#185 Scott "Kidd" Poteet - SpaceX Polaris Dawn Astronaut on Spacewalk, Moon Landing and Mars

Scott Poteet, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
This is quite an experience, so thank you. Yeah, you know, we've been looking forward to this.
We met at inauguration and had a quick, I don't know, maybe 15-minute conversation there. And I've always wanted to have an astronaut on the show.
So, yeah, thank you for coming. Absolutely.
There's only like 6 or 750 astronauts have gone into space. So blessed to have that opportunity and just excited to talk about it.
Yeah, me too. Me too i want to do a life story on you and uh talk about your time in the air force your childhood get into space and then who knows what kind of rabbit holes we'll go down here but uh but yeah like i said thank you for coming and i'm looking forward to this so everybody starts off with an introduction here.
So Scott Kidd Poteet, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. You grew up in New Hampshire, earning a bachelor's in outdoor education from the University of New Hampshire before diving headfirst into the Air Force.
You're a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel with over 20 years of service where you logged more than 3,200 flight hours in aircraft like F-16s, A-4s, and T-38s.
Over 400 of those hours were in combat supporting operations like Northern Watch, Southern Watch, Joint Guardian, Freedoms, Sentinel, and Resolute Support. You commanded the 64th Aggressor Squadron, graduated from the elite USAF weapons school, basically the Air Force's version of Top Gun, and even flew as the number four demonstration pilot with the Thunderbirds.
You then went into the private sector serving as Director of Business Development at Draken International and later as Vice President of Strategic at Shift 4 Payments. You are the Mission Director for Inspiration4, the world's first all-civilian spaceflight in 2021.
You also suited up as the mission pilot for Polaris Dawn in 2024, a SpaceX mission that took you nearly 900 miles above Earth, the farthest humans have traveled since Apollo, and included the first ever commercial spacewalk. You're a triathlete who has competed in 15 Ironman races, including four world championships in Kona.
Well, now you live in New Hampshire with your wife, Kristen, and your three children. And most importantly, out of everything we mentioned, you're a Christian.
Amen. So welcome to the show once again.
If you watch, you know everybody gets a gift. Use these on your next Iron i will i appreciate that vigilance lead gummy bears i'll give you a couple more of those to take home yeah those are hard to come by and they're made in the usa and legal at all 50 they're still legal we haven't made any changes yet but uh i don't think we're going to either but uh then so I have just one more thing before we really get going here.
So I have a Patreon account. Patreon is a subscription online community.
They have been with us here since the beginning when I was doing this in my attic when we couldn't get any advertisers, any way to make money. And they were the ones that supported us that got us everything from the cameras, to the employees, to moving into this, to everything.
And so one of the things I do in that community is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. And they had some good questions.
I know. It's the most nerve-wracking question, I'm sure.
So this one's from me. Oh, no.
Is that legal? I'm part of the community, too. And so this one's from me.
Is that because no one asked a question? Oh, no, no. The original question, I'll ask you too.
Okay. But I'm going to ask mine first because I've been dying to talk to an astronaut about this because we do dive into some conspiracies here, as you know.
Did we go to the moon or what? I've been wanting to talk to an astronaut about this for a... There it is.
We have not been back to the moon since 1969. Why haven't we gone back? Why? Oh, man.
I think we just shifted our focus as a country. NASA had different different priorities once we went to the moon, which I do believe we have.
You do think we did? I do. I do.
I don't know. I mean, I would imagine there would have been a lot more leaks out there.
Yeah, I'm with you. I think about that.
It's really hard to keep that big of a secret. But why haven't we gone back? I mean, we don't just go anywhere and then like, yeah, fuck it.
There's nothing here. I don't think we need to come back to the moon.
We walked on it for five minutes and we're out. There's nothing to see here.
Like, really? Give me a break. It's not easy.
There's a sequence of miracles that that happened i mean think about the the computer power of what they had back in the pilot program we have more in our iphones these days um so it wasn't an easy task um and then once it was accomplished you know in my opinion i you know the the focused shift to low earth orbit you know building a station um accomplish the science and research that has been the focus for the last few decades amazing things have come out of that you can do a lot more at uh zero gravity and um with the science and research and we we experienced that on our mission with our 40 40 experiments that we had lined up um and that's just you know let's build up the station let's let's explore low earth orbit um and now that we've kind of made this new shift with a uh opening up a new chapter in commercial space exploration you know um allowing these companies and organizations to to kind of go off on these new tangents and explore. We're not only going to address low Earth orbit over the next, you know, coming years.
It's all about, okay, let's go back to the moon, to lunar surface, and let's go to Mars. Because it's human nature to explore in curiosity.
And, oh, by the way, we can benefit life on Earth. So, you know, bottom line, I think it's just a focus.
And now that we kind of shift and let's do more because we can. We useability and technology is improving.

But it's a heavy lift.

It's not easy.

Otherwise, we would have, you know,

knocked it out in a couple years.

We're still a couple years away.

Yeah, you know, I don't know what to think.

It's just, what is that, 1969?

What is that, 50?

I'm 51 at 73, so that's an extra four.

It's 55.

Yeah, like 56 years. Yeah.
56 years we have not gone back. That's just odd to me.
That's really odd. But whatever.
So you think we did? I think we did. All right.
All right. When do you think we'll be back? Are we going back? Well, yes.
I mean, Elon wants to go to Mars. The plan is two, back to the lunar surface in two, and Mars in four.
Back in two, in two years. Yeah.
I do think that's realistic. Like I said, there's a lot of things that need to be solved.
And NASA's doing amazing work to get us there with the partnerships and collaborations with SpaceX and other organizations. But we got to figure out how it's going to be done and done safely.
Because it's like with our mission, it was a no fail. Otherwise otherwise we're going to set back these programs years if something catastrophic happens yeah um and the public's not willing you know the risk we took back in the day you know the 50s and 60s was a lot a lot uh a lot more significant than we're willing to accept these days and you know we're we're kind of risk averse and it can be a positive and a negative you know to some extent because it can be paralysis through analysis at some point we gotta put up shut up and go um it seems like civilian uh space exploration is like really going, becoming a lot more advanced than NASA.

It almost seems like it's well beyond what NASA can do.

Am I off on that?

I mean, isn't SpaceX going up to rescue the NASA guys

that have been stuck in space for like eight months? You're starting off with the tricky ones. It's a partnership for sure.
NASA's, they do this for 11. They've been doing it for decades, 60 plus years, whatever it's been.
And we typically always want to make sure that we never lose

sight of these accomplishments. We're standing on the shoulders of giants of what they've

been able to accomplish. And we, meaning commercial space collectively, would not be where we're

at without everything they've been able to accomplish. And moving forward, it is definitely

a partnership.

