In the Hangar with Captain 'Hoot' Gibson and Dr. Seddon

join me in giving a warm boom round of applause to hoot Gibson so it's it's a real honor to have here and it's a real honor at boom to just have so much excitement the world around us that were able to have such amazing that accomplished people come join us and share their stories and their inspiration with us so thank you so much for being here I'll tell you what this is a real pleasure this is such an exciting venture that you all are pursuing I want to fly it well we'll see we could arrange that you're going to build it first so a former American naval officer aviator test pilot aeronautical engineer retired NASA astronaut professional pilot and racing regularly at the annual Reno Air Races that's that's not enough I participated in the investigation of the space shuttle Challenger accident so we'll talk a little bit about that and also afterwards in the redesign to recertification of the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle he was enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2013 has flowed 111 types of aircraft so maybe we couldn't make 112 actually that's an old one it's 159 middle really 159 159 airplanes snow I got fun I've been busy I got 1/3 Wow it's so impressive has flown classified missions I guess we won't be able to talk about that and I was an airline pilot Southwest Airlines for 10 years until they forced him out for having been too old too and married to dr. Rhea Seddon who's with us as well and we'll chat with Ray a little bit later who's a physician and a retired NASA astronaut both of your parents were pilots and we've got some videos and slides and whatnot that we're going to share a little bit later so a real real honor to have you here maybe we could just start with the curious your impressions of a boom a little bit like what do you expect to see versus what you kind of actually saw hiren scene where we're at I think I'm gonna see a whole lot more even than what I anticipated and I've looked at it a lot and this is exciting you see what was the first slide that I picked this was my first slide because what I want to say is supersonic is so cool it is really fun to be supersonic I hope great we'll talk about it some cuz she has been superb once you spent hypersonic as well but supersonic is so cool and I am fascinated by what you're doing and by what you're going to accomplish and you're gonna do it you people are gonna do it you're gonna make this work this is too cool thank you cool for words thank you so let's let's jump in a little bit so you've had an amazing career how are you spending your time now well let's see I guess yeah the couple of the slides kind of talked to it I got to be a fighter pilot in the Navy just like your chief test pilot bill who I got to meet but I flew these old dinosaurs first in fact this was my first combat mission was in this particular airplane Bureau number one five three zero one nine well that's pretty weird to have that memorized I can't remember my wife's birthday but I know anyway and it's coming up okay anyway I got to fly f4 phantoms and at the time that was my first supersonic airplane that I got to fly at the time that was the world's best all-around fighter and it was a fighter bomber and I flew those in the Vietnam War made two cruises in phantoms and then I got to fly in the first Tomcat squadron Tom Cruise hhor-- hard actually got to fly these things and made them made the very first cruise in 1974 1975 and people don't know this but we flew a combat mission in the Tomcat the de Saigon fell I was overhead in a Tomcat on combat air patrol just in case was any artillery or any any MiG's or anything like that which there wasn't and let's see you got to fly oh let's see several other supersonic airplanes but got to fly this little rocket while we were at NASA this was so cool they'd hand the keys to you and hand you a government credit card and you could go fly the thing and fill up the tanks on the government and race should probably talk about that some too but that was a lot of fun but to answer the question of what I'm doing now I work and I have worked for the last 20 years as an expert witness in aviation lawsuits and usually on the defense side so you know what what happens I'm sad to say is that somebody goes out and sadly kills himself in an airplane and the lawyers get a hold of the widow and they say you know this is all the engines fault and the propeller and the airplane and the avionics and the weather briefing and air traffic control and we're gonna sue them all and get you twenty five million dollars and I help defend against that so what I have to do this is the fun part I still get to do flight testing because I have to go get in the type of airplane involved and duplicate what they did except for hitting the ground leave leave that part out so in this slide my Bonanza is parked in the foreground and I had flown down to Moyock North Carolina to Blackwater headquarters and it was an airplane chartered by Blackwater that crashed in Afghanistan and so I showed up to fly this airplane and they gave me their two most senior Czech Airmen and they said okay what is it that you want to do and I said well I'd like to build up to doing accelerated stalls in the airplane because the accident looks like it involved in accelerated stall and an accelerated salt is a stall at a g-load well most of you engineers what you engineers will all know that's better than I do a g-load and greater than one G and they the chief pilot said well we don't know what it's going to do because we never actually stalling we take it to the stall warning in training and then we recover and they said okay but we're game and I said okay I propose we build up to it with a slow 1g approach to the stall but we're happy with that then we'll do maybe a 20 degree Bank angle and if we're happy without a 45 degree Bank angle and build up to maybe a 2g now before I did that and one of the questions later on is going to be how do you do this safely I had looked at the shape of the wing the airfoil and I concluded