters, and and there are things that I know you relate to. One is the science is spectacular.

The moon is nothing less than the Rosetta Stone for decoding the earliest history of the inner solar system, including the history of the earth, because the moon holds the cleanest record on its crater scarred surface of what happened in the inner solar system, including the impact history, which is probably intimately tied to the rise of life on Earth, because the impactors brought with them organics and water and energy, things that you need to have to have life arise. And With the monolith.

So So the science is one of the most beautiful things that we get out of going back to the moon and exploring. The second thing, as as you know, and and you're you're all over this, is that the moon is the place where we learn to live off planet. It is the outward bound school, and it's as you said it's only 3 days away. So we've got to learn how to live off planet while we're on the moon only 3 days from home if something goes wrong before we go further out.

And the third thing is that the moon is the only place in the solar system where you could stand on a surface and see the Earth as a beautiful fragile oasis of life in the blackness of space, and that's a leap in perspective that we desperately need to reinforce if we are to be good stewards of planet Earth. So for many many years I've been talking about those three things as the reason to go back to the mountain. Interesting. I can't wait till you watch the rest of the videos.

So anyway Yeah. Because yeah. It's a these, yes. Okay. I will I will I'm going I'm going to say you did a great job. Fantastic. This is great. Is there any questions for me? I just wanna say thank you again so much for having me and for bringing me into your your world, and I'm I'm already learning so much from this interaction, and I would just love to see it continue.

I I would absolutely love it in what I what we share with if people are working on our team, we're helping them in all different ways. And so we've got individuals from all over the world. We have 5 new people who are starting this week. We have companies joining us regularly. We just had what's the name? Artemis shielding. They do, radiation shielding. They started with us some time back.

They had to stop for a period of time, and they contacted us just recently and said, we have to be involved in this project. And we've restarted up everything again on the radio on the shielding side. But we get everything from patent attorneys all the way through to engineers to financial individuals. It just the the amount of talent that's coming this way Mhmm. Is just phenomenal. So yes. So you could be a part of that, that ecosystem and we can work together.

So with that said, what I wanna do is I wanna thank you for taking the time. I wanna thank everybody out there who did take the time to listen in. We wanna thank you for, well, hope that you learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Remember, the Project Moon Hot Hat Foundation is where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon to the accelerate development of an Earth and space based ecosystem.

Then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species. We are about planet Earth. We are about accelerating innovation. We're about creating collaboration. But in the end, there'll be 10,000,000,000 people on this planet by 2050.

And we're our project is to take those innovations and those new lessons that we learn from governance to you name it, and turn that back to create a new future for ourselves, our children, and our children's children. So you can go to the website. About midway down on the home page, you'll see that there are 3 videos at the bottom. Watch 12. Number 3 is where Project Moon Hut started, where it was founded. So you can hear a little historical if you'd like to from its original conception.

Now, Andy, what's the single best way to get a hold of you? You can go to my website which is www.andrewchaykin.com. That's andrew, no space, chaikin.andrewchaykin.com, and just click on the contact link and type a message in the little window, and it will go right to me. Fantastic. Well, we'd love to connect to you. You could reach out to me at [email protected]. You can reach us at at projectmoonhut on Twitter. You could do also at Goldsmith if you wanted to reach me.

There's also LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. There's mister David Goldsmith if you wanna catch us there. And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite. Throughout history, we've seen humanity undergo transformational shifts that are so impactful, they define entire ages. Just recently, we lived through the information age, and what an incredible journey it's been. Now think about this.

You could be very well on the in the midst of another monumental shift, the transformation into the age of infinite. We're talking about an age that transcends the concepts of scarcity and abundance. It introduces a lifestyle rich with infinite possibilities, established by a new paradigm that links the moon and the earth into a term we call Mearth. This synergy will create a new ecosystem and an economic model propelling us into an era of infinite possibilities.

It does sound like a plot for an extraordinary sci fi story, but this is the story you'll see unfold in your lifetime. This podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation. We look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon. By the way, we were named by NASA. That's how we got the name. Through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem.

Then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species. For more information, you go to our website, www.projectmoonhot.org, where you can check out our 40 year plan, the work we're working on, and so much more. There is a lot being generated on that website. As a matter of fact, you should check out the 4 the Project Moon Hut classification system right under the 40 year plan.

Absolutely amazing work by the team. We are a nonprofit. So while you're there, consider making a donation by clicking on the button up on top. So let's dive into our podcast today. The name the title of the program today is, what will it take to get back to the moon? And today, we have another fabulous guest with us. We have Andrew Chaikin. How are you, Andrew? I'm very well, David. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to it.

So as always, we do a very brief bio. Andrew is an independent space historian, best known as the author of A Man on the Moon, The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. He's a visiting instructor at NASA since 2010, a member of the geology and geophysics imaging team of the New Horizons missions to Pluto and to the caper belt. He's also a member of NASA's Engineering Safety Center's Human Factors Technological Discipline team. I barely can get that out.

He is a recipient of 2 NASA Group Achievement Awards and a recipient of the American Astronaut Astronautical Society's Ordway Award for Sustainable Excellence in Space History. Those are a lot of tongue twisters in there. So be before we start, and this we've had to add this only because individuals have commented that I know what's going on in this interview, that how do I come up with all these questions? Let me be clear to you, and Andrew can attest to this.

I know nothing about what Andrew's going to talk about. He and I and every guest since that have been on a program, we get on and we discuss the title of the topic. We don't go into any depth. I don't have any of the content. Then Andrew is allowed to go out. He does his own thing. He comes up with his own program, and this is the first time I'm hearing anything. I do not know where he's going. I don't know what he's going to cover. I've not heard the bullet points. This is live.

I have a piece of paper in front of me. And and during a typical interview, I take 13 to 17 pages of notes. So I'm live with you learning at the same time you are asking real questions in real time. So let's get started. Andrew, do you like Andy or Andrew? Andy's fine. Okay. Because I just looked in this bottom of your corner of your screen, and it said Yeah. It's, okay. It's Andrew in print, but Andy to friends and and, So I've become a friend is what you're saying.

I've I've I've crossed over that. You're on the inside, David. Okay. So, Andy, do you have an outline or set of bullet points for us? I do, and I wanna say, before we even start, that this has been a very interesting and rewarding process for me because I the stuff I'm gonna talk about today, I've been teaching at NASA and other places like the Missile Defense Agency since 2016.

So I have a lot of miles, on the on the odometer talking about this stuff, but having to come up with these bullet points really was interesting and rewarding because it got me to think about communicating this material in a different way. So I'm really glad that we've that we're doing this.

The the I have found, and you're not the only person who has said, this journey and I think you had about 2 months, but this journey for typical, guest on any of the podcasts, we've done over about 400 since I've started doing this process. Almost every guest said I had to rethink things. I had to change the verbiage. I had to change the the direction in which I normally deliver it. And, we've had people after a program I shared with you just earlier. I would say, you've gotta send this to me.

I have a book deadline tomorrow or the next day. He said, I need to add things in here I've never said before. So that's great. So I'm glad I'm glad you had an experience with it. I wasn't sure if you were gonna like me or not, but at least we're this far. So Yeah. So let's go over the, the bullet points. How many do you have so I know? I have 7 bullet points. Okay. Number 1, the first one, please. Rocket science is not enough. Rocket science is not enough.

Number 2. The stories we tell ourselves. Stories we tell ourselves. Number 3. Beware the reality distortion field. Reality distortion field. Number 4. Understand the risks. Stand the risks. Number 5. Number 5 is beware us versus them thinking. Versus them thinking. Number 6. Awareness has a shelf life. Has a self life. And number 7? Proper paranoia. Paranoia. Proper paranoia.

Sometimes people give me words that I I just don't know how to spell, so I'm glad that I I think I spell paranoia properly. Alright. So let's dig in. Let's start with number 1. Sure. Actually, before I do that, I wanted to just say a little bit about my path and how I got to this point because I didn't start out looking at the stuff I'm gonna talk about. And I don't think that when you and I spoke last time, you gave me a lot of your history. So this is great.

Yeah. Yeah. And and, you know, I I mean, David, you're you've said very clearly and and repeatedly you're not a space guy, and I'm glad that I have a chance to to, interact with you about this material because your reactions will be, you know, very instructive to me. I am a space guy from the time I was a little kid. I mean, I grew up with it.

I was 5 years old when Alan Shepard and Yuri Gagarin, actually not in that order, the other the reverse order became the first humans in space, and I was just captivated by the idea of going to another world. I had picture books with what it would be like to walk on the moon or go to Mars or float in the rings of Saturn, all of that stuff. When I went to I'm gonna I'm gonna let me just break it for a moment because it's a question. I say I'm not a space guy.

You've you heard that in the first time we met. I've told that to people all the time. I don't sit here and look up all the time. I I do admire people who've done the work, but I look I like the grass. I like the going outside. I like Earth, I guess is the way to say it. When you say Not mutually exclusive, though, by the way. Right. Right. Well, yes. I love when people will say, well, we're going to the moon, and they talk it as a, like, a a celestial body. We're on a celestial body. Exactly.

You you can't you can't you can't say what is a celestial body and we're not. You can't use the word lunar because we have to talk properly about the lunar. Well, when you pick up dirt outside, do you call it terraforma?

No. And you're you're you're, articulating something that I feel very strongly about, and that I think is one of the great gifts of being interested in astronomy and space exploration, which is I go outside and I love the grass too, and I love the blue sky, but I always am aware that beyond that blue sky is a universe, and it's so cool. I love that. I love that. I just what I was gonna ask you was that trigger.

Like, why are some people I guess it could be fashion or dance or music or whatever category it is, but that feeling of being in awe that made you pursue it. Yeah. I just would love to understand the biological, the psychological, the sociological components of how someone becomes in so much love. You know what I'm asking? I can only tell you that it was it was in me from a very very early age. I mean, I literally remember it going back to when I was 5 years old.

And I don't know what put it there other than the fact that maybe my my mom got me a book about space. I I I, you know, and then I started taking them out of the library. I don't know. And, you know, I've heard people I've heard space people say that trying to explain this to a person that doesn't feel it is pointless. It's like the the Louis Armstrong they this is what they said to me. It's like Louis Armstrong's quote about jazz. If you have to ask, baby, you'll never know.

But I have seen people become odd by looking at the moon through a telescope for the first time in their lives, seeing the pictures that we get from the space probes, hearing an astronaut talk about what it was like to walk on the moon. Those things can awaken that awe or just any But that's no different than anything.

If I if you don't like carpentry and then I showed you the nuances of carpentry or if you're not a good dancer and you had a good instructor and next thing you know, you were able to have a dance with your daughter for a wedding and you you really do you say, oh my god. I didn't know I I love dance this much. So that that eye opening side of it is the challenge. It's how do you get that eye opening? And and that's a challenge that, you know, is part of our obligation.

If we believe in this, we have to be able to spark that in our audience. So I've worked on it continuously for all of my adult life. I've been in this business of communicating space since I stopped being a planetary science researcher in 1980 and became a science journalist. So just Maybe maybe one day maybe one day, I will wake up and have that. It's been a long time. Hey. You know, maybe the day that you actually get to spend your 1st night sleeping in the moon hut, you know.

I don't even think about it. I just know that we have to do it. So let's go back. Let's hear your history. Give me give me some things about your history so that we can under I can understand you better. By the time I was in high school, college, the Apollo Apollo was happening when I was in junior high and high school, and I was glued to the TV for every Apollo mission, and I was really So so you're in the 5th you're about 5th in the fifties?

Well, I I was 13 in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. So I was born in 1956. So I wanted to be an astronaut more than anything, And I was watching these missions wishing I could just, you know, become part of the Apollo program somehow at age 13. And I by the time I was in high school, the robotic missions were kicking into high gear. We were starting to get unbelievable pictures back from the Mars Orbiter, Mariner 9. We had rocks from the moon that geologists were looking at.

You know, the the Mariner pictures of Mars were showing us volcanoes 3 times higher than Mount Everest and canyons, the length of the United States, and ancient river valleys, and all kinds of wonders. And I said, I wanna be a planetary geologist because that is I've all I've always been a science person as well as somebody who's very turned on by art. In fact, it was the artwork in my childhood astronomy books that really sparked my interest more than anything.

But I was also very fascinated by science, so I decided to study geology in college. And as luck would have it, well, not luck. I consciously applied to Brown University because, and I got in, and my adviser was the was the leader of the camera team for the Viking Mars landers. So I ended up being an intern on the Viking mission at the Jet Propulsion Lab, 3 summers in a row, including the summer of those landings, Viking 1 and Viking 2. And a really interesting thing happened, David.

It was unbelievable to be in inside for a mission like that, see the first pictures come back from the surface of Mars. But I realized as I watched the scientists at work that I wasn't sure that I wanted to do that. You know? I love I love the subject. I've never lost my love of the subject. But did I wanna be a practicing scientist day to day? I was too much kind of split between left brain and right brain. I I had too much going on with the desire to do, space art.

I was becoming a amateur singer songwriter. I was thinking, jeez, maybe I'd like to do that. And I didn't know what I wanted to do for a while. I mean, it took a few years after college before I landed, and and I had spent about a year and a half as a planetary science researcher at the Air and Space Museum in DC. But I finally, almost by luck, became a science journalist in 1980 at a magazine called Sky and Telescope, which is very well known to amateur astronomers.

And from there, you know, this was kind of a renaissance or a boom in in, science journalism at that time in the early eighties. I started writing for other magazines. By 1984, I really was setting my sights on writing a book, and what I landed on was a book about the Apollo astronauts. I wanted to know I still was so smitten with that Apollo experience, and I wanted to understand it. I wanted to get inside it.

I wanted to know what was it like to go to the moon, to actually walk on another world or orbit another world for the first time in human history, and how did it affect the 24 people who got to do that. So that's when I started working in in 1984 on a man on the moon. It took me well, from 1984, it was about 10 years before it came out. And it took part of that was just, number 1, getting the astronauts to talk to me.

Yeah. But part of it, I have to say, was learning to become a storyteller that would live up to the amazing material that I was writing about. And that was as much a reason why it took 8 years as anything else. So in the process of writing A Man on the Moon, I turned myself into a space historian. I already knew about the geology of the Moon, so I was able to comprehend the science. I basically had I had a basic understanding of the technology, and I learned a lot more.

I was already sensitive to human behavior and was of course, that was very helpful in interviewing the astronauts about their experiences and their relationships with each other and so on to the and all of this was in the service of being a storyteller that I could tell a compelling story. So I I'm gonna what's the once what's the biggest surprise? Doesn't have to be a story you've told before.

Was that actually wouldn't something where you've kind of never really shared it was the thing where you said, wow. I never even thought about that. What would be that one out of all of the interviews you've done? Well, it's actually true of many of them. Not all of them, but many of them. I had I had been thinking about this so much, and I hadn't been imagining myself going to the moon.

And I just was sure that if you got to go to the moon, that it would be what I called a a zap, you know, that it would blow every fuse in your head for a while. And, you know, you'd you'd be carrying around that zap inside of you for the rest of your life. And what I found was with a few exceptions, a cut really, just a handful of exceptions, it was not really that kind of a zap for these guys. They were first and foremost professionals.

They were doing this because they were the best at being test pilots, fighter pilots, and they were given this job that had tremendous importance to the nation, and they were all very all one of them had been military, and and that was very important to them. They did experience awe on the flights. I don't wanna paint them as people who were not Of course. Receptive to the experience. But several of them said to me, it didn't change me. I'm the same guy I was before I went.