Is it a one-way, it is definitely a partnership.

Is it a one-way partnership or is it a two-way? I mean, the government isn't great at sharing. I'm just, you know, is it really? I think it's two-way.
I mean, just look at our program. You know, we did the first commercial spacewalk.
To do that, SpaceX wanted to develop a brand new EVA suit, extravehicular activity, do a spacewalk. And that's never been done in over 40 years.
NASA has the EMU suit that they currently use. SpaceX is going to figure it out on their own.
So they took their baseline suit, the IVA suit, the one they currently wear to and from the space station, in a very, you know, less than three years, two and a half year um time span took that suit and developed the the what we wore which is more or less the prototype eva suit now to do that

on a very streamlined budget not a you know a multi-billion dollar program you know they they

monster garaged this thing to develop a suit that is extremely viable and and will be you know the the baseline going forward as far as what they're going to develop regarding a suit with humans bouncing on the the surface of the moon and and mars in in capacity, not a handful of suits like NASA has. The concept is these starships are going to launch hundreds of passengers.
In Elon's vision, he's stated in the past, three of these a day with full of passengers going either to the low Earth orbit, to a station, to the moon, to Mars. It know, it's sci-fi.
But that's what we're accomplishing. And that's what SpaceX is accomplishing and other organizations are accomplishing.
Because I, you know, when I got involved with this program years ago, I didn't really understand the concept of boosters landing on their own, chopsticks, catching boosters, reusability. I'm like, there's no way.
This is far-fetched. But look at us.
I mean, tonight, Test 8 is launching in Starship. And each time they launch, they're learning new things.
It might not land successfully in the Indian Ocean, but it certainly well could. And they're going to catch the booster with the chopsticks.
And this is just a next step to achieve that ultimate goal of multiple launches daily, going to the moon, going to Mars. Why do we want to bring hundreds of passengers into space? why not i mean it depends on who you ask on on what you believe and you know justifying these significant projects and programs but you know we certainly aren't good stewards of our planet um we haven't been.
Whether you want to call this an insurance policy or you want to go down the curiosity route of let's explore. Because who knows what's out there? And are those resources that we could capitalize on? You know, the population issues, the climate issues.
When is it going to make a turn for the worst? An asteroid. They're talking about 2024, whatever asteroid name they have.
It's supposed to have a probability of 5-6%. And by 2032, don't quote me on these numbers.
But that's catastrophic to certain parts of the planet. So again, it's like if we have the opportunity and the resources and the intellect to pursue some of these goals, why not? Hey, I'm not against it.
I don't have anybody to talk to this stuff about that's been up there. So I think it's just a fascinating subject.
I mean, we haven't found any water or anything on Mars, have we? Or frozen? We found frozen water or anything on Mars? I don't know. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's just interesting.
I mean, how would we sustain there with no, nothing? We don't know. We don't really know anything.
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Got a couple of robots running around there, but I mean...

Just landed on the moon with another robot company.

So they're trying. I mean, it's all about exploration we did it decades ago with exploring countries and across oceans so yeah it's far off that have we found anything significant that that would help sustain human life on the moon or Mars that you're aware of not that that I'm aware of.
I mean, it's going to rely upon innovative technologies to figure out how we, you know, because it can't be a one-way mission to Mars. Yeah.
And it's eight months to get there, and it's eight months home, and however long you need to do the mission on the surface.

Eight months? It's eight months?

Yeah.

It's a long car ride, buddy.

It's a long car ride.

Well, the volume of these vehicles are pretty big.

It's a lot bigger than what we lived in, which is a lot bigger than what they went to the moon in.

How long did it take them to get to the moon?

I think it was two and a half days, a couple days. Traveling 25,000 miles an hour to escape gravitational pull.
Damn. Damn.
All right. We'll move on.
This is from Brian. How did you get your call sign when you got named at your first squadron? And during your time flying the F-16, did you ever fly any CAS missions supporting JTACs on the ground? Love the JTACs.
That was my favorite mission was working with you guys. SEALs, three-letter identifiers.
Those were the best missions. because you're supporting your brothers and sisters on the ground doing the mission.
So to answer the second question, yes, I did a lot of casts. I flew the F-16 for 20 years, and it's a multi-role platform.
So you do air- air and you know, it's the jack of all trades, master of none.

So you're constantly dabbling all these different modalities and mission sets.

But the reason why I chose the F-16

was for the air to ground missions

and specifically the CAS.

In fact, my last assignment was Aviano Air Base in Italy.

We deployed to Afghanistan

doing Resolute Support and Freedom Sentinel, doing counterterrorism missions, dropping bombs, and working with you guys and other agencies. And that was by far the highlight of my career.
What year was that? That was 15. So it was kind of the height of isis um there wasn't much of that presence it was more al-qaeda but we were just you know working our way up the chain looking for high value targets um trying to beat out the predators because that was when the predator was was kind of making its big push on unemployment.
Very, very accurate platform. In fact, when I went through weapons school, Top Gun school, that was the focus of my thesis was integrating CAS missions with F-16s and Predator.
That's a long story, but to answer his question, yeah, a lot of missions with JTACs, controllers, doing CAS.

Call sign.

Call sign.

So it's KID.

It's K-I-D-D, two Ds.

When you go through your career, it's usually something you F up, you screw up,

or play off your name. So I got call signs like Puder, which kind of play off Poteet.
I had Biff for a while, then I had Money, the movie Swingers back in the 90s. And then I ended up getting married, so I was no longer Money.
I was kind of a small change. You weren't a swinger anymore.

I was never a swinger.

I'm just messing with you.

Verification.

But I lost the call sign money, and then I got named kid. And every fighter squadron, how you get your call sign,

the naming ceremony is always different.

And I was in the triple nickel, 555th Fighter Squadron, very historic.

Robin Oles from the Vietnam War, the best fighter squad in the Air Force. How we did the ceremony is you're kicked out so they can talk about you.
Just usually it's a drink fest. So you don't really hear the reasons why you get named until you you get brought back into the ceremony and they've selected a couple different stories of why there's usually one that's pg that's releasable and then there's another reason why so the releasable story is that kid i looked young back in the day my first name is actually william so billy the kid there was already a kid in the sister squad on the 5 10th the buzzards um but he was kid so they added a an extra d and there's there's other reasons why it ended up being kid that uh unfortunately come on.
Come on.