you know what this thing looks like a big Cessna 172 with turboprops on it and sure enough that's how it flew and so it wasn't any big deal but for me that's the fun part the the unfun part is cross-examination in trial because opposing counsels job is to pardon the expression make an ass out of you and if they can do that then they might win it's nothing personal it's just business but if you can prevent them from doing that then maybe you'll prevail so anyway that's that's what I'm doing nowadays and that's exciting I've done two relatively exciting test flights this year already haven't told her all about eighteen times these can be excited Kinki can you share a couple of their stories well okay yeah hold your ears okay well the one I did a couple months ago was a a Rockwell Commander 114 which is a single-engine piston about the size of a bonanza like the one in this slide and it was a tragic accident and I won't tell you all the details of it but he took off and he had engine trouble and he wound up belly landing the airplane and a bunch of mesquite trees and stuff and the airplane caught fire and the bad guys are suing Honeywell International claiming that the turbocharger seized and that's why the engine was running rough and that's why he couldn't keep it in the air and that's why he had to belly-land it well the airplane burned to the ground after it landed gear up so it lands on the turbo chef on the turbo the turbo it lands on the turbo because that's the bottom part of the engine well after the accident when they investigated the engine months and months later everything's all corroded and rusted they found that the turbo was seized big surprise airplane landed on it and it also burned and then it also corroded and rusted so I did three test flights I did one test flight with a perfectly normal turbocharger I did a second test flight with the turbine reduced in diameter because they found that it was eroded so in the accident airplane and they were going aha see that and it was reduced in diameter so I flew it with the reduced diameter turbo as well and in the course of those flights I determine how much power do I need to fly in level flight and if I only have let's say 23 inches of manifold pressure can I climb the answer was yes not real fast but I can climb and then the third test flight was with a seized turbocharger and what you make the engine do in that case is suck air in through the compressor it isn't spinning so there's a big pressure loss in the induction system so it took quite a bit of runway it took 7,000 feet to get airborne Wow and the airplane normally takes 3,000 so wait but I had done the testing beforehand to know that if I got 23 inches of manifold pressure which I did I knew it would climb I knew it would it would fly so that was how I flew it so that that was kind of exciting but I crossed the end of an 80 400 foot runway at about a hundred feet and then I flew the ground track that they had flown I didn't belly-land it in the in the trees and I crossed where they went down at 1,100 feet above the ground so I showed that hey you're scenario of a C's turbocharger doesn't fit the accident so therefore you lose so you know they haven't thrown in the towel yet but they're gonna have to because we proved that that was not the cause of the accident so that's that's fun when you do something like that you wouldn't have liked watching it oh yeah when I came back and landed when I came back and landed the engineers and the lawyers that I was working with course we're standing there beside the runway watching and they said were you messing with us on that take off a little bit at your altitude at the end of the runway were you messing with us and I said no that's that's all she had but it was enough and it was enough to disprove their theory so you're doing things with airplanes that smart people on the other side of the case claim will be fatal yes and in fact in in fact there what but now but I didn't just do that as the first test I thought was the last test that I did and I mentioned we flew with an undersized turbo and we also flew where I set the power at just 23 inches and verified that it'll climb 300 feet a minute it isn't real rapid but it will climb and I knew that it took 19 inches to hold see more you kind of knew how it was gonna go I really the answers ahead of time which is what you do in flight test bill will tell you you don't go right to your endpoint first you build up to your end right so so you're saying that the flight test is a lot like lawyering and that you don't ask a question you don't know the answer - right right yeah they have an old expression that lawyers are never supposed to ask a question that they don't already know the answer to when they do it really blows up in their face because I had one one time I was in a deposition and it involved a Cirrus which is a four-seat prop plane like similar to this and the lawyer asked me in the deposition he says well captain Gibson you're such an expert on jet airplanes aren't you but what do you know about white earbuds and I was able to say well I'm glad you asked me that because I learned how to fly in light airplanes I soloed on my 16th birthday and a piper cult and I had my private license when I was 17 in a Luscombe and a piper Colt so I started on light airplanes I've been flying light airplanes all my life thank you for asking and he went oh next question that's great so you've shared remarkable stories there what's the most remarkable flight experience you've had in your career oh well that's problem that's the next two slides I think remember what was next yeah this was one of them okay this was one this is a photo of my crew my space shuttle Atlantis now this was a long time ago now 1995 I got to do the very first docking that was ever done by a space shuttle and this was 14 years after we started flying him but we had never had a space station get to go to and we still didn't have one this was the Russian space station and so I got to do the very first docking and it was with the Russians my crew and I had to attempt to