Now, the exceptions, and you may have heard of Ed Mitchell, who founded the Institute For Noetic Sciences and was extremely interested in the nature of consciousness. He talked about a consciousness raising experience that he had looking at the Earth as Apollo 14 headed home from the moon. And that was a really interesting aspect of my book. Then Jim But let me I'm I'm I wanna for you, not what they so you heard all these stories.

Yes. What was the thing for you then that was I mean, you just mentioned this reality this realization that it wasn't as big. It was a big deal. I'm not trying to downplay it, but it was just another human going through another experience. What did that do to you? It was frustrating to a lot of the time. And I and I You you wanted to find, like, the you wanted to find the diamond. He ended up finding Yeah. I know. Normal normal digging. But but, you know, I also came to understand, hey.

My job here is not to impose my preconceptions on this experience. My job is to tell the story of how it really was for these guys. And I think, however, it ends up being, it's an incredibly rich story because even if you're talking about a test pilot who's just devoted to the checklist, that guy is still one of the first humans to leave the Earth and go to another world, and, by the way, he's experiencing his own moments of awe. That that's my point.

You are you are putting on top of these individuals your expectations. Right. But the and that's why I was that's why I was kinda digging to hear if you found something. And I'll it's a very short story. I'm with a multi billionaire. He asked me to go out and have some dinner as because I had been working with them and we sit down and we're talking. And at one person at one point, he just looks at me and says, I work late at night. And I'm looking at him, like, I'm not sure how to respond.

And I said, why do you work late at night? And he has a hun it's, you know, it's a 50,000, a 100,000 employees, whatever the number was. I don't remember. And he said to me, why I work late at night because if I work late at night, others will work late at night. And it wasn't about making money. It was about a work ethic that he thought if he stayed and worked late at night, others work late at night.

And when you when you hear that from an individual who's got 1,000,000,000, I stopped and said, like I have many times with individuals I've met around the world, I've said, just like us, the same. Different challenges, different obstacles to overcome. He's working till 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night just so that 50,000 other people will work late at night, not for money. Does he think that's the best way to run the organization?

Yeah. And you're you're you're taking aback for a moment and you're saying to yourself, okay, wait, what just happened here? And I didn't put him on a pedestal. I've been working with him already, but that was an out of the blue quest comment. So in your case, did that influence what you heard from these people in this matter matter of fact nothing you know, wasn't as big?

Did that have an influence on the activities that you are engaged in or the way you presented your content or the way you look at your life? Well, I'm I'm happy to say that I was able to come to this realization pretty early on in the writing in the research and writing process. While I was still interviewing these guys, I came to that realization. And so Okay. I adjusted.

And, you know, there might still be a moment here and there where I would be, you know, trying to get something out of them that I wasn't getting. And by the way, there were others who yeah. They were they were still test pilots of fire pods, but they were very expressive about the amazingness of the experience. Right. Right. It it's the type of thing you're having a conversation. He says, yeah. That was cool.

But but, you know, in 7 years ago, I was doing this flyby, and I was doing this, and I was flipping and averted. You know? So he's excited about that. Well, I have to tell you something. I have to tell you something. Dave's let's just take one guy and I won't I promise I won't take up a lot of time with this. No. No. It's okay. So Apollo 15. It's the first of the kind of full up science expeditions.

They had a a lunar rover for the first time, they had an upgraded lunar lander, they had enough supplies to stay for 3 full days on the surface of the moon. So, you know, they did 3 moonwalks for the first time. They went miles over the surface in this lunar rover. They went to the edge of a ginormous lunar canyon. They went up the sides of of lunar mountains. And one of the rocks they picked up dated back almost to the formation of the moon, it was nicknamed the Genesis Rock.

The commander of that mission was an air force test pilot named Dave Scott. Dave was phenomenal. He was a phenomenal interview. I spent, you know, sick 2 sessions, each of which lasted hours, hours and hours at a restaurant in Los Angeles.

It was amazing to hear him talk, not only about his experiences on the moon, but his perspective and how he taught me things about flying, like how you fly in lunar gravity, which is different from flying anything else, because the gravity being 1 6th and you don't have an atmosphere, all you have is the thrust of your rocket engine to to let you steer.

So you gotta tilt you gotta tilt to one side to get some of that thrust pointed off in the direction you wanna go, And then you gotta tilt the other way to stop, and it was just fascinating. So I went through that experience. I wrote the the chapter on Apollo 15. And a a couple years later few years later oh, gosh. 5 years later by this time. So the interviews were 1987, and now I'm at Dave Scott's house in 1992. And we're going over the chapter, which was great.

So I had these guys look at what I wrote, and they told me what I had where I had screwed up and where I had missed a nuance here that they wanted to, you know, illuminate, you know. And at one point, we're reading we're going through the section where he's setting up they're setting up their experiments on the moon and there was a Styrofoam packing material. No, it wasn't Styrofoam. It was some kind of pallet that one of the experiments had been sitting on.

And Dave decided he was gonna have some fun and he spun around and threw it in this one six gravity. And, of course, it's being captured by the rover TV camera and everybody can see it. But he almost fell over and he said to me, you know, it was funny because the mass of the backpack, I started to spin around and I thought I was gonna fall over. But the mass of the backpack kept going in this spin and it it held on my feet. No. It brought me back on my feet. I could put my feet under me.

And I had this moment of just, oh, my God. He's telling me about something that happened to him on the moon one day. Right. Yeah. That's exactly it. Those moments were the gold for me personally. Those moments That that's the goal. That's the human side. I I did look him up. I didn't he did Apollo Gemini 8, Apollo 9, Apollo 15, 91 years old today Yeah. To date. No. James 2nd is his birthday. Yeah. And he's still alive. So maybe we can get him on the program. I don't wanna say that negative way.

He doesn't like to do the he doesn't like to do the No. Okay. But he he I'm just saying that there were these What what surprised me? You know, I didn't know about any of these things. You said lunar rover, lunar lander, 3 full days, moonwalk over the Canyon, the Lunar Mountains agenda. I didn't know any of these things. Oh, it's it's it's amazing. And you see when I wrote the book, a lot of people didn't know we went back to the moon after Apollo 11.

So I had a feeling that And that's a big point Yeah. If you think about it. And I wanted to tell these stories partly that was one of the reasons I wanted to do it because I I really felt that we'd lost touch with this incredible adventure. But so let me just let me just get you up to now. So the book came out in 1994. The the book was read by Tom Hanks while he was making Apollo 13. He called me. I had a chance to visit the set of Apollo 13 a couple of times, the Ron Howard movie.

And Hanks was playing Jim Lovell. And we we kinda connected there. He's a he was a space fan when he was my age. We're the same age. And when he was a kid, he was a space fan. He called me the following year and got me in on the ground floor of what became a 12 part miniseries based largely on my book for HBO. That was my Hollywood moment.

And then, you know, I I wrote a few more books, and the thing that really got me to here was in 2010, I was I had been asked by NASA to teach their engineers a course on space history. And one of the people who took the course was a guy from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland named Ed Rogers, who was the what they called the the chief knowledge officer, which sounds like Star Trek. But it meant that he was the keeper of the lessons learned. And he kinda drew me into his world.

And before I knew it, he and his boss, the center director, were asking me to put down on paper, quote, unquote, how we do this stuff. And this was 2011. And ever since then, I have been delving into writing, researching, teaching the human behavior lessons on success and failure in space flight projects. And it's I never would have thought that I would be in this field, in this endeavor. I'm not a social scientist.

I'm a space historian trained in planetary science, but I have immersed myself in the behaviors that got us to the moon and the lessons from the accidents that NASA has has experienced. And that's what I'm gonna talk about today. And you are focused on, US. You or are you a moon or a space historian, meaning you're covering what the Chinese do and what the Japanese do and what the Russians do? Or are you focused you know the question. Which Yeah. Is it just one or is it, global?

To do this job, to really do this right, you have to delve so deeply. You have to be able to hear directly from the participants. You have to be able to really get inside what people were thinking, what was motivating them, why they made the decisions they made. So, I confess, I have not had the time and bandwidth to stray outside of NASA's history other than I have done some delving into SpaceX, not enough to teach it at the same level, But I that will come.

I will be doing that, in the near future. But, no, it has I went back to Apollo, David, because Apollo is really the closest thing we've ever had to a perfect program. It was not perfect, but it was the closest thing we've ever had. And so it is a beautiful lesson in not only success, but in recovering from tragedy because you may know that they killed the first Apollo crew in a a fire in the capsule while it was still on the launch pad.

So human behavior got them off track and led to that accident, but human behavior So when so when you're looking at Project Moon High Yeah. Talking about fires in the hall and the hatch. Now I understand when you got on your your facial reactions, and I can't see you now, but your facial reactions when you started talking about Project Moon Hut, I was keying into them because you had I don't know.

I felt like and I didn't really I don't do research on people like people would think that I would do. You had a sense of the fascination was in the architecture of what we're working on and how we're trying to do it, and we are doing it. So I thought that I I kinda got that sense out of you when Well we we do we we we do record all of our our calls. So we have thousands of hours. Well, I would say yeah.

And that would be very that would be very interesting, you know, when you when you actually put something on the moon, come back to me. Because then it'll be space history. But but no. I'm I'm, hey, man, I'm fascinated by all of it. I'm fascinated by what motivates people to do these things from the beginning. I'm fascinated by how they think up the concepts. I'm fascinated by how they do it and make it happen. I'm fascinated by what happens to them when they go.

I mean, the whole all of the dimensions and facets of this subject matter are fascinating to me. And I never used to think I would be interested in you know, management to me was always a a snooze. But I have to say, when you get into the behaviors that got us to the moon for the first time in human history, my god, management can be really captivating and gripping because you realize you're seeing decisions that people make that will have tremendous positive or negative consequences.

And it's interesting that you say that because individuals don't understand the complexity of a decision just based in business. You know, I think I sent you a copy of our book. That took 12 years to write. Is that the one decision you make has ripple effects across the ecosystem but the hard part for people to understand is when someone articulates it, they tend to forget the things around them that made that happen.

So for example, they forget that they had a bad drive into work that day or that there was a power outage in the morning or that they had a bad night's sleep or they fought with a child 2 days earlier and they're pretty upset and or they didn't do their homework and they tell you the story that they remember.

But the situation that happened around them is far more complex and and I'm sharing that only because there are many days, today was one of them, I woke up and said I don't even know why the hell I'm even involved in this. This is just so much freaking work. It is a Sunday we're doing this and we normally have 5 hours of meetings on Saturdays regularly scheduled and it's just so much freaking work that I Yeah.

So I I do wake up plenty plenty days and say I I don't want this anymore and I don't know why I keep on coming back. So the the fact that your your reaction, again, prior to our starting was just interesting, on this case. So let's get back to But I do wanna say, David, don't put too much weight on what you perceived from my facial expression because as I say, it's all fascinating potentially to me. Well, I look.

Yeah. Sometimes and and this is what, I'm gonna say a child might perceive is that by having people around you who have an awe or sense of enlightenment or sense of interest, it does change the dynamic of the rest of the day. And I woke up, I you know, I'm I'm asking myself why. I'm I'm walking around in the bedroom and down I'm saying, this is just ridiculous amount of work. And everybody's questioning everything your question your your decisions are being made.

Yes. And they're not in a bad way, but there's so many. And your facial reaction was, oh, wow. Well, maybe we are doing something. Oh, it's good. Because you said I went through the whole website and I saw this and I watched this video and I'm thinking Oh, yeah. Oh, so so you did and and I listened to the podcast from this one. I listened to this part. That was a good podcast.

Okay. You don't realize what that little influence had for me to start this call because I I was not in a in that loving feeling today. Okay. I I get it. I get it. I'm glad. I'm glad. So so let's get to this rocket science is not enough Yeah. Which I think is a good segue to what we just completed. So this is the funny part. You've heard enough of the podcast already. We're now on number 1.

Yes. Yes. So, you know, as I mentioned, I pivoted from being a space historian to being an investigator of human behavior in success and failure within the space flight world. And what I found as a historian is that when you delve into the history of space flight on this through this lens, what you find is that there is a counterintuitive lesson.

And the the the lesson is that it you can be the best person who walked in the door when it comes into the technical stuff, when it comes to the technical stuff. You can you know, the rocket science, quote, unquote, it's actually rocket engineering. Right? But but the phrase in the language is the common phrase is rocket science. You can be fabulous at the rocket science.

But history shows that if you're not paying attention to the human piece of the system, you're not inviting success, you're inviting failure. And this is not me talking. I'm not an engineer. I when I go into a room full of NASA engineers, I say, hey, guys, you know, I'm not here to talk to you because of my great engineering acumen. I'm here to tell you what the history is screaming at us. And the history is telling us that we have to pay conscious attention to how we think about the work.

That is to say, the attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions that we bring to the work. In other words, if you want a a bumper sticker for it, our mindset. And the the thing about it is that this is not stuff that most engineers are comfortable with. I don't wanna make a blanket statement, but but in general, you know, there's a joke that I heard So we we can make a blanket statement. We could say that Moe, in your perception, what you've seen Yeah.

Is that in the American, ecosystem space ecosystem, you find this because you're basically talking about an American personality style. That may be. I've not had the chance to give this class. My point. I'm I'm trying to kind of confine it to say Sure. I I think, you know, I've worked in over 50 countries. And in each country, the minute you land, you have to know, do you go left? Do you go right? How do you read something? How do you ask for something? And it's all different, globally.

So by you saying how we think about the work, we're talking about the idiosyncrasies of the American personality when it comes to, say, for example, NASA. Well, that's very interesting. So you're saying so so to put it another way, the engineers that that I deal with at NASA, at at other agencies, they are mostly left brained people who don't do, quote, unquote, feelings and and behavior. Are you saying that you have experienced a different makeup abroad?

I would say that the personalities of culture, individuals within cultures, bring a different type of response mechanism to everything. So I'm gonna be broad brushed here. My grandfather was Russian. I'm going to tell you if you walked in into a Russian meeting, you would have a very different set of conditions that you'd be dealing with in terms of leadership and personality traits.

And and everything the baggage is brought along from being a youth in their growing up in their society would be very different than if you're dealing with a whole set of Japanese individuals or Chinese individuals or Indonesians or individuals from from India or, you know, I can go I can list the countries, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, you know, you can go down the country list.

So the I'm saying that when you're what we're talking about, that's why the question was asked much earlier, do you spend much time understanding this other side? These this this the rest of the world that they're in, you said no. So I'm gonna reframe this. What we think about the work, the mindset that's brought in, that's it's gonna be very different. Yeah. It's going to be let me give you an example. It's COVID. It's not COVID. It's 2,011, 12. I'm walking down the hallway.

I'm living in Hong Kong. I'm walking down the hallway with the CEO of the largest luxury brand for a certain category in all of Hong Kong, very, very well known, worked with them for 5 years. And as I'm walking down the hallway to our executive meeting, he I make I do a little one of these, and he looks at me. He says, you have a cold? And I said, I don't know. Could be one starting. He says, you want a mask? And I said because I didn't know this at this point.

This was early in the time that I started. I was in Hong Kong for 10 years. I said, sure. So he hands me a mask. And during a whole day of meetings with this executive team, we wear masks. I wear masks. Nobody else does. And what I when COVID came about, I did a podcast and I shared with people. In Asia and I'm being broad brush here because Asia is very large. But in Asia, you wear a mask to protect others. In the United States, you wear a mask to protect yourself. Right. Right. Right.

And you would not know that unless you had gotten down into the idiosyncrasies of that culture and spent time with them, which brings me to how we think about the work and the mindset you brought up. I don't know how they think in those rooms, but I've not seen it. But I'm going to guarantee you it's different than the way it's done in America. I get it. I get it. It has to be. Yeah. No. And I I I that's fascinating.