This was JD, Jack Daniels.

I might be able to...

Well, we got plenty of time.

All right, all right.

I won't press you.

All right, so let's move into the life story here.

So I know you were born here in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Chattanooga. When did you move to New Hampshire? So I was born in 73, 51.
We were born in Chattanooga, but I was actually, I lived five years just across the border, north Deep Woods, Georgia. Middle to low income fam.
A lot of connections with Fort Oglethorpe, Chickamauga Park. My uncle had a double wide.
And half the trailer was a private collection. I think he had one of the largest private collections of Civil War artifacts.
I just remember as a kid rummaging into his collection. There's really cool stuff like bullets with teeth marks, ceramic bullets from amputations, biting the bullet, the whole concept.
Those are some of my memories as a kid. But when I was five, we moved.
My dad worked for a company called Combustion Engineering. He worked there for 50 years, worked up from janitor all the way up to a manager.
But he got transferred up to New Hampshire Seacoast. So we moved to a town called Durham and pretty much started grade school in the town of Durham.
Actually went grade school, elementary, middle school, high school, and college all in the same town. Really? But stayed there all the way to college.
What were you into as a kid? What's that? What were you into? Sports. Sports? I was very competitive, obsessively competitive.
80s, so I was big into the Celtics, the Red Sox, we would always go to games, Patriots as well as the Bruins. But it was obsessive to the point of, you know, I would sacrifice all my friends and foes to get to the front of the line for whatever, you know, lining up for class.
And it ended ended up, you know, parent-teacher conferences, trying to figure out ways to kind of channel that gladiator attitude I had. A little bit of bribery.
I kind of was able to figure out how to channel it to something a little more productive, which became sports. So sun up to sun down.
Back in the day when you actually could stay out past sunset as a kid, riding your bike and just looking for my next contest of how to compete.

And that was my childhood.

And it became.

You have siblings?

Older brother.

Year and a half older.

Great relationship.

Family was a little bit, I, I would say maybe unemotional, um, kind of kept to ourselves. Um, but I would spend my time just roaming, looking for, looking for trouble.
What sports? Um, I played everything. Um, baseball, soccer, basketball was big throughout my life.

I got a job at the golf course, so I picked up golf.

Started, I was a good golfer.

I played on the high school team as a middle schooler,

but then they cut the team, so I had to figure out another sport,

which became running. So I actually involved um in running pretty early on and that became my focus um i wanted basketball to be it you know larry bird back in the uh celtics era in the 80s was a big deal so um but i was a realist you know five foot nine inches tall i knew it wasn't you you know, a likelihood of, it wasn't in the cards playing at the next level in college.
Terrible, terrible student. C's and D's across the board.
Really? Yeah. I couldn't, I couldn't focus before all the diagnosis.
But I just couldn't pay attention. I was really good at setting athletic goals and succeeding on the you know pitch the field the diamond the track but i could not apply those same strategies in the classroom and it was by the time i got to high school i'm like all right i'm not going to college if i don't figure out a path and and for me it was okay, I'm okay at sports.
Let me see if I can leverage those talents and use that as a path to getting to college. So that's when I focused on running.
Ended up winning the state championship race my junior year, and it was kind of that performance and my dedication to the sport that that got me recruited to run division one at um at university new hampshire i applied to unh that school and uh university tennessee at knoxville um and that was it and and i got recruited and and i only got in because of the coach.

So the plan worked.

So the plan worked, thankfully.

But even the college, man, academics was just the traditional education method is not my jam.

Yeah.

You know, sit through class, pay attention, take notes, memorize, regurgitate it in an exam that you may or may not use this information in your life. So that's kind of where I found a different option.
What was your major? What did you? It's called outdoor education. What is that? So it's education through experiential learning.

So how that is different is that you're taught a basic skill set.

So all my classes were like scuba diving, rock climbing, winter mountaineering, whitewater rafting, Nordic skiing.

You can get advanced backpacking.

I actually had an advanced backpacking class. Damn.
And you would go and you would be taught some basic skills but you immediately go out into the field and you apply these and you learn in the field and um it was only by happenstance um that i came across my buddy of mine brought me to class one day in fact i remember it was um i Signed for ROTC, another kind of a serendipitous moment that I had joining ROTC, but I was already signed up and I'm in full service dress. And it's middle of the winter, three feet of snow on the ground.
And he's like, hey, come with me to one of my outdoor education classes. I'm like, okay, I'm very impulsive.
So I'm like, all right, let's do this. So I go to class and it's in a gymnasium.
It's not in a normal classroom. And there's students in the back of the class in the storage lockers going through all this gear.
And I'm in my full service, just hand-me-down polyester uniform, a big trench coat, you know, cheap patent leather shoes and stand out like a sore thumb um and i we walk up to the class and the teacher starts talking and he's like all right this is advanced winter backpacking and we're going to build a quincy in the snow for the next three hours and i'm like i'm not dressed for this and i don't know if this is going to work out. Well, come to find out, my teacher is a Navy SEAL.
He was a Navy SEAL for 20 years. And he takes us out back, and we start building this Quincy.
And for those who are unfamiliar, Quincy is like an igloo. But instead of blocks, you dig down to the surface, you pile a bunch of snow up, you let it set.
Once it's set into a big old dome, you kind of dig a little entrance. Once you get inside, you dig all around.
You leave about four to six inches for a wall. Once you dug it all out, you take a little propane stove, you light it, you glaze, heat up the inside, it glaze over.
And now you have this impenetrable structure, this winter shelter. And get you know 12 15 people to stand on top of the structure it's only four to six inches and it it holds the weight and now it's like 23 degrees warmer inside this igloo that's quincy and man i have a blast i am soaking wet i'm just on my hands and knees digging this structure.
And he's giving all these life lessons, talking about combat. And because he's, you know, I'm wearing this uniform.
And it was just like this profound experience. And I'm like, this is the way I can get an education, earn a degree so I can go in the military.
Because I didn't think, you know, I've got three and a half years left to get a degree in order to go into the military because I'm the ROTC program. And I'm like, my grades aren't cutting it right now, but this is something.
Why did you pick ROTC? What caught your interest in that anyways? So I was walking to class freshman year, fall semester one day, and this flyer on a bulletin board caught my eye. And it was a picture of a fighter jet.
It was just an advertisement encouraging students to come experience the Air Force way of life. Sign up to be a passenger aboard a KC-135 air refueling aircraft at the local Air National Guard unit out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Pease, it used to be an Air Force base, Stratcom, they launched F-111s on alert there. It was actually an alternate landing site for the space shuttle back in the shuttle program.
Heated runway, 13,000 feet long. Anyways, they have a guard unit there, KC-135s.
Now it's the KC-46, the replacement refueler in the Air Force. And I'm impulsive.
I sign up. And when I signed up, I didn't fully grasp the consequences of my actions because there's a couple secrets about myself.
It probably going to jeopardize credibility. Extremely prone to motion sickness.
What? Always have been, always will be. You stick me an Uber, 15 minutes long, I'm done.
Are you kidding me? I still get nauseous. Scared of heights.
I hate heights. Me too.
Actually, Afghanistan, they took us up in a helicopter I was a command position and the PJs took me up in a helicopter and they knew I was scared of heights and doors open up at like 14,000 feet man it freaked the shit out of me anyways so and I'd never flown an aircraft before in my life.