learn to speak Russian people asked me what was the most challenging thing about this it wasn't the docking I had the line up the the interface right here is about a four foot diameter docking ring in the shuttle cargo bay I had to line up the sinners within 3 inches we're both going 17,500 miles oh I'm making it sound difficult because it makes me look good but I had the line of centers up within 3 inches that wasn't the most challenging part it was learning Russian because I are an engineer engineers ain't top good in English so trying to learn Russian was really a challenge and so anytime I've got to speak Russian I start off by telling the other person this and that is y'all go over you Peru ski Ocampo ha a Pawnee my own HMO I speak Russian very badly and understand nothing but when I launched aboard Atlantis I had two Russians onboard with me to take over the space station and I picked up the three who had been there for four months and gave them a ride home well what happens during the launch if I needed to tell Anatoly or Nikolai he's been a chief of Java uno see a small Yankee poacher no more to free almost each other excuse me please we have a small fire onboard right now yes so we had to be somewhat conversational and Russian because we had to be able to talk to these guys and at the time Russia was so broke they couldn't afford English textbooks or English teachers so we had to learn their language Wow so that was probably the biggest challenge okay the other great moment that I think I've had I was an air racer for 18 years in the Reno Air Races mostly the unlimited class but also the jet class and finally my 18th year which was four years ago now I won the unlimited championship in this airplane Strega which is a very highly modified p-51 Mustang and in this picture I was just finishing the second lap and the photographer that took this shot said I know when I got that picture it was the end of your second lap I did that lap in an average of 498 miles an hour and the engine I was running a hundred and twenty eight inches of manifold pressure four atmospheres of boost and if the engines going to hold together for eight laps you're probably going to win and if it doesn't hold together you're gonna land without an engine which you know we practice that so anyway and and the loo is I don't know if you can all see the pylon up here at the top of that pylons 30 feet off the ground and the rule is my helmet cannot be below the top of this pile on which I see is a reasonable rule so I'm probably 50 or 60 feet in picture and two months so that this was one of the great moments that I've had because it turned out that there had only been a total of 21 people that have ever won the unlimited championship and I got to be one of those after 18 years of air racing so that was that was a pretty that was a pretty high moment for me and in fact the TV station asked me how does this compare with being a space shuttle commander and I said you know what this ranks right up there with commanding a space shuttle this is a really big thrill so so I had to like you said to to victory altitude and very low alpha one yeah let's keep talking about about adventures in flight and as you know before too long here were you know we're going to make some hard decisions on are we are we ready to go fly this bird and so you've done you've done a number of first flights of new types right yes would love to talk about the process you go through when you as you step into that airplane or really before you step with that airplane how do you how do you get comfortable knowing that something new is ready to go well part of it is you're you're relying on experience and Bill can speak to this one of the things that we did in test pilot school was we tried to put people through as many airplanes as you possibly could in that one year to expose you to a whole bunch of different airplane designs power plants propulsion methods and all of those things and so I mentioned a little bit of it when I talked about doing the accelerated stalls in that casa 212 cargo plane which is it's a shrunk down c-130 as what it is it's just got two engines got a cargo ramp in the back but you will walk around the airplane you will look at you'll look at the wing shape and part of it is some methodology that you learned at test pilot school and so the sign doesn't really show up but it says US naval test pilot school you'll also compare that airplane to airplanes that might have some similarities to something you've flown before and so what I'm showing here is an a4 Skyhawk that has a delta wing and it has a horizontal tail as well so it has a tail plane because I got invited to fly this thing and I had never flown one of those before and there wasn't a two-seater so my first flight in the Russian mig-21 was gonna be my first flight in the Russian mig-21 now part of what you'll do is you'll do a literature search and you'll see is there data on it now this is an airplane that had flown for years so I wasn't the initial test pilot getting to do the first fight of the xbone which I'm going to try to replace bill for so that this is a little different but what you will do same thing you'll look at the shape of the wing this is a delta wing although if you look at the thickness of this wing it's a whole lot thinner than the a4 Skyhawk wing so you're gonna have a much higher stall speed and in fact the mig-21 winds up being just about exactly the same thing as an f-104 starfighter it's a mach 2.1 top speed and 175 not approach speed if you've got full flaps if you don't have full flaps at 15 knots to it so it's a rocket ship and so that was some of the methodology of it is looking it over real carefully the flight control system was somewhat similar to the f4 phantom because they're from the same time frame rough same time frame that they that they got designed and built so you look for similarities you look for things that are going to be something that you can compare to before you go fly it and so the xB one is going to give you a head start obviously on overture by having similar aerodynamic