And I I hope that down the road, I get the chance to travel overseas and talk about this material and learn exactly what you're talking about? There's a the, Alan Malely who ran Ford for a period of time, he had one of these scenes where he was bringing his team into an engineer, into a testing facility. And I don't know if it was external or internal.

It doesn't make as much of a difference, but potentially it could because external means you'd have to respect them one way, and internal, you'd have a different set of respect just because of that's conditions of organizations. And the person doing the testing started to make comments about the vehicle. And immediately, one of the individuals jumped in and started, well, we're doing this, and he said no. 1st and I'm not quoting this perfectly.

First, you learn to understand before you start to share what you know. Right. And he had to tell them, you're not there to tell people why it's not working. You're there to find out why, what's going on so that you can then share your purse your, your knowledge later. And in the same case here, the hard part for you, if you're just visiting, is you won't know the idiosyncrasy, the those little tiny things that make the culture the culture. Does that make sense the way I say it? Absolutely.

Absolutely. So but, you know, even if we restrict it to NASA and and the American aerospace arena, we're still talking about a subject that is so nuanced and so intricate. And at least in our world, in this country, you know, it's not something that is taught in engineering school very much as far as I know. It's not something that you know, there's a joke that I heard at one of the NASA centers. How do you tell the difference between an introverted engineer and an extroverted engineer?

I don't know. The introverted engineer looks at his shoes when he talks to you. The extroverted engineer looks at your shoes. So I walk into a room and I start talking about this stuff, and I I put them try to put them at ease to say, hey. I get it. This is not your comfort zone. But what I have come to understand about spaceflight is that it is a high wire walk. It is that unforgiving. That's the analogy I use.

And to stay on the high wire requires sometimes that we step outside our comfort zone, and I will say more about this as we go on. So what I've done By the way, I'm gonna tell you the quote was something such as seek first to to understand, then to be understood. I love it. I love it. You know, they at at NASA, they say you can't be on transmit all the time. You have to be on receive mode. You know?

It's our culture, American culture, and I'm gonna be very broad brush here, compared to other cultures around the world is much more aggressive in their style of, communication. Now I would say that I'm gonna use I'll be using very broad brush here so can't get hopefully, I'm not in trouble with this.

You know, when you deal with a Russian, and I I worked in Moscow, worked in Saint Petersburg, amazing people there, again my family, I'm a Russian background, is Russians fight to fight because that's part of the culture. Israelis fight for a long time, and then they say, yeah. But we're just friends. Every culture has their nuances. So I love this with the the introvert and the extrovert. Yeah. So that's perfect.

Yeah. Yeah. And So how do you when you when you say that to your groups, what is their first reaction? Oh, they laugh because they get the joke. They know what I'm talking about, and they get the fact that, you know, this is not something that they usually talk about. And I what I've done is I've extracted a framework to talk about behaviors that invite success or practices. I call them success behaviors or success ingredients. I also talk about behaviors that invite failure.

And and in in the case of the High Wire Walker, it's like we're wearing a blindfold, and we're out on the high wire wearing a blindfold. But those the blindfold is elements of our human nature that are kinda hardwired into us, and we have to rise above them to stay on the high wire. And that requires that we go outside our comfort zone and pay conscious attention to our attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions, our mindset. Okay. So what comes to mind is this.

What has changed in the past 20 years in terms of the American space ecosystem, and I think you're more or less talking NASA, but, I guess, the the complex. What has changed that you see as positive, and what have you changed that has seen this potentially negative?

So the positive change and the negative change both stem from the same development, which is that the rise of new space companies, new space is a term that's used in the world of of aerospace to denote, companies with with atypical cultures compared to the old aerospace companies or or NASA, the startup cultures and so forth. So the rise of companies like SpaceX. On the positive side, there's been tremendous innovation. Right?

I mean, way back in 2010, an astronaut who had recently retired from NASA wrote an op ed in the New York Times that I thought was very well expressed about why NASA has had been slow relatively slow in its progress compared to the old days. And, you know, because just to give you the the cliff notes on this, I mean, in 2010, the International Space Station had been in continuous operation for a little more than a decade.

And they were still building it, and, you know, a lot of the resources of the agency were going into flying the shuttle so that they could finish building the space station. Of course, the shuttle was gonna stop flying in 2011. So my my friend, this former astronaut, wrote this op ed, and he said, in order to he said, the problem with NASA is that Congress approves something like the Space Shuttle and then says, this is the only vehicle you're gonna get for 20 or 30 years.

You've gotta just keep flying the same vehicle. And he said, if you can't iterate, you can't innovate. And the difference with companies like SpaceX was this start up culture where they said, hey. We don't care if the rocket blows up a few times before we get to success. Now, at some point, they they really did care because they were about to go bankrupt and go out of business. And then, fortunately, the Falcon 1 worked before that happened.

But they understood you got to fail before you can succeed. But the problem with NASA is that, politically, the cost of failure is very high, because it's Congress, it's a very publicly visible endeavor, and people don't necessarily understand what I just said, which is that you got you know, like, you saw the maybe you maybe you didn't, but you've heard about the Starship, the new vehicle in space. Yeah. Right. Blew up.

I've I just just so you know, my day my day is all beyond Earth, not beyond Earth, is all Project Moon Hat. So from start to finish, morning and night, we've got ITAR, EAR, CFIUS, we've got new technologies for the moon, got we've got models being built. I mean, we've but we've also got platforms and immersive technologies and all of that happening. So, no, I I hear about all this. I do watch them. And one of our teammates, his name, Andreas Bergweiler has a YouTube channel.

He had Facebook, but they all sorts of Facebooks just had challenges. He does all the streaming. So every single launch that happens around the world that he can, he streams it. So I hear about it. Every one of them. Okay. So you you you knew you saw it when Starship blew up the first time. You saw it when it blew up. I saw the ground being completely destroyed and and things being tossed miles away. Yeah. And yes, all of that. Right.

And then the second launch they did much better, but it still was not they didn't reach orbit. And, you know, people say, oh, they failed again. Well, yeah. But look at the progress they made, the tremendous data that they're gonna be able to use to make it even better. And, yeah, there I think there were some dumb mistakes, like not putting down a better platform the first time, So you wouldn't be raining concrete all over the the whole area. Right?

But what I wanna say about the last 20 years I I guess no. Wait. See, I would I rephrase that. I'm going to bet you that the people who built it assumed, and I'm not saying good or bad, but they made the they had a belief that what they build would work. So you're saying they should have and I'm saying no. In the conditions that were happening, they said, why don't we pour this? Why don't we create this? Why don't we set it up like this? This will be great.

No one wanted it to pour concrete down or have concrete come down like rain. No. Nobody So it wasn't they it it they just did it, and they thought it would work. Yeah. But but but you're putting exact you're putting your finger right on the reason I teach this stuff, which is that we have to pay attention to the lessons of the past and what people did in the past. Now it doesn't mean we imitate them blindly.

But every failure that happens, we're not you know, as long as we're talking about a professional organization with a, you know, a high degree of of of talent on on board, We're not talking about people who are stupid or incompetent. We're talking about people who are very smart, well meaning But was there a history was there a history of reigning concrete anywhere? Let me finish the sentence. Sure. We're not talking about people who are stupid or incompetent.

We're talking about very smart, well meaning people who suffered catastrophic failure because of flawed mindsets. Now in this case, there was an assumption on, as far as I know, and I can't I don't claim to have delved into this in great detail, but my understanding is that that Elon Musk basically said, yeah, we should be okay with just concrete. Well, they didn't have a water suppression system, which is what they used on the Saturn 5, which was much less powerful than Starship.

And so, you know, okay, guys, right there. I think I'm right about this. Somebody may write in and say, ah, Chaikin, didn't you know they had a water suppression system? The pool No. I did they didn't have a as far as I know, they didn't have a water suppression system. Yeah. So Absolutely. So, you know, it's one of my failure in ingredients is hubris, overconfidence.

And I'm not saying that you can always avoid an accident, but it you're more likely to avoid it if you say, are we being overconfident? Well, but that's not what again, the way you just shared it, I didn't see it as that. I saw that as, I don't wanna get in trouble by the boss who does have a temper or will dip into his way. Question, though. Culture And that is why it happened. So it wasn't the it could have been that there were people there who said, this is not gonna work.

And we don't We're gonna have some issues. We don't know the answer. But no one's gonna bring that up. Right. We don't know the answer. And if I ever had a chance to delve into that, I would very much wanna know the answer to what you just raised. And that's why I said earlier, we don't know the conditions around the condition Absolutely. That made that thing happen so we can get one perspective. But all of this is no. You're absolutely right.

But but but all of this came from your question about what's changed in the last 20 years. Mhmm. So all I was trying to say is that I think the rise of companies like SpaceX has been a a net a a tremendous positive for the level of of innovation and iteration.

The negative is that if you're NASA and you're trying to do something like send humans back to the moon with the Artemis program, and you contract out the capsule that takes the astronauts from Earth orbit from the surface of the Earth to Earth orbit or or onto a flight path to go to the environment of the moon, or you contract out for the the lander, which is SpaceX, that's what Starship is gonna do for Artemis, it's gonna be the lander, you you, NASA, no longer have the ability to look into the organization necessarily and see how they're doing their work, what kinds of practices they're using, what their test data is like.

Back in Apollo, the engineers at NASA were, in many cases, more knowledgeable than the contractors who had never done anything like this. Today, that that balance may or may not be be the same, but NASA has lived through a lot. But they don't always get the opportunity to tell the contractors what they're you know, to to be able to get get the contractors to listen to that experience or to share the data of their testing and so forth.

ITAR and all of that gets in the way, so it's made it much harder for the people at NASA who are trying to, you know, go back to the moon? You know, I, I I'm going to give an analogy, and I don't know what it's called. You probably do. You know at the, it's at the southern tip of Africa, I believe it is, where the waters don't mix. Oh, I There's 2 sets of water. Yeah. There's a a water mix at, by South Africa. The water is on one side, it's one salination.

The other is on the other because of the it's warmer and it's saltier and they don't mix.

I wonder the reason I asked the question was I was trying to find out what you thought on it, was that there's probably as much as we'd like to believe that there's a cross, crossover between agency work and commercial work or agency and, for profit organizations, I would bet you with still a lot of the this lack of understanding and lack of incentivization and lack of leadership skill sets to be able to make that crossover as powerful as it probably needs to be?

Well, it's a very complex subject, and I I'm hesitant to I'm hesitant to make statements about it, before I've had a chance to really delve into the details. And I hear things that that that alert me to the difficulties like I just described Yeah. Because, you know, core companies are motivated by different things than government agencies.

They're motivated by, we've gotta compete, we've gotta make a profit, And so, you know but nevertheless, I think by and large, you know, the people I talked to at NASA have very positive things to say about SpaceX. They've been through experiences where they had a really significant failure, and they learned from it with NASA's help. But we're we're we're talking SpaceX. We're talking, Blue Origin. We're talking Firefly. We're talking astrobotics. We're talking relativity space.

I mean, there there are a lot of moving pieces. And I wonder if we went across the ecosystem. You know, SpaceX is gonna do, what, a 150 flights this year and, Rocket Labs, don't quote me a dozen. No. So I wonder how that goes across the entire ecosystem. And you know what?

I'd love to be able to to, like I say, I don't wanna sound like a broken record, but I'd love to be able to to go into a a place like SpaceX and and talk about this material and see what they what it looks like from their side. When we get our interview, I'll ask for you. How does that I'll see if we can get you in. So So so when you say so rocket science is not enough. Yeah. Where do you where do you take us then? What's what's the enough?

Well, no. In other words, rocket science is essential, but but the human behavior piece is also essential. But what's the when you say human behavior, give me a little bit more. What do you Well expect from this new generation? Let me keep going. Let me Sure. Let me keep going with with our with our bullet points because I think, this will this will come out of the developer as they say. Okay. So we're on to 2, the stories we tell ourselves?

Yeah. So this is really something that that reflects a basic aspect of us as human beings that we are storytellers by nature. We tell ourselves stories as part of the way that we make sense of the world, way way we make sense of what happens to us. And history shows us that we have to consciously examine the stories we tell ourselves about the work, about each other, about ourselves too, because those stories have the power to skew our perceptions, such as our perceptions of risk.

And they can influence our decisions, including our technical decisions. So just to give you a couple of examples. So one example relates to the Apollo Fire, which happened in 1967 before we had flown any Apollo missions. And the crew of the first Apollo mission, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were going through a practice countdown, in their Apollo command module, on the pad, and nobody thought it was a hazardous test.

There was no fuel in the booster, that kind of thing, but they were sealed in that command module in a pure oxygen environment at more than 16 pounds per square inch. And suddenly there was a flash fire and they died and it completely caught NASA by surprise. And I have delved in really, really, great detail into the human behavior roots of that accident.

And just to name 2 of the stories that they told themselves before that accident, One was that their their whole fire prevention strategy in Apollo was based on the belief that they could eliminate all potential ignition sources, that is to say, damaged wiring. And that obviously was not the case. Right? And if you think about it, I mean, you can't you can't do that. It was only after the accident that they realized, what were we thinking?

There's no way that you can because you can't even tell if there's a wire that's hidden from view to inspectors behind an instrument panel. You can't necessarily detect by any of your instrumentation that there's a flaw in that wire.

The other thing that they told themselves, the story that they told themselves, decision makers believed that because they had never had a fire in the little Mercury or Gemini capsules that had flown up to this time, they'd never had a fire in those capsules in pure oxygen, and so they told themselves it was unlikely that they'd have a fire in Apollo.

But that ignored some really significant differences between those little capsules and the Apollo command module, which was big enough for the very first time for people to move around in, including technicians, while the thing was being checked out, and there were exposed wire bundles that were vulnerable to damage by that activity. So it was only after the accident that they realized they'd been telling themselves a story that didn't hold up. Okay. That's that's one example.

Mhmm. The other example has to do with both of the shuttle accidents, Challenger, which blew up during launch in 1986 and Columbia, which disintegrated during reentry in 2003. What I found in my delving into those accidents is that both of them stemmed from a narrative that NASA bought into long before the shuttle started flying in 1981. Way back in the early seventies, they bought into a narrative.

In fact, even before the shuttle was approved, they were kind of coerced into this narrative that said that the shuttle was gonna make spaceflight routine and affordable, which meant that they had the way the economics worked, you have a fixed program cost. How do you make it competitive cost competitive with the throwaway boosters? Well, you gotta fly a lot. Right? You gotta have very high launch rates.

They were talking about flying 55 times a year, and yet they didn't design a vehicle to do that. They didn't design a pickup truck. They designed a Formula 1 race car. And even after they started flying and they saw, hey. You know what? We said they were gonna be able to turn this thing around for another flight in 2 or 3 weeks, and the best case is, like, 3 months. They didn't adjust. I mean, they they adjusted slightly. They they they said, we can't fly every week. Let's be more realistic.

We'll fly every other week. So there was still this tremendous schedule pressure on that program, and we'll hear a little more about this in the next bullet point. But but that's again, you're I'm wondering more just in both these stories. How much was leadership responsible for making the story hold? Let me as as you move from ideation into bringing other people involved, the cost becomes exponentially higher.

As you move from bringing people involved to say, for example, building prototypes or building design work or starting engineering, it's exponentially higher. And as you move down that timeline, the costs and the risks to people's careers become exponentially more impactful. So who's this you can't get all the way to the end and say, oh, by the way, we have a Formula 1 racing car. It's not gonna be done in 2 weeks unless there were people there who were willing to say, David's a real jerk.