At 18 years old, we didn't have the money to go anywhere.

But here's my chance.

I'm going to sign up, and I'm going to go.

So I command.

I sign up, and bus takes us.

Big old school bus drops us off at the plane, and we board this aircraft, and I take my seat.

Again, I'd never been in an aircraft, and it's hot. It's dark.
There's no windows in this gutted plane. Couple seats up front.
And I start to panic. I'm like, holy shit.
I start sweating. I get, you know, heart rate goes up.
Breathing shallow. And I'm like, I don't want to do this.
How do I get out? But there's a couple of cute girls next to me. I can't back out now.
I got to man up. And so air crew comes out and briefs us on what we can anticipate.
And they're like, all right, we're going to start off with some low approaches, do some training. I'm like, I have no idea what that is, but let's do this.
And we're going to go out to the airspace and refuel some F-16s. And so close the door and take off and they immediately level off and they come back around and they land and take off again.
20 minutes into this flight, I just lose my lunch. I'm puking.
It's like a scene at Alien. It's just, it's bad.
And I pass out. Two hours later, crew chief wakes me up, says, hey, son, come with me.
Walks me back to the observation where they do the refueling. The boom operator sits back there.
And I'm like working my way up there, just trying not to puke on anyone or anything. And he takes a seat and starts doing his pre-fueling checks and trying to distract me.
And I take the observation seat next to him. And he's like, all right, there's two fighters on the horizon.
They're about to reform. And I pull up to within a couple feet of our window.
And, man, it's like a scene out of Top Gun. There's a fighter pilot.
He's wearing his helmet, his mask. He's giving me a little shock eyes.
And he boom, plugs the aircraft. And we start communicating.
and he's wearing his helmet his mask he's you know he's giving me a little shock eyes he boom plugs the aircraft and we start communicating he's asking questions he's telling us about his mission i'm just like that is awesome you know i that was the little spark everyone's got their motivation um but that was the the fire that was lit within me and i completely forgot about the last two hours i I just, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I didn't care what it took.
I knew I had a lot of challenges in front of me. But I had to figure out how to get in that cockpit.
Nice. And then I figured out the education piece with outdoor education.
Wow. Wow.
So, yeah, I mean, but there's gotta be a lot of studying to be a pilot and an astronaut. And so, I mean, I would imagine there's a lot.
Got him fooled. So, so let on.
So you graduated college. Then what? I did pretty well in ROTC.
Anything active, I do pretty good at. Or if I have interest in it.
So I was a pretty good cadet. I graduate, distinguished graduate, and I get selected for a program called Euro-NATO Joint Jet

Pilot Training, NJEPT.

And it's a specified pilot training program out of Shepard

Air Force Base, Wichita Falls.

And it's all the NATO countries participate.

They send instructors and students

who are going to be flying fighter jets.

So it's specific to flying a fighter aircraft

whereas the other um pilot training bases there's two tracks well there's three if you count helos everyone starts off on the same platform it's a t6 now i flew a t37 just a side-by-side little dog whistle loud jet trainer. aerobatic the g onset rate in those aircrafts are oh i get chills every time i think about my first year of pilot training because i would puke almost every single flight um and at the six year or the six month point uh for those other basis you split you go if you go to the heavy track, you're going to go fly a C-17, C-130, C-5.
You're going to go to the T-1, Learjet-looking aircraft. If you're going to go fly fighters or bombers, you go to the T-38.
Well, this program that I went to, there's only one track. You go from T-37 to T-38s, and you go in the fighter.
What you end up with after pilot training, which is, you know, that's a whole other story as far as what is required, but it's somewhere around two to two and a half years to get through the training process. It's needs of the Air Force.
Everything's stratified. Probably the SEAL is very similar.
It similar um stratifications so you're performing

number one two three four all the way down to whatever your class has um and when it comes

time for your assignment night it's like all right the air force needs two f-16 pilots for f-15 c's

this many f-15 e's a-10s and you just go down the list um and you you pick so first uh first and

Thank you. C's, this many F-15Es, A-10s, and you just go down the list.
And you pick. So first ranked student gets to pick whatever they want.
Yeah. And then it just goes on from there.
Now it's like F-22s, F-35s. So back to your question, I went to Shepard Air Force Base, and I did this program.
I was about there a year and a half to get through the training there. Then you go off and do supplemental training, depending on what aircraft and survival training, centrifuge.
Then you do all these top-off qualifications before you actually get to combat operations, operational assignments, which is at that two-and-a-half-year point. So hold on.
Let's backtrack. So pilot training is how long to get to pick what you're going to fly.
The actual training is a year, but there are certain elements or milestones you have to accomplish, like survival training. You might go before you even start pilot training.
Or it might be something in the middle or it might be something at the very end. Centrifuge is something you have to go through because you're going to start flying higher performance aircrafts that you need to qualify yourself in these certain profiles of pulling Gs because some people have a really difficult time.
If you don't understand the G strain maneuver, it's just some people aren't physiologically cut out for pulling some of those high-performance G profiles that you'll experience in a fighter jet. So the training is actually a year.'s about a year and a half but then there's an extra six months you'll you'll have you have to go through to learn how to fly an f-16 or an f-22 or an f-35 so i was there a year and a half okay before i went off to my base to learn how to fly the f-16.
Okay. And it was a miserable experience for me.
Flying the F-16? No, pilot training. Why? Motion sickness, academics.
Yeah, how did you get through the academics? I mean, I thought I was going to be a pilot just as a hobby. I was like, oh, this might be kind of cool.
And then I looked at all the shit I had to study, and I was like, fuck that. I'm not doing it.
I was like, ground school? No, not doing it. So, I mean, how did you? It sounds like you were a horrible, horrible student.
Man, I was challenged then. I was challenged F-16s.
I was challenged weapons school. I was challenged space.
And it's more my hard-headed mindset. Because if I apply myself, I think I could do okay.
You have to have a drive. You do.
You have to have a drive. You really want that end goal, and that's the only way you're able to concentrate and get through the shit that you don't want to do, like study.
In pilot training, even looking back, I'm like, well, I went to weapons school and I went through space. Pilot training was nothing compared to what I went through later.
But at the time, I'm coming off outdoor education, four years of scuba diving, rock climbing, mountaineering. I mean, my final exam in Nordic skiing was five days in Vermont doing Nordic skiing.
As long as you didn't get a cold weather injury, you got an A.