so I'm assuming is what xB one's going to do so yeah that's that's how you approach it and I'm sure bill can add to that but but but that's the sort of thing that you go through okay so for a pattern match off of what's the most similar thing that I've flown before and therefore what I would expect yeah how do you know whether you've ended of diligence on that because there's we fight this all the time here there's always another question you can answer there's always more analysis you can do how do you how do you approach and knowing when you've done enough diligence you've done enough homework and you're ready to fly you know at some point you just have to say okay it's time to go for it and and you know the Israeli let's see what was their expression the Israeli Air Force or I guess the flight test center the Israeli flight test center had an expression that I think they even had this plaque up on their wall it said the more time you spend reporting on what it is you're doing the less time you have to do what it is you're doing perfect balance is only achieved when you spend all your time doing nothing but reporting on the nothing that you're doing so so you don't want to get into that fix you don't want to get to where you know we're never going to be ready to fly it at some point you got to say look we have we have minimized the risk as best we could and now it's time to go fly space shuttle first flight was that way every manned rocket that we had ever flown before we did an unmanned launch of it to shake the thing down and check it out and the shuttle that was going to be really problematic to do although we had done the glide flights off the off the 747 you could keep nitpicking yourself and saying we need more studies we need more risk reduction at some point you've got to say look we've done enough we're going to go fly it and and you know you have to be very methodical your safety organization has to be able to keep asking questions until they're blue in the face and you get to answer them until you're blue in the face and but at some point you've got to say hey look it's time to go fly yes yeah that's going to be exciting so let's so hopefully you get all those things right and the first flight goes wonderfully key of stories to share from unexpected things during during White's Oh going stories or lessons learned or well yeah some of the lessons learned that that they taught us in test pilot school one of them is plan the flight and fly the plan in other words if it's not on the plan I don't do it you don't do it you don't come up with another data point that you suddenly decide hey wait a minute while I'm up here at 46 thousand feet I want to see what the buffett boundary is if that's not on your pipe plan you do not do it now the the short answer to something unexpected is land the thing get it on the ground and we'll iron it out on the ground let's don't try to troubleshoot it we've had we've had plenty of examples of people trying to troubleshoot something and dying in the course of doing and so make sure make sure that if you do hit something really unexpected get the thing back on the ground and let's analyze it there when you could get all the engineers all the smart people to look at it and and don't don't press it in flight there is always little surprises the EE the f-14 project that I flew was a big modification to the f-14 and it was to put a photo reconnaissance pod on it and it was kind of strange the way it happened but the way the pod said aft in the tunnel in the f-14 Tomcat at high speed about 510 knots it put up it put it down load on the back end of the airplane and so I ran out of nose down trim and I couldn't trim the airplane up the airplane wanted to keep pitching up and so once again hey let's go land it and maybe it maybe you go modify it maybe you do something you don't press it even farther and say well maybe it's nonlinear maybe if I take it to 600 knots it'll be different so so you don't do that you just don't press it I was doing a test why I'm sure I told you about this of a mig-21 up in Quincy Illinois and and it was it was kind of funny it was a airport Quincy Illinois Airport doesn't have a tower but they were having an airshow that weekend that's that's also not really a good idea to be doing a test flight when there's an airshow at an airport there's too much going on and but they had a temporary tower they had an Air Force crew there that was doing a temporary tower and and now that that the big that I was going to fly had one little problem with it and that was that transmitter didn't work okay the radio transmitter didn't work but the receiver worked fine so I went over and I talked to the tower and I was really eager to fly this thing - so don't get too eager to fly that's another thing you don't want to do so I went over and I talked to the tower and I said okay I can hear you just fine so if you call me when I taxi up to the wrong way I'm gonna be ready to go you can just come up on the radio and clear me for takeoff and and so and you can shine the light out you can shine the green light at me - when I come back into the break I'm ready to land I'm not going to do a touch-and-go or anything I'm just going to land it so when I come back into the break you can shine so anyway I had it all worked out with the tower so I took off went out and flew the airplane everything went fine until I came into the break and I came into the break to land and broke you know I was probably doing 350 knots in the overhead pattern broke - it downwind put the gear down and rolled out on downwind and then I said to myself oh yeah there was one other thing I was wearing my oxygen mask but there was no oxygen in the airplane so I just had the hose disconnected and that was for facial protection and I said I think I smell smoke and I told you this story oh okay anyway that's the other story no actually it's not the end of the story I said I think I sell smoke and then five seconds later I said I see smoke and five seconds later I said I see a lot of smoke in the cockpit and so now I'm hurrying I'm