I'm just he doesn't listen. I'm gonna go with it anyway. I'm just gonna we're just gonna do what they say. Well, you you you Which was it leadership versus the people they the stories that leadership told us compared to the stories that people tell themselves? You're you're asking exactly the right question. And, you know, something I learned in talking to some very smart people about organizational behavior is that culture comes from the top.

And so what you're putting your finger on is the fact that, yeah, the culture of the shuttle program came from the top. And if you'd had people in the top of NASA who looked at the turnaround time, excuse me, and looked at some of the problems that were surfacing as the shuttle began flying, and said, you know, maybe we need to rethink this. Maybe we need to stand down from this kind of high flight rate that we're pushing you to do. That would've history could've been different. You know?

The the problems with the o rings, and we've all heard about those o ring problems that caused the Challenger accident. That surfaced really early in the program. They started seeing and I'll talk more about this in the next bullet point, but they started seeing this problem early on, and then it got to a kind of a different version of the problem about a year before the Challenger launch that was more serious. But there was no let up in the in the schedule pressure.

In fact, the pressure was increasing to get to closer and closer and closer to this goal of flying every other week. And I'll tell you I'll tell you a very revealing story that I heard from one of the shuttle astronauts. One of the things that NASA told the world and itself was that the shuttle would become, quote unquote, operational. And you you know what that phrase means in the aerospace world. Mhmm. Yeah. It would become operational after just 4 test flights. Okay?

So the astronaut who told me this story was a former navy test pilot who was selected for the shuttle program in 1980. And he and this is about a year before the first shuttle flight. He comes in and he hears them talking about shuttles can be operational after 4 flights. And he has just come out of the navy as a test pilot, where everybody knows that when you have a new navy jet, you have to fly it a 100 times or more before it's ready to turn over to the fleet, right, before it's operational.

So this new astronaut goes in to see one of the veteran astronauts, who's also a former Navy test pilot, and he says, let me get this straight. We're gonna fly this thing 4 times, and it's gonna be operational? And the other astronaut, the senior guy says, don't pay any attention to that. That's political stuff that's coming out of headquarters. Between you and me, this thing is gonna be in flight test mode for a 100 flights.

Now, that reveals a disconnect between the people at the top and the people who were right down there in the trenches who were actually closest to the reality. And by the way, that didn't happen in Apollo. No no astronaut went into another astronaut's office and said, I know they say we're gonna land on the moon by the end of the sixties, but just between you and me, it's gonna be more like 1973. Nobody said that I bet you I bet you there were people who said that.

Nobody said that because nobody thought that. Nobody thought that it it might not happen in the timelines that they thought. I mean, when the Apollo fire happened what you're when the Apollo fire happened, there were a lot of people who were afraid the program might shut down. Right. Well, that means it could be delayed till 7th. Right. But when that didn't happen, I guess, you know, that's a caveat there.

My point is that the story about these 2 shuttle astronauts reveals this disconnect and perception of reality between the top of the program and the people who are actually closest to the reality. And there were people even in the mid in in the early eighties, after the shuttle began flying, who were saying, this thing's an airline and we gotta fly it like an airline. I mean, this is not public consumption. This is behind closed doors at NASA. Fly like an airline.

And you wonder, you hear this stuff and you think, how could they how could they think that? This is not uncommon, Andy. I as as part of the word when I speak, I have a very different modality than most speakers. I don't give the same presentation over and over and over and over again. You've probably done a lot of speaking. You similar presentations. I never do. I do upwards of 10 interviews. Speech I give, I'm I'm doing it on the fly. I'm I'm doing it Oh, on the fly.

Okay. I'm doing it from I'm doing it from my from my my slides. I I put up the slides Okay. To basically get my rolodex dialed up to the right things, and then I just let it rip. What I meant is that you have a series okay. You have a series of slides and things that you follow. Every presentation I give has been completely different. I do 10 hours of interviews from prospective members of the audience, and then I present using the data that I learned from these 10.

But all the interviews are private. Nothing is ever shared. And I one client working with, Illinois, 2 works. And we can mention this because David is a great guy. David Speer, he ended up passing away. But he had after those 10 calls, we had a call about something we were working on. And he said, how did you learn all of this? Because he had never heard these things.

The people on his team, because they knew that there were 10 they they they don't know how many calls, but each person was having a private call with me. I didn't record it. It was all just taken by notes. But when you hear 10 you know, CFO, CEO, c, CEO, COO, Talent Management, when you get them, you see a very different web. And he was surprised that the answers that I was able to pull out.

And that's my point is that while you're saying that in the 19 seventies or sixties, I'm I've gotta believe there were people in there who were getting paid saying, there's no way this sucker is gonna make it. But they would not have shared that publicly because they would have lost their jobs. You know, you might look. I can't say that you're wrong, and I just haven't come across it. And I've I've I've Yeah.

Well and you probably will never come across it and that there's always going to be that challenge there. Yet, I I agree with you with what you're saying is that there's a disconnect often between departments and individuals within organizations. Expectations of what's supposed to be the outcome, in this case, getting to the moon, and the type of work that has to be accomplished.

Now when you go to SpaceX or you go to these other organizations, how is NASA dealing with, for example, because you know them well, how is NASA dealing with the fact that Elon says, gotta try it again. Let's put another one on the pad. Let's see what happens. Well, you know, again, it would be great for me to have, more of an inside view of those conversations. But what my sense is that, you know, they're they're frustrated with the amount of time.

I mean, they don't they don't question it from a philosophy standpoint. They agree that you have to fly and get the bugs out. You've got to experience failure before you can succeed. I mean, they that's part of NASA's DNA and even before NASA. But I think, you know, just to give you something that's been in the news and, has been talked about quite a bit is that last fall, what came out was and keep in mind, when we talk about Starship, Elon is is doing that for his own purposes.

He believes that that's the vehicle that he is going to use to take humans to Mars. Yep. So he's doing this anyway whether or not NASA wants to use it. However, Starship is in what they call the critical path to getting humans back to the moon with the Artemis program.

And one of the things that came out last fall was that and I think this came directly from Elon that they estimated anywhere from 12 to 15 Starship flights to refuel the Starship that they launch into Earth orbit, and you saw this. Yeah. That's a 44 it's 14 right. Fourteen refuelings to be able to get one Starship to the moon. So, you know, that's a bit of a problem for NASA and I it's not clear how this is gonna play out. That's a lot of launches.

And And by the way, I'm a I'm a CPM, a critical path method person. I absolutely love the technology. Yeah. It's a big thing for the Artemis program. Yeah. And so So are you You know, one of the stories that we tell our you know, that that they've been telling themselves is we're gonna get back to the moon by whatever it is, 2027, 2026, 2027. They've had to adjust that date, and that's normal.

But this idea that you're gonna have to fly all these times and by the way, the whole refueling, concept, when you're talking about propellants that are, you know, liquid oxygen is a cryogen, very very cold, 100 of degrees below 0. Yeah. And so you have to it it experiences boil off, you don't have a perfect Yeah. Thermos. Right? So you've gotta make up for that loss before you can fill the tank. I mean, we don't have the refueling technology nailed No. No matter how many flights.

And not to do 14 on Yeah. It's a 100 ton, but sometimes using a a even though you could use a sledgehammer, sometimes using a hammer is a better tool. What would that look like? What what do you mean? Well, what I'm saying is the it's a 100 this is a large transport vehicle. Yes. And, potentially, having 1 large transport vehicle with 14 refuelings, which I think or Elon said, no. It'll be more like 8. And, again, don't quote me on that because I'm talking out the side of my, whatever.

Is maybe there are other technologies that could fit that need where the starship is really I'm gonna go back to your case. It's designed to go to Mars. Where you had said earlier, this was the the, the shuttle was designed to be one way. It ended up being a we call it formula 1, and it wasn't the normal transport vehicle.

Well, maybe we're trying to take a square peg and stick it into a round hole where it could be Bezos' Glenn might have a smaller it does have a smaller capacity, but it could do some of the things that are necessary without those restrictions. You probably know, Bezos and I think it's Northrop Grumman, but I may be wrong about this, are partnering to do the lander for the second Artemis mission. But I don't have much visible. I mean, really, I know very little about what that concept is.

All I'm talking about is the storytelling. We're telling the story that Artemis just the story. It doesn't matter who's involved. That I'm not trying to pick on any player. We're telling a story that will get to the moon with the Artemis program. The Artemis program is gonna use this heavy launch vehicle that can do a 100 ton to whatever the the the math that goes into this, and they can deliver this, but it's 14 refuelings. Yeah. Well, maybe someone should say, does that story sound right?

And what I do every time I teach my class is I say, okay, gang. After we've been through all the case studies, I say, what are the stories that we're telling ourselves today about our work that we need to pay attention to? And it's supposed And that's exactly what I'm trying so when you hear the story, if you were the one to change it, what would the story be?

Well, I mean, you term it specifically with Starship or with Artemis as a whole or I mean, I think, it's Just the the we just talked about Starship being the the 14. The we just talked about the challenges that happened in multiple accidents with Challenger. Are is a story being told when it comes to the Artemis program or the Artemis, the first state, first phase, whatever the the terminology is, is there a story being told that should be changed?

If you were to change the story, what would it be? Well, I don't think we know how much the story has to change yet because we don't but, I mean, I think it points to this I think the basic story that NASA told itself long before now is we're gonna contract out instead of having an in house development program for a lunar lander, we're gonna contract out to a private company that's gonna deliver lunar landing as a quote service.

And Mhmm. And I'm not saying you know, this price quality deadline pick any 2. Right? You've heard that. Yep. So I'm not saying that that by itself is an unworkable story. The nuance is, can you hold to a particular schedule that you thought you were going to hold to if you are doing that? I'm I So You probably had a lot of you probably had a lot of interviews over the course of I'm not interviewing. I'm asking serious questions. And the reason is looking at project Moon Hat.

We have a box of the roof and a door of the moon. We have 4 phases of development. We have plans and and designs that schematics that have been done. We have scale models that have been done. For us to be able to achieve the box of the roof and the door on the moon, we have to be able to tell the right story. So I'm really asking that story. But our story is much more complex. Our story is not about getting to the moon.

Our story is about improving life on earth, and this is one piece of a puzzle. Yeah. And so I'm asking the question if you could change that story. We're a story of coopetition, not competition, but coopetition. Maybe, for example, in our case, we're gonna have multiple scenarios, and I'm not gonna give all the pieces out now is we're gonna have multiple scenarios where the desired outcomes are gonna be achieved. But in achieving them, they turn back on earth.

So when I say what story would you tell with Artemis, I'm really trying to find out if you've said to yourself, this is the story I would tell at this point based upon the what we've seen happen, whether it be Starship, whether it be Well, let me put it Rocket Labs Let me broaden it let me broaden it a little further. NASA has talked about going back going back to the moon. They've also talked about going back to the moon as a stepping stone to go to Mars, to send humans to Mars.

Yep. And the story that they've told, I believe the world, as well as themselves, is that we can decide now a lot about how we're gonna go to Mars and try to have some commonality between the hardware that we use to go to the Moon and go and the hardware we use to go to Mars. And we can make a lot of key decisions now about what will be required to go to Mars. And I my feeling is that the story they ought to be telling themselves is we need to be on the Moon for a while, maybe 10 years Okay.

Before we know what we know don't know now, and then we'll know much better what we have to do to go to Mars. We'll have technologies hopefully, we'll have some technologies that we don't have now. We'll understand, the human, you know, what it takes to keep humans alive on the surface of another world. We'll understand that better.

I don't I don't I have a hard time signing on to the story that says we're gonna go to Mars in the 20 thirties because I just think it's gonna take a lot longer before we really are ready, and it's gonna depend on what we learn on the moon. Okay. Thank you. That's what I wasn't looking for that answer. I was looking for an answer. That was an answer. So I agree with you more than you can imagine because and I'll give you a side story.

1 of the our teammates was at an event with Bill Nelson, walked up to Bill and said, hey. Here here you're going, gonna go, what's going on with NASA? And he said, we're going to the moon. And he said, why are we going on the moon? And he was he was just trying to find out being a part of our team. And Bill said, so we can go to Mars. And he said, why why are we going to Mars? And Bill looked at him and then turned away.

Just walked right away from the conversation with several people in the group. Not that it was a question and answer session. This was a conference. They were just talking. So the next day, Bill was on stage. And this kid's son was one of 3 kids who were asked to ask the people on stage questions. It just so happened that his son was matched up with Bill. So Bill was asked the question. He he did the same thing. He said we're going to Mars. We're going to moon to go to Mars.

And the kid said, why are we going to Mars? And this is a no joke. So we could beat the Russians. Well, I've I've heard it's I so I agree I agree with your commentary, but that doesn't tell me there's a story Well that we should be following. Well, I think I think I think we have to we have to always have the awareness in the front of our minds that things are all often, maybe not always, often harder than we expect they will be.

And so we make, you know, if we become schedule driven we do that at our peril if humans are involved. It's one thing if you you blow up a rocket and you lose, I mean, you hate to see this happen, you know, multi $100,000,000 or or even $1,000,000,000 spacecraft, that's that's bad. You do not want that to happen. But if, you know, what I feel like my goal is I wanna help people avoid the mistakes of the past, especially if it can mean that we avoid an accident that could kill people.

So So I'm gonna yeah. I agree. I I'm gonna change it. It's I don't believe the the statement that you said, I don't believe we should be schedule driven. Well, you have to be the sun that's not what you meant. You have to be the sun Right. That's what I so I was gonna say, I believe that you believe so. I think we have to be better at planning and better at implementing earlier on so that we don't have the delays that happen. And I think we could be better at that.

Let me let me let's go to the next bullet point because this will will advance the the middle it'll So we've got, beware of the reality distortion field. Where is the reality distortion field? What program was that? Well, my only the only use of that phrase, I I kinda coined it myself in this context, but the only other place I've heard it was that it was used to describe Steve Jobs, that that he was a walking reality distortion field.

And I use it to refer to the effects of external pressures like cost pressure, schedule pressure, and political pressure. Now, as you've just pointed out, you know, these pressures are a fact of life, right? You're never gonna have a program that doesn't have schedule pressure. You're never gonna have a program that doesn't have cost pressure.

Even in Apollo, which was funded like a war because it was in fact a battle in the cold war, it was funded like, you know, it was a proxy for a shooting war. We didn't fire a shot, but we were basically fighting a battle in the Cold War. And Absolutely. Even in Apollo, they had cost pressures, but they had more than enough resources to do what they were told to do. That was not true in the shuttle program, by the way.

But these pressures, the thing is we have to be vigilant about the effects of these pressures because, and again, this comes right out of the history, when we're under these pressures, they can skew our perception of risk. We're more likely to indulge in what I call false perception of risk, which I'll talk about in a in a second. But it's like you said, you can't do away with schedule pressure, but you've got to pay attention to what that's doing to your culture and to your mindset.

Because if you don't, this reality distortion field, you can think you're being very mindful of safety and and mission success, and you'll be thinking that right up to the time you go over the edge of the cliff. And I can give you examples of that. Why don't you give me because I I've got something to add to it. So by the way, you were right. It was 1981 by Bud Tribble, Tribble, who said that about Steven Jobs.

Yeah. So I I thought that was fun to to find that out, that that Steven Steve Jobs was a walking reality distortion field. But So what are the examples that you have? So so false perception of risk, which you're more likely to indulge in if you're under this reality distortion field of cost pressure, schedule pressure, and political pressure. What that is is that you have a problem that you didn't expect. It starts to show up when you fly your vehicle, but you kind of you get away with it. Okay?