We were in bed and breakfast in a hot tub in the afternoon and skiing all day long. A little hidden secret.
But now I go to pilot training and the expectation is, dude, this is a big boy program.

And oh, by the way, I went right after graduation because I was gung-ho.

I just wanted to get going.

So I literally graduate.

Three days later, I'm on the road moving to Texas.

And my classmates were all top graduates at the Air Force Academy.

So they're coming off aerospace engineering, astrophysics. You know, that's one of the premier academic programs in the country.
And, oh, by the way, these are the top graduates. So this is who I'm competing against, you know, in that stratification.
And it was, it was a steep, steep learning curve. Yeah.
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That's trueclassic.com slash SRS to save that's trueclassic.com slash srs shop now and elevate your wardrobe today thankfully there's the the flying piece you know you got to apply yourself in the actual stick and rudder coordination piece but there is the the academic piece you got to prove yourself there before they're going to put you in a cockpit and we had these things i still have have nightmares about them it's um stand up and it's like there's bold face like you have to memorize certain emergency procedures for that's specific to the aircraft and it's like almost a haze where you know in the morning you have stand up and you gotta they'll call on you they'll randomly select all right kid back then i don't was, pooter, stand up. All right, this is your scenario.
You get your aircraft and you have an engine failure and you're this far away and at this parameters and it's just, you're in the hot seat and you got to verbatim give the procedures and then all the amplifying systems knowledge and it's just to prove and test your level of competency and that that was my nemesis you know and if you don't do well enough you know pooter sit down next guy and you don't get to fly that day you're grounded until you have some remedial training i was notorious all right pooter here's your second chance. No shit.
Dude, you suck. Sit down.
How did you overcome the motion sickness? It took a long, long time. A lot of driving.
I actually had to hide it from my instructors. Thankfully, the 38 is, you know, is that tandem? You know, it's brought back.'s front back yeah you're separated where the 37 was

next next to each other so you see exactly what's going on in the cockpit but in 38 you're in front

but um i would have to puke and swallow i would literally puke in my mask and just suck it up

because you get to a certain point where um you know depending on what your issue is

Thank you. puke in my mask and just suck it up because you get to a certain point where um you know depending on what your issue would just puke in your mask yeah this might be tmi but no i'm i'm like sometimes where does it go it if if you can you can hold it long enough you can either you know and my recommendation is if.
How do you concentrate flying a jet while trying like hell to hold vomit down? If you do have to. My recommendation is always eat something you don't mind eating again.
Bananas is a good choice. I remember one time.
So you would puke and then swallow it again? You just got to fight through it. And then what happened again? I had a great instructor.
He was Norwegian, and he—hardcore dude, loved to party. Drove this old 1980s Cadillac with big old steer horns on the hood, hood ornament.
He was awesome. He was sympathetic to my cause.
So he would know, because I'd be doing this heaving going on, and I'm trying to fly this aircraft and pay attention, especially the aerobatics once you get to the airspace. But my first flight in a 38, I thought I was over it.
You know, six months, all right, it's getting a little better, getting a little better, because eventually you get to a point where, like like they stick you in the barony chair, you know, to force it out of you, try to just break your will. None of that was working for me.
And I would just hide it via techniques already talked about. But my first flight in the 38, man, it came on so quick.
It just, it came out of my mask and all over my visor.

And I'm like doing this windshield wiper, trying to clear my visor because my pilot's in the back.

And I suffered through a well below average execution on my dollar ride my first flight.

I think I made it.

I think I made it.

And he climbs out of it.

And he climbs up into my cockpit and he's looking around and he goes not a chance because there's puke all over the dashboard of this uh so i didn't pass that ride um so hold on does it go is it like an initial we're talking is it initial an initial motion sickness and then you puke and then it's gone for the rest of the flight? Or is it like the whole thing? It ebbs and flows. So it's like seasickness.
You're in it. Shit.
Yeah. And you still wanted to be a pilot? Oh, yeah.
Holy shit, man. Yeah, I was determined.

Stubborn, strong-willed, ego.

I don't know what it was, but I'm like, I have.

I can't fail.

This is, I got to figure it out.

Because there's one kid in my class that left.

He just, I'm done. I got tapping out.

I'm out.

But I just, I wanted to figure it out. You know, you do.
I mean, I could eat a greasy pork sandwich and go do aerobatics as long as I'm flying. Stick me in the back seat and someone else is flying.
So you have overcome it? Yeah. Okay.
You know, people talk, is it physiological?

Is it psychological?

I think it's a combination of a lot of things.

Inner ear.

Thankfully, space is not, there's no correlation.

Because space adaptation syndrome impacts 50% of astronauts.

What is it called?

Space adaptation syndrome. And it's, because you, and we'll get to it, but like you experience all these G-forces on the way up.
And then it's a long ride. So it's about nine minutes.
You're pulling four and a half Gs. And then when that second stage separates, you're thrust forward.
You're hanging in your straps. And now you're in space floating and so that transition

oh it can force this cross coupling illusion of tumbling and it impacts everyone differently it can be seconds it can be minutes it can be long durations of this tumbling and it's different axis depending on who you are do you know if you're going to get it before you go to space So it's a big surprise.

And puking in space with zero gravity? Oh, man. You saw the movies, you know, Apollo 13.
I was ecstatic. I was on cloud nine.
I was on a drug, man. I was so pumped.
Once I realized I got to orbit, I'm floating. I get through this tumbling sensation.
Because you're forced to deal with your circumstances. There's no like, I'll suck this up for 30 seconds on a roller coaster.
Or you're flying a fighter jet. Can you ease off and fly straight level for a few potatoes? No, you are forced to deal with your circumstances.
There's no reset button. And that's very challenging because that capsule is rotating.
It's got to maintain line of sight with satellites for communication purposes. So as it's going around, it's rotating.
So you look outside and you see the horizon. And that makes sense.
This is the top of the capsule and this is the bottom bottom you come inside you float around and you look back outside and it's completely opposite because it's and now it's like whoa after a while your body adapts and human body is amazing you know i would be you know a couple hours into it i'd be on my um ipad laptop whatever um iPhone, doing some science and research. I'd be completely inverted, working, just hanging inverted, when that's the top and that's the bottom.
But you lose all reference. But back to motion sickness.
Yeah, I more or less got over it. I still get, especially if someone's a shitty driver.