gonna hurry to land this thing and that's good because it's got 175 not approach straight so you get to it so so I turn it eliminated right I turn on final and I'll I'll sort of forget this moment because the smoke was thick enough in the cockpit but I had to lean way forward to get as close to the windscreen so I could see well enough that's how thick the smoke was and and I thought about her and her saying things like why do you want to do these dangerous things your kids are gonna grow up without you why do you want to risk your life like this and I and I remember I said to myself you know what this time maybe she was right but I landed rolled-out turned off the runway shut it down right there open the canopy ah she wasn't right everything's fine I'm just fine so so you know on test flights you are frequently going to encounter something that you don't like so number one make sure your transmitter works now it wouldn't have made any difference but I could have at least shared the misery I could have called them and told them hey the cockpits full of smoke and they could have felt sorry for me but make sure everything is working we don't want to fly it at most everything is perfectly up for flight and sometimes you really want to go and you have to be tough enough to say ok it isn't a hundred percent ready let's don't go oh so anyway those so that's the airplane and of course here it is in flight as you can see it's got kind of a small wing but at least it's really thin and so it doesn't generate much lift but it sure does go fast and it's a it's a it's a rocket ship and here it is in the landing configuration once again not a very big wing and the flaps aren't real big either and so that's why it loves lots of runway and so xbone looks like maybe it's going to be a little bit of a of a hot canary as well ah canary so a bit will be but anyway make sure everything's ready let's do a couple more questions I want to invite your wife up to join the conversation so you were part of the Challenger investigation I'd love to love to hear some stories from that and some lessons learned sure well let me set the stage I miss the Challenger launch by one mission I flew the my second launch which was my first mission as commander was the other launch of January 1986 so I had just landed ten days before we had flown I think nine launches in 1985 we were on top of the world we had just received our fourth orbiter Atlantis and we were going to fly I think at least nine missions in 1986 we were on top of the world and all of a sudden we watched the liftoff and in fact my crew and I were in the midst of debriefing and somebody stuck their head in the conference room and said hey guys there are two minutes away from launch you want to take a quick break and watch the launch and then we'll come back and resume the debriefing and we said sure so we went over to another conference room where we had all the air to ground loops and all the video and all and we watched challenger be destroyed and of course before challenger we didn't have pressure suits we wore of cotton flight suit and a helmet we didn't have pressure suits we didn't have parachutes we didn't have life rafts we didn't have anything and it was because NASA's philosophy was this is going to be the era of the space [Music] you know some possibility that we might have saved between zero and seven people channel two through they had parachutes and references so after challenger we did was we the astronauts managed to get into the Rogers Commission report NASA you need to provide some method for the astronauts to be a bailout from a blighting world because before that we'd be never would we have and so you'll hear NASA referred to as pre challenger NASA for most challenging us who was that through medical change from us we went to being on top of the world the being in the deepest darkest only defending the doorway and I have lost friends before age and friend radiation I had never lost seven principal so it was really a tragedy and we didn't even know what was wrong for about three days and it was only the third day after that we found with the other light imagery from northern if the other lights which are looking at the right side and we could see the run-through before I didn't lose the light and it took us here 283 years - first off to analyze and I was learning the investigation found Cape Canaveral of the booster rockets and most of all the extra month routes the big ocean and we had to answer a question and that was did we have this familiar because we have several or was this a design flaw and so we had to go through all the paperwork which is a monthly paper with this all just on the booster rockets and members of your crew members of tank and then there's the integrated vehicle inter I was dedicated to Navajo basically until April going through - probably the conclusion that we perfectly it was a piece on before and then it took us like I say nearly three years after all they have to redesign the retest and reserved by the booster products and since I've learned so much about this boosters the chief astronaut when it was time to go flag and said okay you think they're ready to fly you go away so I got something airless technology when we started up again so I almost made back-to-back frauds committed with 24th launch Challenger was the 25th and then I commanded the second launch when you started going to be able to find seven well some of it is okay there's a slide that I have shown a number of times and these were some of the factors in the Challenger accident now I know who probably all heard the cold temperatures affected the o-rings and the boost about us okay and one of the big things that we did wrong was we had never qualified those booster rockets below 50 degrees yet somehow included it was okay to launch tremendous 20 degrees vessel so when we redesigned them and recertified and we said we needed qualifying them to remember what the numbers for something forward because you know it's once in a blue moon is going to be fall to Cape Canaveral in Annapolis and so we launched