So you keep flying. And the little voice in your head says, it hasn't bitten us, so we must be okay. And what I tell people that I teach is you better pay attention to that little voice in your head because if that comes up, you need to ring the alarm and really look at what you're doing. It's the common thread in all three of the human space flight accidents at NASA that killed astronauts. The Apollo Fire, Challenger, Columbia.

In each case, they had a problem, a vulnerability that was known, but they said to themselves, it hasn't bitten us yet, so we must be okay. I mentioned in the fire that there were people decision makers at NASA who believed, hey, we've been using pure oxygen since the first astronauts we flew in Mercury. We've never had a problem with oxygen. We've never had a fire. We're not gonna have one in Apollo. And they believe that right up until the day of the Apollo fire.

I like to use do you remember, David, you'll remember this. I think we're close enough in age that you you may remember this. Remember the arrow book of brain teasers? All the little books that we used to get from Scholastic Book Company, and they were great. Right? And there was one book that had some optical illusion. By the by you're about, I was born in 60 3. Yeah. So you've got a few years on me because Yeah. So so there was one book that had a bunch of optical illusions.

And and the one of the illusions was a picture where if you look at it one way, you see a vase. And if you look at it another way, the same picture, nothing's different. You see 2 faces looking at each other in profile, and it is all about perception. It is the same data, but you perceive it very differently. And perception is shaped by expectation, perception is shaped by belief. Cognitive scientists have shown, have done experiments where this comes out very vividly.

So the example I wanna give you has to do with the telecom the night before the Challenger launch. And you may know this story that they'd already had I don't. They'd already had problems with the o rings on the solid rocket boosters. The the boosters were made not in one piece because you couldn't transport the booster in one piece from where it was made in Utah at Thiokol. The company was called Thiokol. Couldn't transport it in 1 piece by rail, so they broke it up into segments.

And what they do is they'd assemble those segments at the launch site at Kennedy Space Center, and the segments were joined with this, this configuration called a field joint because it was assembled in the field. And within that joint was a pair of o rings that were supposed to make sure the joint was sealed.

There was some material made out of a very high temperature putty that was supposed to prevent any of the very hot gases of ignition from reaching the joint and and getting to the O rings and and, you know, destroying their ability to seal the joint. But they started having problems with this joint on the second shuttle flight in 1981. Problem was not constant. It would happen, then it would go away. Happen, and then it would go away for a long time, come back.

The year before Challenger launched, there was a new kind of twist to that problem, where there was very severe damage to the o rings, where the hot gas was actually getting right by the primary o ring and and starting to attack the secondary o ring, which meant that this redundant joint, they thought they had a measure of safety because there were 2 o rings, but that went out the window when they saw that the gas could go right by the primary under some conditions and start attacking the secondary.

And as the the engineers at Thiagol started to look at this and they did some very basic, you know, tabletop tests, not really tabletop, but you know what I mean, not a not full scale booster hardware. Yeah. They just started saying something's wrong here. Let's try to see what's going on, and they figured they saw some issues. And they started to get the the the sense that it was related to temperature, which makes perfect sense if you think about these O rings.

They're made out of rubber, And and, you know, as Richard Feynman, the great physicist showed in the session of the accident commission, you know, you put it in ice water and it loses resiliency. Well, the night before the Challenger launch, there was a telecom between the engineers at Thiokol in Utah who were very worried about the next day's launch because it was going to be much colder than anything they'd had before. And they said, we're really scared about this.

We don't think we're comfortable launching if it's below a certain temperature, and we think the launch should be delayed tomorrow until it's warmer. And the managers at the Marshall Space Flight from the Marshall Space Flight Center, who were on the call in Florida, said, you don't have enough data to convince us. They said, you you've got to prove that it's not safe, which was a complete inversion. I mean, they didn't say it in so many words, but that was what everybody took from it.

They're making us prove that we are not safe to fly instead of making us prove that we are safe, which was the the safety logic all the way through Apollo was prove to me that I don't have a problem, not prove that I have a problem. So this is the reality distortion field in action. It's taking the same data, and one side is saying, we're really scared about this, and we're starting to we're we're we we've come to the belief that this is a temperature related phenomenon.

And the other side is saying, what are you telling us? You're telling us we have to delay the launch until it's warmer? You know, what what the Marshall, project manager said was, good god, Thiokol. You telling me I have to wait until April? You know, this was end of January. So this shocking inversion of the launch safety logic from prove it's safe to prove that it's not safe is a hallmark of what can happen to you when you're under these kinds of pressures. So it's but it's the but.

I'm I'm sorry to go for the but. I'm sorry. It's a it's a distortion of the distortion. Let me explain. The people who were from Thiokom who were on the call Thiokol. I Thiokol, I could tell you based upon the way you've said it, the people didn't have a great story. So the individuals on the other side said, you know, I hear you, but everything we've done on our side and everything we've looked at sounds good. If gonna toss this out.

If they had the CEO on the call and the CEO brought up a slide, showed an error, a test that was done very quickly to show that there was something, they might have balked for a moment. So here is an example of leadership per teams not sharing the story properly. Yeah. But let's go all the way let's go all the way back to where more nuance. Right. It's it's more nuance, but let's go back all the way to the beginning because the first note I wrote down was excuse me. Language here.

Why the fuck didn't they build it near build these rings closer to the facility because they were so important so that they wouldn't have to be cut up into slices? That was another decision that was made. Question. So while we you used are are you I'm gonna ask you this, and this is not an insult. It's just a question. Do you know what a CPM chart is? A c critical path method chart is? I don't. You mentioned it before that you're a big believer in that.

Okay. There there is a, okay, in the 19 fifties, it's, it's unpaid to think that I sent you. In the 19 fifties so you could look it up. I'm not trying to belittle you. We could look it up. It's not paid. It's not paid. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. I think.

In 19 fifties, approximately, I think it was 3 or 4 organizations including like General Electric, Lockheed, major companies were having challenges with large scale projects where they weren't coming out on time and on budget. So they created this technology. It's a it's a project management tool. It can be converted to a leadership tool. That's why it's presented in the book.

But it's a tool to allow someone to be able to manage complex interconnected sets of activities to find out which is your critical path that determines the end state of an activity. So let's say you and I were gonna going to go we were gonna build something and we saw that it's gonna be we're supposed to have it December 31st, But when we look at the path, we add the times to it, we're gonna end up January 12th.

Someone might say, well, this is the critical path which it is, the longest path in the sequence. And what you can say to yourself is, what can I do to impact that path? So maybe you go to a vendor and you say can I pay you more? And you'll get it done in 6 days. And then you go to another vendor and get it done in 5 days.

However, critical paths are kinda complicated because you could be paying 1 vendor to get it done but it actually won't impact the rest because there's another activity that has to be accomplished that intersects. So a critical path tool is a visual, you could look it up, that allows an individual to do complex tools. I use them all the time. I mean, you wanna do a project with me, within a day or 2 I'm gonna create a critical path method critical path. So it's very powerful.

The reason that I bring it up is because my first my first question was if this was such an important part I don't like the word critical. If this was such an important part because it's overused in the methodology of putting the shuttle together then it should have been done closer to the facility so it wouldn't be cut up into pieces because that was already an unknown.

And some person could have made the decision for economic reasons, their cousin worked at the place, the bid came in late, it wasn't quoted right, they took the log they took the lowest bid instead of the highest bid. There could have been a variety of variables that we'll never ever know. And bringing it back to what you're talking about in terms of this reality distortion field, you have to also be careful. You you I'm sure you're familiar with the DNA sequencing with Watson. Correct?

Not on the level that you were on because I was not a biologist. Well, it's a simple thing. It would they were they they came out and said they'd be able to get it done in 15 years. And by the year halfway through, literally halfway, they'd only sequenced about 300,000 DNA sequences. And everybody said there's no way they can get this done. The reality distortion field would've kicked in.

However, they didn't realize the exponential learning curves that happened from the beginning of the development ended up being exponentially faster at the end. They actually got it done about a year and a half earlier. So you there are times where and I'm gonna give you very quick the that's number 1, the DNA sequencing. You have to be careful because people can say it won't be done because they didn't do the planning. They didn't understand it.

Number 2, how many times have you gotten something done because you had a deadline? Oh, sure. No. No. Deadlines are are very important. In fact, we wouldn't have gotten to the moon when we did if we didn't have Kennedy's deadline. Right. If we didn't have a deadline. So that also comes down to culture.

We are some culture where so it it was the last one let me give you is that the hard part what you what's tough in what you're saying, which, like, smacks me glaring bang in the face, is that timelines intersect and it's very difficult to understand that often. So let's say I said to you, we're gonna work on a movie. Tom Hanks, You have to get it done by the 5th by the when could you get it done? I ask you in June. And you say, I'll have it done by end of year. And you say, great.

And you're working on it. And you're working how's it going? Oh, it's going okay. Not as good as I like. It's going okay. Going not as good as I like. But because you gave me the end of the year, I've told the film crew, I've hired a production crew, I've spoken to the actors, I've gotten all the the location set. And as we're getting closer, you say, yeah, but but but come on. You gotta understand it's creative process.

I would walk you in the back corner, Andy, and say, you've got to get this done. We have $15,000,000 riding on this and you can't just say, hey, by the way. So the so my question to you with this reality distortion field is how do you know when it comes to these type of technologies if it is 1? Well, look Given what I've said. I'm sorry. No. Look. No. A very good question, and and I wanna fold in what you asked.

You made a comment that if the CEO of the company had been on the call and made a great case, things could have been different. And in fact, you're right in saying that the case that the engineers made didn't cross the threshold of convincability or convincing power to to shift the mindset of the people at at NASA. In fact, there was even one guy who was even higher up in the food chain, who was on the telecom, who said, I don't propose that we go against the contractors recommendation.

What you need to know though, is that the really damning stuff happened at the contractor, because they initially voted. The the engineers said we're not comfortable launching if it's that cold. And the vice president of engineering sided with his engineers and said we're gonna recommend against launch if it's colder than 53 degrees. It was gonna be 26 degrees, and they said, we're not Oh, wow.

So at that point is when the NASA program manager said, my god, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April? And what happened was that the Thiokol guys said, let us go offline for a little bit and talk about it. And as soon as they went offline, the corporate VP got up and said, am I the only one here who wants to launch? How's that for a charged question? And And and he pay and that person pays a lot of these salaries.

He does, but he's not in a mindset that can leave him open to what the engineers are trying to tell him. And the engineers Oh oh, no. But he could He also could be afraid of not being able to meet payroll. He's afraid. Could be afraid. He's afraid of pissing off, pardon my language, Thiokol's biggest customer. And they had gotten a letter Right. They had gotten a letter a couple of weeks earlier that said that NASA was gonna look for a second source for these boosters to There you go.

Their flight rate. So all this stuff is where you need So right. And that's going back to what I said a lot earlier. You don't know what happened to the child. You don't know how they had a what happened to the night before. The letter It's not even that obscure. We know it. Yeah. The letter. We know it. And we and we know it because the people in the room have talked about it.

And so the guy who voted with his engineers under great duress changed his vote, and they came back on the line and they said we support the launch with no temperature constraints. Now did they know somebody was gonna die? No. They didn't. They what they felt was They would never if they knew someone would die, they would have all been screaming and jumping up and down saying someone's gonna die, someone's gonna die.

And what they knew was the engineers who were closest to the problem were really uncomfortable. They said we're going in the wrong direction. We're getting colder than we were a year ago when we had this terrible erosion of the o ring. Now you wait wait. You asked another question and I wanna answer that too. Sure. I love it. So you said why didn't they just build it closer to the launch site and ship it in one segment?

Well, there's plenty of information about how they made that choice, and I can't remember now why what the, you know, the the you know, they do scores. They they rate them on management. They rate them on technical prowess. They rate them on, you know, all these parameters, and then they they make a decision. Well, there was one company that wanted to do a 1 piece design, but they lost out to thiacol.

Part of the psychology was it was based on a segmented booster that had been used with tremendous success in an unpiloted rocket called the Titan, the Titan 3, which launched, you know, the Viking Landers to Mars, and the Voyager missions to the outer solar system, and a bunch of huge, DOD spy satellites. It had a stellar record of success. But what they didn't have, they never got those boosters back, like we did with the shuttle. Oh, so they couldn't even see if there was damage. Exactly.

They never knew if there was a close call. It was only after Challenger that some testing material some testing information was made available to NASA that said, you know what? They did have close calls. You know, and so thank you for the dimensionalization, because this is a you're talking about the distortion field, and one of the things that I I often teach when I'm working with people, it's not my main job, but, I've worked with executives around the world in all sorts sorts of conditions.

And I say, look. You create your pitch, but your story and it has to be good. But then you sit back and you say, each individual who's in that room, if it can be done, what might they say or ask? You hold it back because if you tell the whole story, you don't always get those questions asked because they it's kinda brushed over. And you hold back a few of them knowing that, for example, Andy's going to say, what about the reality distortion field?

And you say, that's a great question and you pull it up completely repair prepared. Now if they don't ask it, you can pull them up anyway. You could say, look. We prepared a little bit more for you to help you. The reason is people learn things in chunks and sometimes they have to absorb it. So they could have shared about the challenges that they're facing and then heard a question and said that's a great question. We did a test very quickly in the lab. We took the rubber.

We put it at this temperature and this temperature, and this is what we had. Great question from Steve. Love it. This is the answer. And so a lot of this is it's storytelling, it's example, it's being prepared, and I don't know and I'm trying the only way I think you can start to stop this reality distortion field is by being much better at planning early on. You know, you're you're making an excellent point. And and, you know, I don't even come in with the expertise on how you plan.

I don't pretend to be any kind of, you know, sage, giver of advice on that. What I can tell you is that at a very basic level, the way to make ourselves less vulnerable to what I call failure ingredients like false perception of risk or the reality distortion field is to make them part of the conversation like you like you would any other technical issue, you know. If you're building rocket engines, you ask each other, are we vulnerable to metal fatigue here?

Well, I'm my takeaway my I'm not trying to, you know, advocate for some world in which you don't have schedule pressure or in which you don't have these patterns of human behavior. What I'm saying is we gotta talk about them to make ourselves less vulnerable to them. So so here's here's the change. What you just said is part of the planning. The planning is we have a question session. We have this session. These are the questions we have to answer.

Here's a interesting thing, Andy. You've been to college. You've been to university. You've gone all the way up. It sounds like you did you you did grad school? Not. Because I You've gone all the way up. It sound like you did you you did grad school? Not. Because I had my little, okay. So you got you got through college. Let's just use that as a number. How many courses, considering planning is one of the most important tools you could have for your entire life?

Planning your wedding, planning a vacation, planning with your family, planning your finances. How many courses did you take in planning? 0. I have this conversation with my wife all the time because I try to share with her there's a difference not because she's doing it because there's a difference between an idea and a plan. And most people have ideas. Let's do it this way. What you're talking about, Andy, which is fabulous, is baking into the design and infrastructure.

Is a timeline variable in the CPM chart that accounts for asking the questions about this. And if you don't build it in, you get crunched, and you don't ask the questions. Does that make sense?

And and, you know, it's a great it's a great thing that I, you know, maybe can go into organizations and advocate for now to say, when you start a project, build in you know, there the guy that I mentioned who put me on this path, Ed Rogers, who since retired from NASA, the the chief knowledge officer at at NASA Goddard, he used to do sessions that he called pause and learn, where he would go into project teams Yep.

And they would take some time out from the intensity of the work and sit down and talk about what was going on on the team, and were there concerns that people had that weren't getting voiced, and were there other things they needed to talk about. You I mean, you need to advocate that that happened on a fairly, you know, frequent regular basis.