Wow.

Anyways.

Wow.

That's well more information than.

Any other hurdles?

That was it for pilot training.

It was academics and the motion sickness.

Fair heights I got over.

Planes are fine.

It's structures.

Yeah.

Thank you. that was it for pilot training was academics in the in the motion sickness fear of heights I get over its planes are fine its structures yeah ledges I have that too okay I figured that I hate I yell yeah jump school was not fun for me yeah I fucking hated it yeah terrified of heights we've went free diving, yeah, skydiving.

Part of the space training.

And jumping out of a plane

was... Oh, shit.
You had to do it?

Oh, yeah.

What got you out the door?

The only thing that got me out the door

is I didn't want to look like a pussy in front of everybody

else. That's it.

But I had a bum shoulder. So this is the only program...
I don't want to look like a pussy in front of everybody else. That's it.
But I had a bum shoulder.

This is the only program.

I don't even know if we want to go here.

But it was with the Air Force Academy.

It's the only program in the world that is the first jump is free fall and solo.

What?

Yeah.

And you're scared to death of fights? Yeah man, I gotta hear this. Unfortunately, I had hurt my shoulder years back, dislocated it.
And I actually dislocated it in space training, in the capsule. In full-on spacesuit.
And it's this emergency procedures. It's we got we just splashed down in the capsule in full-on spacesuit.
And it's this emergency procedures. We just splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, and now we've got to do this emergency egress.
So it's rush. See how quickly we can get out of the capsule.
So my responsibility as the swimmer with all my Ironmans was to get out first. And I got to throw the boat, the inflatable boat out in the water and pull the cord.
And as I'm pulling, I completely dislocate my shoulder. And so this was an injury from years prior.
so now I have this. I was able to get it back in because these suits, these are expensive suits.
And the docs came in and were trying to get my shoulder back in. But I'm in this suit.
I mean, it's a helmet. It's one piece.
There's no way you can get up into the shoulder. So over time, we were able to finally pop it back in.
And that event kind of just let this, like, you know, all stretched out. Yeah.
So it was, but skydiving didn't help. Actually, my first jump, I had to pull with my left hand.
Worked out fine. But that kind of ended my skydiving career until I had surgery post-space.
Damn. Have you ever, just a random question, you're a diver too, right? You had mentioned you did some scuba diving in school.
Have you ever been scared of heights underwater? Have you ever come up like you're diving on the ocean floor and then you hit a ledge? No, I don't think I've ever been that deep. Shoreline off the Atlantic in the north is pretty shallow.
I get it. I get it on that.
Do you really? Yeah. I never thought I would.

Looking down? Yeah. I remember diving over a ledge once, and I was like, oh, shit.
Let's go back over here. Yeah.
How deep? I don't know how deep it was. I can't remember.
But I do remember the feeling, getting it underwater, which you would think you would never get because you have that, you know. it's not like you're gonna fall but there's that just that look off the ledge where you can't see

the body underwater, which you would think you would never get because you have that, you know, it's not like you're going to fall, but there's just that look off the ledge where you can't see the bottom of it. I love watching those free divers.
Yeah, yeah. Holding their breath.
Breath holds. Five, six minutes.
That's pretty wild. Yeah.
So when did you, what place did you graduate at?

I was just, I think I was fourth or fifth out of 12.

And then we had some NATO country.

We had two Dutch, two Dane, two German.

So we had a big class, 20 or so.

I think I was

4th, 5th, 6th, somewhere

right around there. What's everybody want?

Honestly, it depends on what you

what mission

you want to do. Because they all

kind of function the same.

I mean,

well, if you

ask a pilot who's flown them, there's

certainly big, dramatic differences.

I mean, are we talking like

Thank you. I mean, well, if you ask a pilot who's flown them, there's certainly big, dramatic differences.
I mean, are we talking like F-16 and C-130? No. So my drop, again, Air Force needs.
My drop had, I want to say, four F-15Cs. Didn't have any 15Es, which is the two-seat strike platform.

It's the mud hand.

It carries a lot of munitions.

Air-to-ground mission.

But you have a WIZO.

You've got a backseater.

Four F-16s, two A-10s, and then it's like there might be a couple instructor to go right back into pilot training to be an instructor if you don't end up in a fighter jet that you wanted it's kind of an option and then there were some bombers B-52, B-1 and so when I picked I had the choice between a 15C and a 16 and i wanted a multi-role platform i wanted to do air to ground i wanted to do casts but i also loved the the sexiness of an air-to-air mission you know um dog fighting and you know doing doing that type of mission and ef-16 is is multi-role. So depending on what base you go to will be the focus of your mission.
Like I ended up, first assignment was Korea, then I went to Italy, and then I went to weapons school. But those first, Korea was all about interdiction.
You know, there's going to be an initial air threat if we ever go to war with North Korea.

It's going to be capacity.

They're just going to overwhelm you with these teenage MiGs, these old, antiquated, you know, third-gen-type platforms.

No capability and no competency, but they're just going to try to overwhelm the South.

Have you ever wound up in a dogfight?

No. Damn! Damn! No, all simulated.
They're very, very rare. Back in World War II in Vietnam, since then, it's been a handful.
I figured. It's been a handful.
Man, that would be fucking awesome. It would be awesome.
But technology these days, it's all about not being not being seen yeah so if you get to emerge it's it's because either you screwed up or you know you just didn't get the information you needed yeah um yeah so i ended up in the f-16 was my choice and um is that what you wanted? You wanted the F-16. I did.
And you got it. Yeah.
And part of it is about the location as well. So you leave prior training with a specific airframe.
And then once you get to that base for training, for me, it was Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix. You spend six months learning how to fly the F-16 to employ it.
So now you've gone from the very basics, flying instruments, flying formation, just a little bit of aerobatic. That's it.
You're competent. You're safe enough.
You hopefully won't kill yourself. And now when you learn how to fly the F-16, you go deeper.
You start doing BFM, basic five maneuvers, the dog fighting, 1v1. And then you do TI, tactical engagements.
Now it's working the geometry for a reform to an engagement, a visual engagement. And then you start adding more and more aircraft.
Now it's act where it's like 4v4 and your actual you know you're you're doing long range stuff beyond visual range and if you end up in a visual merge you're you're competent enough to do the type of dog fighting and then you kind of go through this whole air to air flow and then you got to focus on the air piece. So you start off by going to a range, and you're dropping these little blue bombs for

scoring purposes, and you're trying to focus your skill sets on learning the basics of

how to employ and fly the aircraft with specific parameters.