outside them our qualification envelope we have seen in the air below that's a big no-no in aviation easily because when things like this happen but going through these one by one turns out we had been burning over his regularly and both of my first two lunches we had burned overs okay well so we had repeated instances of this happening okay that's what we see now a normalization of the medians okay maybe this isn't fun as as we see [Music] and this is this is not part of the race should have been theirs 208 we frequently burned the primary but the secondary is a challenger secondary so make sure you really understand we're doing engineering judgment was wrong we also have a bunch of engineers who built the booster rockets that didn't want to watch that because it was two boats their concerns never got elevated to the decision members so transparency is going to be really important to the organization if any of the engineers have something that they want right now we need to be listened so those are well we would have realized this he deserved why we need to do something about it now come on the other wasn't the question of the brush was challenger okay but let me show you a slide that I showed the talks about won't be an accident today now it looks very similar okay anything else no nothing else cheering we have gonna miss my suppliers turns out we have had multiple instances of foam breaking loose and hitting the feathers in one case a nipple speaker half skirt of the booster rocket until they've been tuned is some of the philosophy most this is just oh and I had seen from the pump off the tank and get Merlin shield when they look okay yes there's low density from when there's high density foam and what hit Columbia was high density it's going to pack law and so the same things that bit us 17 years later to repeat themselves we have a same problem they had out of Engineers that the really concerned about the funk over loose that they didn't make it to the upper management we had a bunch of posters we had a bunch of terms the senior manager appears they management at this point they're just what goes wrong and the more junior engineers that this refers to so hopefully we don't have to burn eight one seven percent of nice yeah but in all seriousness like what you're saying about the importance of transparency and building organizations for the voices are heard it's not so much and yeah think about probably that if you give a challenger you think about Matt's know they a group of people did something that no individuals Truman ever would have done that's another good example is yeah and part of that it is I can't believe going did this as an experience whose they are and as smart as they are as good as they are they implemented a system on the output of how many sensors one sensor and they had another sensor in the show do anything on one system you had to have confirmation of at least one more Spencer and hopefully two officers so I just it seems like there's a challenger we smooth outside of the envelope we don't need to be a rocket scientist to know not to class that is probable you don't need a rocket science today we should have a flight critical to phone system there so it's it's easy to look at those as boomin say well that would never happen here cuz go go smart but I don't believe that that for a second because they're incredibly smart people know all of these things so they're going but a nice unit for us as we build we have the opportunity here to building a culture to be coming from scratch but what we do session at over here is never up down the slide true well I just didn't see our end talk at the local university as a big aerospace program you know Murfreesboro Tennessee which is racial intensity and the first slide I put up and this is again this is crew resource management resource management firstly I put it up it had this photo learn from other people's mistakes because you won't live long enough to make them yourself and so I learn from everything that's done before and the maxi is over is a another so learn from as many bad examples as we possibly can and have all the transparency we did you refer to where with somebody see something had been asleep as a commander in as an airman part I would always say maybe I'm intending to do this exactly by the book but if he see me doing something that isn't purely by the book I expect you to speak to me and then if they do we don't you you committed thank you for pointing that up dude so I think that's because we're leaving space and just learn from other people's mistakes other people's mistakes of always getting pretty bad news I suppose if you do something wrong be happy he's got to bring that little baby you're hurt you heard the boss say that this team has herpes say this report is really good it's really really really really important and sometimes I takes a bunch of places in my life but my basic problem is the more people assume that everyone sees it and then we're the people who need to see it don't see what does dependence and that's normal yeah we see this all the time that's wrong right people disappoint you summertime maybe it's not so normalization of communities let's let the maker join the conversation so let me give my race raising deduction so doctor raised in a penguin suddenly okay is the positioning are tired NASA astronaut here one of the very first female astronauts and blue on the three space shuttle flights mission specialist on STS 51 Delta and STS 44 payload commander of assess appeals STS 58 as halo community Rizzoli my fans research mission 14 did fly 870 pursuit greatly from doing this to do very fast we're putting a swollen area then above like us fuel spill I need to cheat you this again lots of obviously prison stuff on the crew Adam 48 rats yes and expand our knowledge of human physiology but its base fly there's 200 we have orbited the earth over freaking 36 hours so that's a real honor to have you here and what an accomplished couple like I am just so personally inspired and I have to see her face during the story I never got to see that