And as long as when the conversation starts in the beginning when they're sitting down creating the plans, someone says, I wanna bake in a few of these points where we have a day. Ah, we don't have a day. No. No. No. No. No. We're gonna we're gonna make a day here. We're gonna make a day there. We're gonna bake it into our planning. And so that becomes one of the checks that you have to accomplish to get there.

If you don't bake it in and you ask for people to do it on the fly, that's when you end up with your reality distortion field because the but the hey. It's gotta be done by Tuesday. Hey, we've got a 100 we got a $1,000,000 resting on this. Hey, we just got into something where they're looking for another vendor. Hey, we've got all of and I give you 400 of them probably without stopping. That's the plan inside. And that's And I would I I agree with you. I agree a 100%.

I just say bake it in the cold plan. And and, you know, thank you. I'm I'm I'm glad that we're in violent agreement as they say. What I wanna do, and maybe you have some advice for me on this, I wanna get into engineering schools. I want kids who are studying engineering to be exposed to this stuff while they're still learning. And, you know, that's a whole other arena that down the road I hope to be able to enter.

So we have what's called a billion hearts and minds, and we have another program with inside of that. The billion hearts and minds is to get a 1,000,000,000 people around the world to change based upon what we've worked on. And it's not change space related. It's change just in paradigm shifting and understanding. There's another one called a little bit of space. What does a little bit of space mean? It's a double entendre, meaning it's got two meanings. We wanna go to teachers around the world.

It's part of this program we're working on. And Pierce is Pierce is one of the people working on it. Andy Aldrin and I have we've had 8 months of conversation on this. Is that we wanna go to schools and say, let's teach let's take your, schools are taught in blocks. You have a block of this, a block of this, a block of this, a block of this, all over the world. What are you gonna teach in each segment if you wanna think about it from a different vantage point, a different language?

We wanna say, can you give us a little bit of space? And what that means is, can you give us 3 days about this? You have a whole year. And they say, I I don't have time to teach it. Well, let me ask you something. How influential has music been to pop culture that's dealing with space? Oh, my god. I mean, you got the Star Trek theme, you got the the Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I mean, music and space have tied together. The themes from many movies have been perforated.

How about psychology? Looking from the world from afar. So I can create. There's a lot that goes into it. And I if you want, it's about a 25 page paper. We can get that to you. It's that we ask the school we have to demonstrate to the school what the value is. And if it's a combination of planning and asking the right questions. But you have to go in with all the tools put together. So if you would like to potentially hear more about that, absolutely. It's not just engineering schools.

It should be what a planetary what was your discipline? You called it planetary geology. Geology. It should also be Geology science.

It should also be in engineering, and it should also be in life support, and it also should be in, you know, you could take all the categories that it takes to launch or to go beyond Earth, and you could find where you would need to have a whole new set of Well, you know, that's another point that I I forgot to make at the beginning, which is that the stuff that I've been able to derive from the history of NASA, particularly Apollo, is applicable to any area of human endeavor. Yeah. Absolutely.

Okay. So why don't we move on to number 4? Yep. The understanding the risks. So all of the accidents that I mentioned, the fire that killed the first Apollo crew, Challenger, and the Columbia shuttle that disintegrated on reentry, they all happened because NASA accepted risks that were not sufficiently understood, but they could have been understood if they had done sufficient testing. So with the fire, if you can believe this, they had a blind spot about oxygen at 16 pounds per square inch.

They were focused on the in flight atmosphere of £5 per square edge. But flammability goes up directly with the concentration of oxygen. And there were plenty Okay. It's a it's a it's a exponential I don't know that it's exponential Correct. But it is it is directly proportional. The flammability risk. Okay. The the the the the intensity of the flame, the all of those things go up with the concentration of oxygen. Do you know why it was 16? It's because Why?

They they originally thought they were gonna fill the cabin with air during Mercury, and the astronaut would be given pure oxygen in the suit, and so you wouldn't have a fire risk while the spacecraft was on the ground with 16 PSI oxygen. But they had a problem with their environmental control system where air was leaking into the suit, and the little gizmo called the demand regulator was being fooled by that.

And the result was that nitrogen built up in the suit, which is, you know, that'll kill you if it gets high enough. Yeah. And they almost lost a test subject. Thankfully, they got him out in time, but they decided we don't know how to fix this. We're gonna just have to fill the cabin with pure oxygen during countdown. And the reason it was 16 was because they wanted a slightly positive pressure above ambient, which is, of course, 14.7.

Do you know when they realized that the air was leaking into the system? It was 1960 ish. No. No. I mean, in in terms of timeline, meaning, if they realized it 4 weeks ahead Oh, no. Or if they realized it 4 months ahead. They realized it before they'd even tried to put anybody in a mercury capsule and send them up. I mean, Alan Sheppard flew in May of 61, and this was, like, sometime in 1960. I can't give you the month.

But it was So they were not able they they realized this condition, and they were not they decided not to to solve it this way. This was the answer. The answer. And as I mentioned to you, they had this belief that, hey, we didn't have a fire with this in Mercury. We did the same thing in Gemini. We didn't have a fire. Right. But see, the thing is that they never tested for pure oxygen at this elevated pressure.

What they one of the guys that was running NASA said in an oral history many years later, he said the thing we should have done was have a boilerplate capsule, fill it full of all the stuff that we'd have during a flight, all the materials that could burn in pure oxygen, which they had been testing, but they didn't test them at 16 PSI. Put them all in there, light a igniter, see what happens, and see if it was something we could control. And they never did it.

They never tested at this elevated pressure, and they never even tested what would happen if you put all those materials in a spacecraft and lit it off, even at a reduced pressure. And people had this blind spot about the ferocity of things burning in 16 p now this was I have to tell you something. In my research from my class, I discovered a film that had been made way back in 1947 by the Defense Department called the Chemistry of Fire.

And in the film, which is on YouTube, you can look it up and watch it, there's a demonstration, a guy takes some steel wall and sticks it into an open mouth flask, which is full of pure oxygen, and then oh, no. He he he, ignites it. He gets it glowing with a with a a lighter or bunsenburger bunsenburger. Yeah. And he sticks it into the pure oxygen, and it goes up like a match head. I mean Yeah. It's just gonna come crazy. Appreciate that if you've never seen it. But they knew it.

This is 20 years before this accident, and people outside NASA were aware of this. But within NASA, there was this amazing blind spot about the the hazard at that pressure. I I would I see, I'm I'm I'm wrestling with these terms, because I'm trying to figure out for us. I mean, that's the reason I these calls are so I learned something here. Trying to figure out for us, there are so many things that you could be testing and testing and testing and testing.

And we're talking about things that have never been done before. So for example, a box of the roof and a door on the moon, the 4 phase development of the moon, what we've got, has never been done before. There is some historical reference for certain types of activities, but there's also not for many others. And you've even mentioned it. It's just one thing could go wrong out of 1,000.

And what are the what are the So there there's there's You know, I've I've puzzled about this, and I've talked about it with the people in my classes. How do you spot the golden bullet that's gonna bring you down? But the in Vietnam, they the the the guys who flew helicopters in Vietnam used to call it the golden BB. How do you spot the bullet that's gonna bring you down?

And if you're a program manager or project manager, you've got people storming into your office every day in a in a fraud Yeah. About, oh my god. We've got this problem. We've got that problem. How do you even triage it? And I don't claim to have the answer except to say a start of how to how to do it is to look at history, You know? It's it's a start. We just had, there's another podcast series on the same website for, for Redefining Tomorrow. We just had Kevin Sarrais on.

He's brought 3 companies from 0 to, a $1,000,000,000 in valuation. And in the call, we talked about entrepreneurship, and he said, well, the CEO's job is just always taking care of things that go wrong. And I said to him, you know what? My you've not heard my my title. It's the CSO. And what is CSO? A chief strategy officer. There's a bunch of terms that you come up with. No. It's chief executive officer. I figured you were going to.

Because my my job is my role is to take on all the things that go wrong and try to figure out a way to solve them or address them and to clear the path for the people in front of me. That, you know, I wanna make sure that they could be successful. My point is that that golden bullet, it depends on there are probably many decisions made in this world and someone went into work and they had a bad day at home, they had something go wrong, and they just said, let's go left. And they say why go left?

You know, I've been thinking about it. Let's go left. And the reason they went left is because they didn't get to sit at home and go over the reports and they didn't wanna look bad and they knew that something was on the line, their job, their role, the finances, the their health, they could have found out their mom just got canceled that day. Maybe there was an incident, and this relates directly to Challenger.

Maybe there was an incident 2 weeks before where the boss yelled at them and said why the hell didn't you go left? And so they're they're damn sure not gonna be making that mistake again. Which is Elon saying, we've you know, let's go with this.

And it's not I love that we're having this discussion because it's it's an the own the one of the case scenarios that I keep on going back to, and I'm playing this over in my head, just so you know, it's not this is not just sitting on top of a a a no way like, we're just having a conversation. I'm interviewing. I'm just saying myself.

Okay. How do we get people to understand that the real importance is making sure in the beginning that you have the time that you don't you're not pressured the same way so you could look at the options. Maybe there are 4 different vendors and 6 different materials you could try. Maybe if you scheduled it properly, it's no it's there's no guarantee. But it's much better to have found out 3 months earlier that there's a challenge than it is to find out 2 months earlier or a month earlier.

And I I share I I agree with you. I love the fact that we're doing this. We're kind of and you're doing we're doing together exactly what I try to do in the class because I don't come in with all the answers.

I come in with a body of of of knowledge and a perspective that I've gotten out of my deep dives into history, but I there's a moment in every day that I that I teach this class, every full day session, where I say to a room full of aerospace engineers, you guys help me figure this out because I don't have the answer. And I I wanna say to you, David, what do you do to get through?

Let's say you could go into a room with people who are starting a project and they say, yeah, we did the you know, they did this 20 years ago. It can't be that hard. What how do you break through the mindset and get them to realize that they don't know what they don't know? So I I'm gonna give you a kinda counterintuitive approach to start, and then I'll answer that question. Every meeting we have in Project Moon Hut, we start with how are you?

Okay. Now that might not seem like a very big question, but it's not about business. It's not about how's work. It's how are you? And the reason is during that call, at least for me, I'm hoping with others, that they're getting to know what's going on with this person. And I'll give you a scenario and then I'll come back to, where this kinda comes from. We had a person on one of our teams. I won't mention the team because it's they've done a phenomenal job working with us for over 2 years.

They have a ton of people working with us. And we got on and this one guy just didn't look right. And we have this how are you? And I said, no. No. No. No. No. How are you? And he just put his head down and he said, oh, this is not good and this is not good and this is not good and and you could tell he was hurt. We spent 45 minutes of that call working on how are you and then we cut the call because it's normally an hour and half.

There's a this one CEO of, of a major company had just flown into Italy. I don't know if I've shared this before. She'd just flown into Italy to renegotiate a major deal. They needed to drop the cost because the economy had changed. And she when she walked into this meeting, the CEO and she were they were talking. She said she asked the person, how are you? He said, hi, and she gave the pitch. And she came back, and it was a terrible meeting.

And I was working with this organization for quite some time, and I said, did you ask him how he was? She said, yeah. I did. And then we got to business. I said, no. No. No. No. No. I wanna know, did you ask him how he was? And she said, well, I I mean, how much can you ask?

I said, if he had said to you that every other vet client of theirs has come in and asked for a discount and that they're they're really I mean, they don't know how they can manage this, would you have given your pitch differently? She said, oh oh, yeah. I mean, I definitely would have if I knew that was the condition. I said, you didn't really care about how he was. You were asking to be polite. So I said, we're gonna try something. 2 of us.

What I want you to do is this weekend, this week, I want you to just manage by asking questions. You can't give any advice. Nothing. Just ask questions. She said I don't know if I could do that. And I said no. No. You can. Just people will get to their answers. You know, do you wanna do red, blue, or green? Do you wanna go left or right? Do you want just ask questions. So the next time we sit down we sit down and I say, how are you? And for 13 minutes she told me all about business.

And I look at her and I said, so how are you? She says, oh my god. And I she said, you know, I did try to do that at work, but I couldn't. But I did go home that weekend, and I did it with my children. Do you wanna have spaghetti, Chinese food, or whatever food? She gave she said, I always gave them options. And it was the best weekend I can remember since they've been alive because they felt like they had choice. They they were being heard.

I said the challenge with you is you're so busy getting work done you're not listening. You know what that makes me think of those days? Go ahead. What are the most important questions you can ask about an organizational culture is what are people rewarded for? And the woman that you were just talking about, in her mind, is she working under a belief that says I'm only gonna be rewarded for my productivity? Well, you you're asking a great question, but so I'm gonna complicate it for you.

800 she her department was 800 people. She had a really dynamic, great, executive team, yet it's in Asia. Yeah. Okay. So now I mean, I I spent 10 years there, so I have an understanding of what was going on. But the average, white faced person, they call him guilo if it's the negative term, the average person who was an expat that came in might not have understood the nuances of culture. And so you're at you asked this question, how do you get people to ask these questions?

Well, what I asked was It's counterintuitive. Was how do you break through a mindset that says, I don't have time to pay attention to behavior. And so the first part is you have to go slower to go faster. That's the asking the question because now the people know that you care, that you're working with them. But it's the there's a saying in front of my desk that says the smartest person in the room is the person who asks the best questions of themselves and of others.

Yeah. And so in order to get these individuals, if you would needed it, you could do, an example of a role play where something comes in and says, hey. Well, there's a fire going on. Or, I mean, you can't yell fire in the without being but you could create a dramatic experience that happens. You could, have them watch a a video that explains I just watched a great video the other day on LinkedIn. I a lot of people have seen it.

This professor writes on the war board 1 tie 2 times 2 is 4, 3 times 3 is 9, goes all the way up to, 9 times 9 is 8, 8 times 8 and then goes 9 times 9 and screws it up, the last one. And the whole class the whole place laughs. And he says, it's funny. I did all 9 of the other ones right, and the only one you paid attention to is the one I did wrong. And I did that intentionally because I we have to remember to praise the people who've done the good things.

So it's taking there are many ways to be able to my point is there are many ways to get a person to get there, but I think the counterintuitive one is to just teach them. It is to give them the tools to equip them to be able to make those decisions on their own. And, we talked about planning. I called the top 10 business schools in the United States and asked them if do they teach any courses on planning. Time management, one of the most important skills that you could learn to be in business.

The top 10 business schools in the United States, undergraduate, not a one. I then called the top 10 graduate schools in the United States and asked them, do they have a course on planning? Not a one. Wow. And you had didn't but but it should be across every discipline, shouldn't it? We're talking we're talking the same language here. We both see a gap in Right.

Yeah. It's it's it's, So so you could actually go in and talk about planning before you talk about the this, this field, this distortion field. You could talk about planning first and say to everybody in the room, show me you know, draw out explain to us how you Well, you know, I do And I guarantee you they would I do feel that once you get somebody's attention and you start talking about the behavior stuff, they really do they really are fascinated by it. I think there's an opportunity there.

I just have to get out from under the current, you know, I'm writing the companion book to the course, and that is consuming an awful lot of my my bandwidth. But when I get beyond that, I'm gonna try to do the things that that we're that we're talking about. Well, we can talk and there's also you have a copy of Paid the Things, so you could read it.

Yeah. Chapter 3, Read the forward, the intro, and the first two chapters, and then read chapter 3, and you will I don't make any money, I gave it to you. So it'll give you a whole different perspective. So let's get on to this, beware of the us, them, and I and I'm here for you, so you could always reach out. We want you to become part of Project Moon on the team, so we're helping each other. Thank you. So, no no worries. Number 5, beware of us them thinking. Them thinking. Versus them.