So you get comfortable in certain airspeeds and altitudes and ranges and how the aircraft feels.

And you're shooting the gun, a 20-millimeter gun.

And then, again, that progresses.

Now you're going to do close air support.

You're working with troops on the ground, JTAGs and SEALs.

You're calling in engagements.

And you're employing in close proximity to ground forces.

How fast, what's the fastest you've gone in an F-16?

It's Mach 2, 2.05.

It's roughly two times the speed of sound.

And, you know, it's roughly 700, for the layman's explanation,

it's around 750 miles an hour.

It changes based on pressure altitude, temperatures, all that. But two times that.
So 1,500 miles an hour. Whoa.
It's all relative. 1,500 miles an hour? It's all relative.
I mean, now you talk about, you know, 6th Gen coming online. this 3-4 Mach.

And it doesn't really feel intense until you get low on the deck flying flying fast low because you you have that ground rush you know the trees are going by pretty fast I would imagine but there's a lot of restrictions so you can't break the sound barrier unless you're in a specific restricted airspace which is few and far between in the US so if you're breaking the sound barrier it's above 30,000 feet or higher and the sensation isn't there you just see a little buffet on your dial your dial otherwise it just you just continue to push what were you flying in in regular pilot school as far as the airframe yeah t-37 is the first aircraft two seat two engine very low power jet the next aircraft was a t-38 it's the uh what they call it the mig 20 mig 28 in top gun f5 it's this nasa flies them um very stubby wing sleek long uh um airframe um twin engine very fast okay and then so you do that for six months apiece, total of a year, and then you fly your platform. Okay, so the speed wasn't anything new to you? No, the T-38, I don't know if you did a mock run.
I don't think you did. I don't even know if it could handle it.
But most of these older generation fighters, it's right up to the Mach. All the fourth gen, except for the A-10, are built to go above Mach.
Damn. What's the lowest you've been flying? Altitude? Over the Mach.
Oh. It's hard to get up there.
You got got to do it in a dive just because the air is thicker down low. You're burning through JP8 pretty quick.
A couple thousand feet. Nothing.
I mean, 450, 500 knots, I don't know, 500, 600 miles an hour on the deck is fun. That's enough.
Because if, you know, shit happens quick when you're going that fast and low. Thunderbirds, we have permission to fly low.
You know, 1,500 feet, pretty low, depending on the maneuver we're doing the formation that you're flying so that's where you really get a sensation talk about unwavering level of trust and when you're flying because we're flying anywhere from three feet to 18 inches apart and you're that low and if you're if you're in the formation you're flying i mean that aircraft is 18 inches apart. You're white knuckled when you first start.
You've been flying this aircraft. For me, I'd been flying it for eight, nine years.
I'm very competent in flying it. But when you're that close and that level of trust and that precise, it's like white knuckled.
You're just death grip. Just over time, you get really comfortable.
You're smoking a lucky and breakfast and you're 18 inches apart. But it's only because you're given the opportunity to go through intense training.
I mean, two, three times the amount of flying that a normal fighter pilot would typically fly in a year, 500 hours versus 150, 180 hours. Wow.
Wow. And all you're doing is doing one thing, not CAS and interdiction and OCA and DCA and BFM.
Those are fun. But a lot of that is just employing using the sensors, whereas Thunderbirds, I didn't even turn that shit on.
Gotcha. It all about the formation so all right so let's walk back through yeah sorry no it's let's walk back through so you said oca and dca what is all what is all that what are those acronyms offensive counter air defensive counter air it's just different mission sets depending on what the scenario is so if we're getting invaded by china or russia and we're protecting dc we're going to set up caps with hopefully we attack them with other things and ships and um but kind of the last line of defense is going to be what we have in the air in these caps and we're protecting the motherland and anything comes at us that's what we're but the focus is to stay back defensive posture that's dca and then you have different um category of missions uh called oca offensive counter air that might be like an interdiction mission like okay we're going to're going to attack North Korea.
We're not. But if we were, there's key targets that we have preplanned that we want to go blow up.
And we're going to send bunker busters, GB24s, or whatever we have these days. Big 2,000-pound bombs.
This is OCA. This is offensive counter-air interdiction.
I'm going to fight my way in, deliver my, you know, my munition, turn around and leave. So we are, you know, on an offensive posture.
Gotcha. Gotcha.
So what section do you start with in school? Building block. It's baby steps.

So you'll start off, okay, can I fly this aircraft?

You'll spend 10, 12 sorties getting comfortable in the aircraft.

You'll solo because there are two-seaters,

but it's meant to be a single-seat fighter aircraft. That was the other reason why I wanted the F-16.

I wanted to be the sole responsible person involved um and then you learn you learn instruments okay if the weather's bad can i recover this aircraft to you know at a base that's socked in so you got to learn how to fly instruments got it okay let's move on let's start doing tactical

stuff and that's where you'll do all right we're going to fly formation get comfortable flying formation because that aircraft is extremely responsive like literally the stick moves like that much it's all fly by wire and throttle obviously moves a lot more but versus like a p51 or f4 or an a4 that stick moves a lot it's hydraulics so flying formation it doesn't take much honestly it's like this thought process you you think about it and it subconsciously you start doing it so you you over correct in the beginning you just that's where the nausea comes in it's just you porpoise because it's it's out of equilibrium because that what makes it such a high performance aircraft is that it's it's not a stable platform so you're constantly looking for that that sweet spot when you fly after a while it becomes second nature now you're worried about well chip between your, the radars and the targeting pods and the situational display and the queuing systems, all that kind of stuff.

That's the focus.

Second nature, the flying is, you know, you don't even think about it.

Do you get used to certain planes?

Oh, yeah.