it's a real pleasure to have because thank you for being here so let's talk about space shuttle he made me share some wonderful challenges in that day one here twice can they were of course all three look what's were memorable in video I expect you know your first flight of the shuttle is always kind of strange I mean this is a shakedown we just go you hope that you know what's gonna happen with you train we have trained for a long time on my first one and I was a little nervous about it you know I was but you know I think you have to realize that no matter how will you plan and how will you training you can never imagine exactly what you are getting for and that says something about my first one it was going to be kind of a Dolf like when we first applying the special this was kind of early on I think this was the 16th mission my producers well this is quite comparable there a lot of who's exciting place there wasn't much new on uber launched pebble set bites I think the one claim to fame was that there was pinged on we're all of the videos but we have a first politician in space likeness so senator Jake Garn from Utah so we got all of us so you know we thought kind of another way nobody will be at the studio there won't be much except you know so we go up there couple years was to launch a couple satellites now thus these satellites have been lost and deployed in the show reborn and so it wasn't anything really so the picture on the left is picture of cinema with the analogy cargo bay of the show you know we turned it on and checked it out everybody says it's a go boom it comes out of the partly okay so what are we supposed to do was come out of there and spin itself up it's been stabilized get it stuff antenna up so we ground good control it and it was going to boost itself so we look out who you know we look who we were we all looked at each other and said it didn't spin itself up the antenna is still down we can't do it so all we could do was talk we said so didn't spit up and they said sang it in Discovery and we said it didn't spin up it's just floating out there and the internet was down and they said well get away from it because it's gotta be looser on it so get away so this is your first one your first day important and it's bad news oh you know this is not watch was fun and floating in space is fun but you know you have a mission it's not just some experiments we're going to film twice in space so next morning Mission Control it's very mister we think we have hi to you and we all did each other well it turns out that the own single point failure satellite was there was a little switch in sad Ahmed's cradle on the show and when we would point it out boom that little switch was supposed to go to the on position it was tucked up underneath and so that was a long speech and it's a little big about that big on the side of that sidewalk so they said we think there's a way was some very unplanned face that made this mission incredibly exciting the people in Mission Control were down there figuring out how do we do that we tell them to do it fast enough instructions back then you couldn't just send computer instructions up you know how they had to update all the instructions to go save the satellite to idiot maybe not you're not old enough to remember what a teleprinter years and all these rules of paper came up on our teleprinter imaginable xerographic so one of the guys on the plane cut those pages into pages put them into one of our news channels so we had instructions today so the idea came to them that we could use something living into the robot life to try to turn them off so I had to use my surgical skills we took some plastic book covers we took a metal hold that was used to flip switches dirty launch that you put in reach attach them together I got to use the style that would carry it on for the song Internet safety people we're going to use the phone saw that is in the medical kit Holy Smoke so here we are in the Veneto Padova has a perfectly and we'll go to curb thing and we're going what about the middle chain vacuum cleaner somebody goes with vacuum cleaners in my gullet already so you know we did it I think we got away with it it's not there's the same article on [Music] this no the next day and all the step so anyway here we are we've got this device now what we're going to do with it well all the witnesses we want two of the guys to do a spacewalk and connect it to the robot now two people on everyone we're trained to do a spacewalk in case they had to go outside in an emergency maybe the close to payload bay doors because you can't come home and they are closed so there's mechanical way to do that so they've had some very basic training and hit ok we would go out and do this so they had all these instructions we want you to go out go down the long term are ways to put them robot there and we want you to strap this flyswatter device to the end of the robot there's okay did what so they come up and tell the pilot and the commander you're going to want you to rendezvous with that satellite now they had only had sort of basic training because we trained for our mission and poreless when they didn't go that's a basic training so the old part of the checklist you know there's a lot of stuff to get ready and it's kind of trick for those of you taking courses in orbital dynamics you know it's just like in the movies just drive over there you have to you know - rather than you know match if you have somebody out in front of you you want attention you don't speed up because all that noise is driving higher and I you're flying along the distance so he dropped back so you actually slowed down I will drop you little or over time you're going to server distance around the earth and we catch up so the activities and the discipline - so anyway doing this they tell me what would want you to do is take the robot they're going to have a satellite over the terms of it and the satellites going to be drifting slowly around as it comes around people and you can catch that switch with those plastic little covers and absolute holes on