Yep. There's a v s in there. So Yeah. So so just to put a fine point on my last one, just to sum up there, I talked about the fire, but Challenger Columbia could have been prevented by sufficient testing of the things that brought them down too. And you're right. The engineers didn't make a good enough case because they had not been given permission to do enough testing. Yeah. So us versus them thinking. This is something that is absolutely epidemic in our culture today.

We are wired, you know, we're all tribal beings. We come from tribes. Families are tribes, ethnic groups are tribes, sports teams are tribes, religions are tribes, and we are wired up to be tribal in our thinking. We we evolve the capability to to run a subroutine, which is always running in the background, whether we're conscious of it or not, to evaluate someone who comes across our path and say, is this person one of us or not?

And if you think about, you know, when we were living in caves, right, somebody comes to the mouth of your cave, you it it's advantageous from a survival point of view to be able to tell very quickly if this person is there to bring you food or to steal your food. So we are hardwired to do this us versus them thinking.

The problem is that in a technical organization, or really any organization, when you start to make members of your own organization the other, when you start to think of those people as them, you're asking for trouble. And the way it surfaces in the context of NASA, one example is something that they call not invented here syndrome, which you may or may not have heard of. So Yeah. Somebody comes up with an outside the box idea.

I know you don't like that expression, but but Well, because it doesn't it doesn't work. Okay. Yeah. But go ahead. Yeah. And for the context of this, yes. Go ahead. Continue. I understand. Understand. Yep. Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna go with you. I'll go with the flow. I'm writing notes. Go ahead. Great. So somebody comes up with an outside the box idea as as happened more than once in Apollo, and and the the people who were being pitched this idea say, why is he even talking to us?

He's not one of us. He couldn't possibly know how to do it. Right? That's tribal. Another example and by the way, one of the things I talk about is that we all have, because of the limitations in the way our brains are created or constructed, we have what I call a limited spotlight of awareness of of conscious awareness. We can only perceive at any given moment a tiny subset of our reality on a conscious level. And so we need Have you been speaking to my wife? I have not.

Is this is this touching a nerve, David? I don't know. Did I say that out loud? I I thought my mic was off. So I I I I really I really think that that the history shows us that we have to have multiple spotlights of awareness on the problem to be able to get to the to the finish line.

Another aspect of this us versus them thinking is something that we hear about a lot in organizations, which is called stovepiping, where people stay in their own little, what they call swim lane, and they don't talk to people who may be in the next cubicle or the next section of the of the office area or whatever. You you don't have these water cooler conversations where people cross pollinate.

And, again, you're depriving yourself of the multiple spotlights of awareness that can bring you perspectives that you wouldn't otherwise have. Now just to give you one example of how this played into one of the accidents that I teach in the Challenger disaster, I mentioned to you that telecom that happened the night before the launch. Well Yeah. Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama was responsible for those boosters and therefore the o rings.

The the management of the whole shuttle program was at the Space Center in Houston. There had always been tribal tension between Marshall and and the Houston Space Center, and Marshall never communicated with Houston about the concerns about the o rings and temperature. Houston didn't even know about that telecom. If they had, they might have said, wait a minute. What what what happened? What what what did the engineers say? Why did they say it? They never said one word about it.

And so there was a missed opportunity there to delay that launch. And that was And it could have been behind closed doors that one of the people said do not say anything. It was understood. It was We're going forward. It was it was Yeah. It didn't have to be said explicitly because it was such a part of the culture. I mean, I asked one of the shuttle commanders, who obviously was based in Houston. That's where all the astronauts are based.

I said to him, how would you describe the culture at Marshall? And he said, what happens if Marshall stays at Marshall? So I'm gonna ask you a question about Tribal. What do you think is the number one thing that space people see tonight? Space people what? People who are enjoy beyond Earth, who are what's the number one thing people say about me when they're talking to me? They'll say it right to my face. You're not tribal. They say you're not a space person you don't understand.

Oh, sorry to hear that. I get that all the time. Well, that's that's unfortunate because it closes doors to what could otherwise be a shared experience. Correct. I am because I'm not in love with space, I therefore can't understand the technology. By the way, my background is organic chemistry, physics, calculus. I did got straight a's in organic chemistry. I mean, I I have a background in biology and a dual major in psychology.

Got an MBA, but I've worked in over 300 different industries, nanotechnology, aerospace, water, and sewage construction retail, but I don't understand space. Mhmm. Now how do you think how do you think collaboration starts where someone doesn't have an under and I'm using it as an example to because I wanna take it further. How do you think it feels if you're not in the space ecosystem, if the people in the space ecosystem think that if you don't love space, you can't really do any of this?

Completely unproductive and and, unfortunate. It's I hate I hate hearing that. It's it is so ubiquitous. It is so challenging that it is one of if it is one of the challenges within Project Moon Hut for me is that it's almost like I have to grab my seat when I'm making a call to a space person because I'm not sure if they're going to be open to the fact that maybe we do have a box of the roof and a door. Maybe we do have some of the most complete plans as we've been told by people.

Mhmm. Maybe we have some things here. We can't even get that far. Yeah. I mean, this is very unfortunate, and the only thing I can say I mean, it makes your job that much harder, and you have to Think of think about history. How many innovations have come from outside the industry into an industry? For example, someone comes from another country. It's some number like 56% of the Silicon Valley, startups were startups by people who were not American, not US citizens.

They came to America, and they looked at the world differently. That's a huge number. Now it could be 52, it could be 57. Please don't kick me for it. But it's that a lot of ideas, Waze, the, you remember Waze for GPS for your car? They everybody was trying to build in sensor road technology to know where people go, and these people at Waze said, hey. Everybody's got a mobile phone. Why don't we just leverage everybody's phone, and we'll use the data that comes off of that?

Because they looked at the world differently. And that this beyond the earth ecosystem could have some benefits from people who don't see the world the same way. Oh my god. Absolutely. So so the so the this tribal thing, you hit me really hard when you said that because I'm thinking, god, how do you I haven't come up with an answer for that. I I can I tell you what I'm doing? Well, I I was gonna say and then and then I I wanna hear what you're gonna say.

But I I was gonna say, you you just have to work that much harder to build a person to person connection outside of the the space subject matter. And I would say we're doing a little bit differently. We're putting the the term here is Thor, Wonder Woman, and Hulk. It's not David. It's that we know that Andy Chaikin has looked at the website. We know that you now know about us. You've heard some of the quotes from some of the people that we're working with.

And it's one of the big surprises where sometimes we'll say, we'll be on a call, say, for an interview. And they'll say, well, I've never heard about you. That doesn't mean anything. But could you open up the page of the podcasts? And you see their eyes go scanning and they say, I I know, like, 30, 40 percent of the people on this list. My reaction is always the same. How did they know about us and you don't?

So we're building Thor Woman, Wonder Woman, and Hulk because it's not about Project Moon Hut. It's about Kirkland and Ellis, the 7th largest law firm in the world, KPMG, Deloitte, PWCEY, JPMorgan Private Banking, Maples Group, Carta. It's about we just brought on 17 law firms around the world to do office actions. We have the guy who invent who created the, software.

When you get a text message from Amazon that says that your package has arrived, the guy who built that for all of Amazon is on our team. The number one ontologist in the world is on our team, Barry White. And if you go down the list, what we're doing is we're building an army of individuals like yourself who learned about us and said, So that's it's kind of a softer approach because I I couldn't win. I can't win. Why is it cool? They you have to love space.

Why is it cool Thor, Wonder Woman, and Hulk? Because, you know when you're about to go into an alley and you're about to fight, like, 8 guys and they're, like, pumping and they're they're ready to fight you, and then right behind you walks Thor Wonder Woman and Hulk. And they go, wait wait wait wait. Okay. Okay. Well, maybe we're not gonna fight you right now. We're gonna listen. So it's we're bringing the army, what's the one with Mel Brooks where they come over the hill? Blazing Saddles?

You know, the the fight. The no. No. Mel Brooks with the the fight, the the big scene where he's battling in Ireland or Scotland. We There's one scene in in History of the World part 2? I'll I'll look it up in a moment. No. It's a it's a battle. It's a warrior film. Mel Brooks? Over the ridge and he's going to fight not Mel Brooks. Sorry. Mel, not Gibson. Is that his name? Mel you know, the the guy who was, Oh. Yes. Mel Gibson. From Mel Brooks. So I was thinking Yes. Very different. Mel Brooks.

I'm sorry. That was my mistake. It's Mel I I I Mel Gibson. Right. He's the guy what's the one there? He's the guy. He slaps Braveheart. Remember when he comes over the hill and they're kinda laughing at him like he's only got these few people and then the whole crew comes over and it's okay. This is the army. What we're doing is we're quietly, we're meeting with people like you.

And I can't even tell you this past week the people we're talking to, they're just over the top because we're just trying to do the work in the background. So to answer the question about this tribal, it's not an easy thing to get over. You have to have successes behind you. You have to have accomplishments behind you. And it's a the beyond earth ecosystem because the topic is, what will it take to get us back to the moon?

Well, one of them is, anybody who's listening to this podcast, is to open up to the fact that you don't have to love space to be interested in creating a box with a roof and a door on the moon. Because you could be a lawyer who's helping us to navigate something. So for example, Maples Group out of the Cayman Islands. They've done phenomenal work for us but they're not space people, they're just people.

Carta, which is the company in California that does the options trading pools, they gave us a deal that's absolutely beyond imagination. Feet Fiduciary Services in Luxembourg became our fiduciary. They know nothing about this because you need all of these people to get a box of the roof and a door on the mountain. Right. And so we're we're gener we're trying to generate them in our own way. But so it's a tough one.

And if we're gonna get a box of the roof and a door on the moon, we have to have us working together. Us versus them is a terrible way to to build that. Well, so we're we're speaking the same language. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So what's this next one? Awareness has a shelf life. I was interested when you said that. Yeah. What does that mean? You you know, one of the things that we see is that when we have a catastrophic failure, it shifts our awareness. I call it a window of clarity that opens.

We can see things differently. We say, oh my god. How could we have done x y z? How could we been that that stupid? You know? Sometimes we say that to ourselves. And and yeah. I mean, it's just the way the way we're wired up. The problem is that that window of clarity doesn't stay open forever. And what the history shows us, unfortunately, is that it is shockingly easy to lose those lessons that we acquired so painfully in the wake of the last accident.

And just one example is that, you know, Challenger happened in 1986, and it really took very little time, only, you know, a relatively few years, like, less than a decade for those lessons to be to start being lost at NASA and pave the way for the Columbia accident, which happened 17 years to almost to the day after Challenger. Very, very similar human behavior lessons.

The fact that, again, this false perception of risk, they had a problem with foam coming off of the shuttle's big external tank and hitting sometimes hitting well, very often hitting the orbiter, the shuttle orbiter, where the astronauts were during launch. And they had some very close calls. They had one flight just 2 years after Challenger, where foam hit the bottom of the orbiter and damaged the protective tiles, these silica tiles for reentry.

One of them was damaged so badly that it got down to bare metal, And it was only because there was a extra piece of metal underneath that spot that they didn't kill that crew. Yeah. And yet, even with close calls like that, they started to think of the foam strike in the same way they thought of the o rings. Well, it's not the way we designed it, but we can get you know, it hasn't bitten us yet, so we're we must be okay.

And by the time Columbia happened in 2003 because of a foam big piece of foam that broke off during launch and hit the leading edge of the wing on on the Columbia shuttle, you know, it had been classified not as a safety threat, this recurring problem, but a, quote, unquote, maintenance issue. And so the lesson is that awareness has a shelf life, and we must you know, not just every year.

NASA has what they call remembrance week every year, because all the 3 accidents happened around the same time at the end of January, beginning of February. And so they have every year, they look back, and they talk about the lessons. My point is you've gotta build this into your culture. That you're you've gotta create a learning organization that remembers the lessons and lives by them. It's very hard to do.

And these you know, the the conversation has been more about the technological, lessons. No. No. It's really not about it's about the human behavior lessons. No. No. What and that's not what I meant is the accidents around technology conditions. It there there we are not saying there was a budgeting error. You're not saying there was an error in hiring. You're not saying there was a contract challenge.

Because in each one of these departments, you could probably relate back like I did with the O ring. Well, how was this selected? Or the fact that they sent out a letter to the company, by the way, we're looking for somebody else. I mean, how would how would you react if your company let's say, I'm gonna get your relativity space. You you had contracts. You haven't gotten rocket off. You're looking at your cash flow, and you get a letter that says, hey. You don't ship.

We're not gonna do any more business. And you're absolutely right. And, you know, if I could go back in time, I'd be standing in the office of the person who sent that letter to Thiokol saying, by the way, we're gonna look for a second company to provide our boosters. And I'd say, and what is it you think is that's gonna do to the to the mindset of Thiocollo? Do you understand the implications and the repercussions of the letter you're about to send? And No. They don't.

And the and even if you have this whole scenario planning But see, it goes back I'm sorry. David, let me just say this and then you can continue. Yeah. It goes back to the stories we tell ourselves because everybody at NASA was in the grip of this narrative from that had existed for Yeah. Decade you know, a couple of decades. We're gonna make space flight routine and affordable. The overarching goal is the flight rate, and everything else flows from that.

Yes. The the there's a perception that I'm trying to get through because I I I'm gonna bring you back to a number 8, so there will be an 8. You you gave 7, but there'll be an 8. Had a company just recently. I had to do 3 speaking engagements. I had to show up on time. I had to do the work on time. And great reviews. I'm gonna throw that in there. Great reviews on each one.

Even the person who ran the program said some of the best programs she's ever run-in like 7 years at their event at this organization. So the But they don't pay on time. So I wrote to them and I said, it's kinda funny. If I showed up 10 minutes late, didn't show up for a half hour a day, you would say I don't get paid. But you don't pay me as if that's okay. I didn't hear back. I saw online payment authorized. But it still was late. It was still was late because I even gave him a warning.

I said your bill's due in a few days and I did my work on time. Are you gonna get a time? And she didn't ignore it. But then I wrote this kind of direct letter saying if I showed up late you would not have paid me. So what's the difference here? So this remembrance, I'm gonna dimensionalize it. I think that the remembrance if you are going to go in this way has to be in every department. Meaning purchase orders. How did you select your your vendor?

Did you select you have this list but did you put in there this category of x? Maybe that's missing in the evaluation and therefore you ended up with challenges because you brought that up. You said there's that that thing that they have to they get scored on. Maybe there's a missing variable in there such as proximity to launch site. Mhmm. That could have been one of the variables that would have changed everything. So what about the proper paranoia?

So proper paranoia is is is a phrase that I heard from one of my great mentors who is, by now they would call him a gray beard at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a fellow named Gentry Lee, who I first encountered when I was a college intern on the Viking Mars landing. And Gentry was just a is a fabulous person, a great thinker, very broad thinker. And today, he is somebody who can look over the shoulders of project teams at JPL and say, are you considering this?

And they have to stop and think and say, wow. No. We haven't, you know, or you're not facing up to the reality of what you're doing. You're not going to make the next launch window to Mars. You have problems that are gonna delay you, and you need to stand up and say that now. He's done things like that.

Anyway, I interviewed Gentry for a book that I wrote called A Passion for Mars about people that I've known in my life who were passionate about the exploration of Mars, including my college professor, including scientists who sent cameras to Mars, orbit Mars, and completely overturned. One of the reasons I love the story of Mars exploration is that every time we've looked at Mars more closely, we've seen a completely different planet than the one we thought was there.

And this started when I was in high school when we discovered they started seeing, you know, these enormous volcanoes and giant canyons. Up until that moment, they thought Mars is like the moon, sort of, but it's got a very thin atmosphere. It's kinda boring. Well, you know, they looked at the whole planet with this orbiter and it was like, where did that planet come from? Right? So I wrote this book and I interviewed Gentry about the Viking mission that that I had been an intern on.

And he told me about the man who ran the project at the, contractor that built the lander, Martin Marietta, it was called at that time. A fellow named Jim Martin who looked like General Savage. The guy had this crew cut, he could be very intimidating. He was a lovely guy underneath it all. I I got to meet him and talk to him when I was a student.

But Gentry told me that Jim Martin's philosophy of how you run a program is that you hire you you you you practice what he called proper paranoia, which is to say that you hire the best people you can get, and you turn them loose, but you are scared, pardon my language, shitless, then it won't Mhmm. I used that word earlier. Yeah. I said I think you dropped an f bomb. Yeah. Oh, I did? Yeah. Okay. Might have So I figured I could come in under the radar with shitless. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah.

So we'll we'll we'll I it it it I only use it when it's really appropriate. So hopefully I use it at the right time. So so you've got to be running scared a little bit that this that it won't work. And you have to be saying to yourself constantly, what am I missing? You can never afford to say, we've got this nailed.

And one of the reasons for that is because space systems are so complex that you will never I've literally had this said by a NASA, engineer who investigated a a a near catastrophe on one of the space station space walks where, you may have heard about this. An Italian astronaut had a water leak in his helmet during a space walk, and he almost drowned. Right?

I mean, he got back to the airlock in time, and the thing is that there were warning signs of this problem on a space walk by the same guy a week before, and they missed the warning sign because of the story they told themselves about what that water leak meant. And what this guy, this engineer who had investigated this mishap said was, you can never know everything about your hardware. There can always be something that comes up that you haven't seen before that can bite you.

So proper paranoia is a mindset that you must have if if you wanna avoid failure. And that, I'll say one other thing, and it relates it relates to what I call failure behaviors. One of my failure behaviors is closed mindedness, and that's another thing that we see a lot in our culture where people live in thought bubbles where they seek out information that confirms what they already believe.

What proper paranoia tells us is that you must be open to information that conflicts with what you believe, and you must be willing to pay attention to that. And people say the hardware talks to you. You gotta hear what the hardware is saying even if it challenges your beliefs. Easier said than done. I I I I have jokes about this. I've been with my wife for 37 years is I often ask people have they changed their wives or their husbands or whatever, if they're spouses, mates.

And people look at me and say, oh, no. And I said, so you can't even change a person you're looking for. Get divorced and remarry. You mean change how they think? Well, actually, the last call I was on last interview, I said, well, have because he brought something up, I said, did you change your wife? He said, I'm on my 3rd. I said I said, well, then you definitely changed your wife. So I always use the expression I'm on my first.

It's not an easy thing to see what you don't know you're not seeing. And you're asking someone to see what they don't know that they're not seeing because we are human and that's a challenge. And maybe it's I use chat all the time. I will dump something into chat and say this is what I've written, created, designed, what am I missing? Or can you give me 10 ways to do this? 8 of them I'll know but 9 and 10 I didn't think about.

And I'm using chat as my, my right hand person to question the things that I'm working on. So I might dump it in and say, give me a counterintuitive Well, what you're saying what you're saying is that yeah. What you're saying is that AI has become the spotlight of awareness that you could that you're bringing on to your team, one of the spotlights of awareness to give you that diversity of perspective. Oh, yeah.

I I because if I it's taking my content, what I've written or somebody else has written. I dump it in and I'm saying, okay. What did we miss here? And it might you know, can you give me a series of questions that we missed? And it's always gonna come up with questions. It's always. But you have to be open to dump it in there and have it challenge you. So just the other day I did we were working on a paper for something that we had to do with, our Mearthl, our platform. And I said, okay.

If you were to do this and you had to do it globally, what would be the top ten things you would do? And he gave it to me and I said, what if I gave you a budget of a half a1000000? Gave me. What if I gave you a budget of a1000000? Okay. What are we missing here? What am I not asking you? Like 10 things that I wasn't asking. So okay. Let's go down each one of them. And it's a conversation that I'm having with AI to find what I might be missing. But I'm always saying go to project moonhat.org.

Here's the here's the copy of Paid to Think. Read the book. Understand what I know. I have to now the large learning language model gets to know you, so it's now able to give you more information. So when I say, do you know project moonlight? It says, yes. Okay. Do you understand this? Let me give you the let me give you the 1,000,000,000 hearts and minds, And it's 32 pages. Or let me give you what we're working on in this area. Okay. Got it.

So, yeah, I'm using it to question myself all the time. All the time. So I wanna get to number 8. This is gonna be one that'll be fun. At least for me. Okay. Let me okay. We're going to get to number 8 and this is I will pause for one second. Just got something in from one of our teammates in in Asia and Pakistan and he wants to continue writing a document. We've got some great things happening so it was nice to see that. Okay. So here's the question.

The title of the program is what will it take to get back to the moon? And I want you to push aside because a lot of what you talked about was the challenges of making sure we do things right, that we don't make the mistakes of yesterday and that we clear those those paths away. My question is so that we deliver on the promise of the title a little bit more. Taking what you know about the ecosystem and we're just making this up, we're just talking as friends.

If you had to design it, Getting us back to the moon. You you could even you were saying some great things about project moon. It's a great throw those things in too. What do you think it would take to get us back to the moon besides being cautious, watching out for, being aware on a what do you think it needs for us to act to make sense? Actually take issue with just one tiny element of what you just said, which is that caution is important, but so is boldness.

And if you'll remember earlier in the conversation, I talked about space flight, the analogy that I use for space flight is being on a high wire. And I I talked about it in the sense of how unforgiving spaceflight is and and one little, you know, false move and you fall off the hard the high wire. What I always say when I teach the class and I put up a picture of a high wire walker and I say, how do you stay on a high wire? And and, the answer that I'm looking for is balance.

So, really, these things are dynamic conditions. Balance is not set it and forget it, and there's nothing about spaceflight that is set it and forget it. You have to constantly be asking yourself, are we doing what we should be doing? And so I would say there's a balance between caution and boldness.

One of the reasons we got to the moon in Apollo when we did was because there were bold ideas like, sending the very first Saturn 5 with astronauts on it into lunar orbit, which was not the original plan, only the second Apollo mission. But they had enough testing under their belt and they had the confidence, well placed confidence to do it.

So I would say with project Moon Hut, you want to strive for that dynamic condition called balance and recognize when boldness is called for, and recognize when caution is core called for. Recognize when you've done enough testing to try to reach farther versus when you haven't. You know, one of the things that you hear sometimes these days and testing costs money. You know, I said before that the accidents that I teach could have been avoided if there had been sufficient testing.

But testing costs money, and so, you know, under the cost and schedule pressures that we talked about, you know, there's a reluctance sometimes to spend the extra money on sufficient testing. And people have a mindset, there's a mindset these days that you hear sometimes that says, well, just run a computer model. Well, that that may get you, you know, 80% of the way there, it may get you 75% of the way there, but it's it probably won't get you all the way there.

And so, I guess what I'm saying is, you know, we talked about the how tough it is to spot the golden BB. I feel like there's a secret sauce that successful project managers have that's born of experience. You really wanna have people in the decision making positions of your project that have been through failure and have learned from failure and have had hands on experience.

The thing you don't wanna have, and this is part of the problem that NASA has had like during the years before Challenger, the guy at the top had never done human space flight, he was a business guy, his second in command had never done human spaceflight, he came out of the robotic spaceflight world. You don't wanna end up in that position where people making key decisions don't haven't experienced the realities. Does that help at all?

Yeah. It's intere because if you look at the average age of a SpaceX employee, it's 27 years old. You look at the average age of a and I won't list the names because but they're a lot older. I mean, they're in their forties to fifties. We need both, don't you? I mean, we need the young enthusiastic people. What I what I tend to hear about SpaceX though is that they tend to hire these young people and burn them out, which is unfortunate.

Yeah. And well, it's but it's it's part of the game of speed to to to mark in this decision making. Burning out people is that you lose the expertise born of experience. But well, the the once something is embedded and it's in the cult, it's already been built, then you don't meet that person for the next phase, for example. That the people who lived through it are there to talk about it to the newer people. Oh, because it's the the mechanism is there.

They've the what is the, the the rocket that they're using currently? What's the name of it? I keep forgetting. The Falcon 9. The Falcon 9 is what? 19, times it's been used? They planned on it only being used a few times? Something was Falcon was coming to my mind. I couldn't figure out what was the number. So the the challenge is or the the misconception is that we need those people there who are there early on who are going through the phases and you don't.

Once the assembly line is put into production, once all the mechanisms are put in place, once the supply chain has been established, once the processes are done, to some degree, you want a new person to walk in and say, how do we do it? Better, faster, cheaper? And you hope that the culture allows you to be able to do that so that you end up with the next generation. Otherwise, you're gonna be stuck in the past.

So it's not a and I'm I'm making this very highly simplistic and I'm not trying to let me give you an example. I don't know if I'm ready to buy into better, faster, cheaper, by the way because No. No. It's not better that's what I'm saying. It's a bad example. If I if you came to Project Moon Hut or any of the companies had over 20, if you came in the 1st day, we'd be facing certain challenges.

Getting something set up, putting the systems in place, putting the hardware, the software, whatever it may be in place. Okay. You come on a year later. Software's already in place. The decisions have been made. Things are running smooth enough. You come in 3 years later. It's gonna be different. So today if you came into Project Moon Hut, let's say you said David, I wanna be a part. I wanna work on this. It is a completely different experience than it was 5 years ago. Completely different.

Because all the entities have been formed, the financial models have been established, the design has been put together. So you come in at a different starting point. And to some degree, some degree there are 3 different types of positions. The first one is oftentimes let me use a a river. Let's say you have to go across a river. Sometimes you have to teach a person to swim across the river and come back. They have to do it regularly. They're gonna transport people back and forth.

They need to know how to swim. Sometimes you need to get them strong enough to be able to get across the river and maybe come back occasionally. And sometimes you just throw the person on your back and say, I've already been across the river. I'm gonna take you across the river. You don't have to know how to swim. You just have to know to take us from that point forward. And you as a leader, you have to determine what are those skill sets that you need.

So what we're doing in Project Moon Hut is we create videos of experiences. We have about a 114 videos. So if you you're watching 2 of them right now. You can watch a video and hear firsthand what that condition is. And so we're trying to create the tools to have things move forward because we're coming at it very differently. And the skills that we needed 2 years ago, we don't need the same way today. I well, I'd I'd like to, you know, I'd like to see it in action.

I'd like to see more about how it works. It's it's intriguing. In all the companies, you know, one of the things we had a a screen printing company long time ago, printing machines. And we had manually printing. And we're going back 30 years. You'd mantle manually print. You've probably seen someone Oh, yeah. They take a little squeegee and they pull it.

Okay. That was a skill you need to know how to put the pressure on, how to put the ink in, how to play it down, pick the right screen, do all sorts of things. We then bought a high speed automatic machine that could print 14 colors and up to 800 shirts an hour. Okay? So the person who knew how to do the squeegee pulling was no longer the person we needed because that machine could print an oversized image and can do it in a timeline run by a 30 horsepower screw compressor.

It was a behemoth machine. And let me tell you, they didn't have to know those old skills. They had to know different skills. So as you evolve as an an organization, you wanna bring some things forward, but others are just passe. They're yesterday. Oh, absolutely. A little bit? I totally get it. Yeah. Because you're there. I mean, you're there. You already know it's already done right now, and we've got so many things in place that we're working on next phase development.

So when it comes the reason I was asking this question is we always wanted to come back to this title of what will it take to get back to the moon. And, you know, we've got Artemis. We've got there's a few programs out there around the world that people are working towards. What what's your take on else that that is a is a crucial ingredient of of success in something like this, and that's the story you have to tell to the world.

And I've been asked many times, why we need to go back to the moon because if you remember, it wasn't very long ago that the moon was kind of the Rodney Dangerfield of the solar system. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Respect for your listeners who are too young to remember Rodney Dangerfield. No. No. Actually, when we started project moon hut, it was all about Mars. We had no respect. You wanna go back to that moon? There's nothing there for us. There's no value to us.

It's only 3 days away in current technology. But don't worry about that. We we wanna go to we wanna go to Venus or we wanna go to, to Pluto. I know it's not a planet anymore, but we wanna go there. It's a planet. Let's not get into that. I I I'm I that's why it was a good question. My 3 pronged answer to why the moon matters, and and there are things that I know you relate to. One is the science is spectacular.

The moon is nothing less than the Rosetta Stone for decoding the earliest history of the inner solar system, including the history of the earth, because the moon holds the cleanest record on its crater scarred surface of what happened in the inner solar system, including the impact history, which is probably intimately tied to the rise of life on Earth, because the impactors brought with them organics and water and energy, things that you need to have to have life arise. And With the monolith.

So So the science is one of the most beautiful things that we get out of going back to the moon and exploring. The second thing, as as you know, and and you're you're all over this, is that the moon is the place where we learn to live off planet. It is the outward bound school, and it's as you said it's only 3 days away. So we've got to learn how to live off planet while we're on the moon only 3 days from home if something goes wrong before we go further out.

And the third thing is that the moon is the only place in the solar system where you could stand on a surface and see the Earth as a beautiful fragile oasis of life in the blackness of space, and that's a leap in perspective that we desperately need to reinforce if we are to be good stewards of planet Earth. So for many many years I've been talking about those three things as the reason to go back to the mountain. Interesting. I can't wait till you watch the rest of the videos.

So anyway Yeah. Because yeah. It's a these, yes. Okay. I will I will I'm going I'm going to say you did a great job. Fantastic. This is great. Is there any questions for me? I just wanna say thank you again so much for having me and for bringing me into your your world, and I'm I'm already learning so much from this interaction, and I would just love to see it continue.

I I would absolutely love it in what I what we share with if people are working on our team, we're helping them in all different ways. And so we've got individuals from all over the world. We have 5 new people who are starting this week. We have companies joining us regularly. We just had what's the name? Artemis shielding. They do, radiation shielding. They started with us some time back.

They had to stop for a period of time, and they contacted us just recently and said, we have to be involved in this project. And we've restarted up everything again on the radio on the shielding side. But we get everything from patent attorneys all the way through to engineers to financial individuals. It just the the amount of talent that's coming this way Mhmm. Is just phenomenal. So yes. So you could be a part of that, that ecosystem and we can work together.

So with that said, what I wanna do is I wanna thank you for taking the time. I wanna thank everybody out there who did take the time to listen in. We wanna thank you for, well, hope that you learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Remember, the Project Moon Hot Hat Foundation is where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon to the accelerate development of an Earth and space based ecosystem.

Then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species. We are about planet Earth. We are about accelerating innovation. We're about creating collaboration. But in the end, there'll be 10,000,000,000 people on this planet by 2050.

And we're our project is to take those innovations and those new lessons that we learn from governance to you name it, and turn that back to create a new future for ourselves, our children, and our children's children. So you can go to the website. About midway down on the home page, you'll see that there are 3 videos at the bottom. Watch 12. Number 3 is where Project Moon Hut started, where it was founded. So you can hear a little historical if you'd like to from its original conception.

Now, Andy, what's the single best way to get a hold of you? You can go to my website which is www.andrewchaykin.com. That's andrew, no space, chaikin.andrewchaykin.com, and just click on the contact link and type a message in the little window, and it will go right to me. Fantastic. Well, we'd love to connect to you. You could reach out to me at [email protected]. You can reach us at at projectmoonhut on Twitter. You could do also at Goldsmith if you wanted to reach me.

There's also LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. There's mister David Goldsmith if you wanna catch us there. And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.