that switch and try to turbo and you couldn't just hit the switch because you were afraid that arm was going to get entangled with a snowflake so they wanted you to hit the switch just came around and have it tear through that posters that was just to get that picture so here we go and I'm looking out back with each other about this computer satellite here now remember I think that very little robot the only thing that I had wanted to do we had a couple satellites for decision then their booster rocket had not burn is so they taught everybody needs the best satellites move the armless way would be on this way drape it over this way and we'll watch to see that the ignition happens way off so I'm not trying to pick it up move it over and drape it and that was about it so here hang up the truck was this huge satellite without killing us all as they slowly cruise well we were able to tell them to dance which that it was in the opposition that wasn't it years later captured as they like internal electrons they jump they jump started so sometimes you just have to bring it but you know the most visionary 12 had so much we were sweating boys they all have to work together to counter the middie Apollo 13 already had to get together you know how can we kill this so a lot of news for a very don't fight what an amazing story how to put the switch in space happens it's harder than you think it is well there's so many more things that I'd love to dig into but were coming on time I'd love to give it the chance for the rest of Russians with regards to the story that you just any story that you just told in terms like there was a sizable amount of risk in trying to get this athlete started and so how the conversation go down about whether it was worth the risk to try and salvage this a behaviour is just letting it go well you know it will watch everything they watch the order in which they watched what was happening they kept up with what we were doing timeline so we knew and you know in time to do this we asked to do we got together with our commander we're gonna do most have you answer yes and indeed when we got back we realized that they had put together all kinds of scenarios especially they had wanted to put [Music] I know that the thrill of winning Reno may say how your mind but just kind of on the inside let's work on you earlier a radial well she got least referring to the secrets that I've raced every seeker has all begin there for 14 years and let's see if two three four of those years who saw Anita it did stick Romans not just for the show but he's racing plants and I have more than three get stick madness in here for city whose latest experience legislation wealthy the only one I recently had the Mullen engine rusty was the muscle and I show the picture illustrate it now that airplane is so much easier to fly a little see period is so much smaller and lighter and if the engine keeps running negative pushing the engine really hard as long as I ever pushed the see period was 70 inches of mouth orders and of course even that was enough to go up to it but the Mustang 128 inches the one thing that I really enjoyed about the Mustang was you lose Seattle Peter the sea fury has this view is big run on the radial engine that front of you and you're sitting in a three point attitude you can't see anything else whereas the Mustang again long those sitting up there which you can see around the original so it's a whole lot easier 25 most and for me the end should behave really nicely now I've reached the in senator mind a number of years and who remembers three years in a row it blew up the edge of the rock and of course the the MIRR lids were really pushing those entrance hard to get that much cooler out in World War two rolls around with sixty inches of manifold pressure and if you grow up copper wire garter he went to war emergency which was 67 inches and here I was working two hundred and twenty-eight inches so the engine was originally 1900 or power the way we were running it is three thousand the worst part if they no longer together so we've got a lot of applications and for me to be a great you know the Navy being the senior service always opportunity to help and so you really you really have to train them well okay I'm be from being a little facetious but they are very very the thoughtful and very much findable very much by the checklist so well I'll be the first of both lines of you know every chance I get which I just did they are very methodical and very very capable and and they've been great to work so my first mission is commander though my co-pilot was a marine and so we both had beaten gold wings and even went on to be a major-general in the Marine Corps and was the NASA the ministry for eight years and so he and I spoke the same language obviously the Naval Aviation train and the workmen worked it in the Esther through the interesting because we had maybe three Air Force Coast Guard and civilian really a joint command was going to us so we had one of these girls yeah it'd be a question we got all the time just did did when I was right again and the wave in serrated is yes you know we just put them work because I was mission commander with four times okay so how would this work right and I are up in space together and I say right it's time to open the Sun shingles she'd say you love the Sun shield Protoss to bring back supersonic flight what advice do you have it's going to be a long journey and of course who said I almost journey begins with the first step but enjoy all those enjoyable the successes and debrief any setbacks and emotions and you should expect setbacks we had setbacks in the space program God willing you will not have a big setback slightly better but you should expect small setback so don't mean to surprise about flight testing is it's going to throw some curves at but [Music] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Boom Supersonic

Views: 2,529

Keywords: Aviation, Technology, Travel, Aerospace, Supersonic

Id: q_7BxLRE4HM

Length: 67min 45sec (4065 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2019