You do?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

So when you deploy, I mean, I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but I mean, so you really know the plane? Mm-hmm. You do? Mm-hmm.
Okay. So when you deploy, I mean, I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but, I mean, so you really know the plane.
Mm-hmm. You do.
And if you jump in another one, you notice differences. Yeah, everything's set up differently and how you flip certain switches.
And they all kind of have an intuitive infrastructure that you could easily learn one system to the next. I don't mean like an F-16 to an F-15.
I mean, like, can you, I mean, it's your plane. It's like a, I don't know.
It's like if you put somebody else's baseball glove on, it's still a baseball glove, but it's not your baseball glove you know what i mean yeah is

it do you know if you're alluding to jump into another f-16 is it the exact same or um or that's

that's interesting question so you have like a rifle like i have my rifle set up the way i like

my rifle set up as a seal yeah and but if i have somebody else's rifle i'm like oh shit i don't

like i can use it and i can be extremely effective with it but i'm i would rather have mine yeah

Thank you. But if I have somebody else's rifle, I'm like, oh, shit, I don't, like, I can use it, and I can be extremely effective with it, but I would rather have mine.
Yeah. It feels different.
That sounds like a Full Metal Jacket quote. Well, I mean, you know what I'm saying, though.
My rifle. This is my, this is my gun.
I said, I know my trigger pull. I know everything about it, you know? Right.
So you have your name on one aircraft. And you have your and your rifle like you zeroed it you set it up the way you like it set up yeah you all that kind of shit if you have somebody else's you lose that you know shit is this thing sighted in is it cited into me i don't know right is it like that with the planes um to a certain extent so you have your name on an aircraft and you have a dedicated crew chief and he's got his name on his or her name on on the other side um and you typically try to fly that tail but the maintenance of these airframes it could be down for months going through phase they pull the panels off and they you know all this is broken we got to fix it so it's constantly the inventory is being moved around so you know you might fly your tail maybe 30 40 40 percent of the time that's probably a little aggressive um except for when i was in the thunderbirds you fly so much and you're so cued into that aircraft, you know exactly how it's bent and you know how to trim up the aircraft because, you know, you can't, different airspeeds, it's going to fly differently and it's going to lean one direction or the other.
So you know exactly how much input you need on the trim to kind of level it out. And you know, on certain maneuvers, when you get to the top, you know, you're 18 inches apart.
We're doing this arrowhead maneuver where I move up. I was slot.
So I was number four. So I was behind number one.
So I'm anywhere from three feet to 18 inches. But in the arrowhead, I actually slide up and in.
So I get even closer. And it's literally, as close as this mic, is the nozzle, the afterburner nozzle of the boss.
The number one aircraft. And when you get up in the top of a loop, you're like 150, 175 knots.
So it's mushy. It's not responsive like an aircraft would be on the deck at 450 knots.
So it takes a lot more inputs. And you're not used to flying the aircraft a lot in that regime.
So by flying the same aircraft over and over and over, you know exactly how much throttle you need, especially if you're, you know, deviating to a different show site. You might be at 2,000 pressure altitude.
Now you go to like Cheyenne, Wyoming, and it's 5,000 or 6,000. So the air is thinner.
So it's going to respond a lot different and the more you know your aircraft

the the more accurate and precise you're going to be able to fly it in those formations but in a combat situation combat unit operational squadrons you typically don't fly the same aircraft over and over so you you will have to set it up the way you want it and some have different you know just different things that

you like or don't like but interesting okay all right so you can get used to any of them relatively you do and you have to it's just the nature of the base and the inventory and the phase of the aircraft but you were asking something about experience. Um, you only know, um, you think, you know, more than you actually do at different levels of your career.
Like, I thought it was pretty shit hot coming out of B course F 16 training. I'm going to my first combat combat unit and then by the time i got to weapons school

i look back and i'm like oh my god i'm glad i didn't kill myself in some of those missions night mvgs in south korea it's scary type flying and then after weapons school you know you further along you get it's like you don't know what you didn't know back then and you're just glad you survived all these different

phases of your

life going through a career of a you know flying fighters yeah so you get through you get through f-16 school what how's graduation yeah graduation again seems to be i don't know maybe it's a lot like the seals as far as there's it's got to be pretty surreal it is um usually there's drinking involved um you gotta let go somehow some way yeah um uh yeah pilot training it's a big deal to get your wings you. I still have my wings that were pinned on.
Took them to space. Again, I don't reflect too much in my personality.
I'm always looking. I get it.
I get it. I'm the same way.
But I mean, there's got to be a ton of tradition, right? There's got to be a ton of tradition in becoming an F-16 pilot or any type of fighter pilot. I mean, how do they pin your wings on? You know, that was anti-climatic.
There wasn't anything too sexy about the ceremony in pilot training the real

traditions that we love and cherish um are the in the fighter squadrons in the operational combat units and every squadron's different there's a lot of heritage because it goes all the way back to the World War I, to Vietnam, on up.

And those traditions have long lasted um so you said what there's there's 12 was there you said there was about 12 people in the original plus the foreigners which we won't count but um because they don't i mean they don't we're not training them how to fly f-16s they will go fly um i had a there's a turkish singapore has a squadron actually at luke teaches f-16s um but typically they'll go back and and do their own thing um so how many americans were there regular before you moved into the F-16 school? I think you said there was like 12. Yeah, I think it was 12.
So how many go to F-16 school? I think we have five. Five? Because there was, maybe it was more than 12.
There was like four or five light rays, F-15Cs that went to Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. There was five or six F-16s that went to Luke.
And then there was two A-10 pilots. And then there was a B-1 and a B-52.
And then two instructor pilots that stuck around. I think that's right.
Interesting. To whatever that equals.
So what's it like showing up to your command then so you go to luke and now it's like that base is dedicated to teaching it's the f-16 schoolhouse so there's it's fighter squadrons but it's still people who you know the instructors are all operational experience combat and now go back to the schoolhouse to teach it's a good you know quality of life for the families you're not deploying you're just you're just doing the the nine to five kind of teaching young punks how to be f-16 pilots and it's a six-month rotation so it's just constant it's probably going to um north island okay coronado for instructors. I don't know, maybe.
Yeah. That's probably more the weapons school at Nellis.
So you go, so it's regular pilot school, F-16. Mm-hmm.
Then you teach? No. I was just making a comment about the instructors that taught us how to be F-16 pilots, they have experience.
They were out in the field doing combat missions at operational units around the world. And they'll do that for an assignment or two, you know, from three to six years.
And then they'll come back to be instructors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's very similar.
And then they might go back, you know, do an assignment there for three years, and then they'll go back into an operational. So I guess what I'm getting at is, I mean, you kind of said, it sounded like graduation was kind of anticlimactic.
So what's it like when you show up to your command after you graduate F-16 pilot school? So when you're in there with experienced fighter fighter pilots you get a little bit of taste at f-16 it starts getting this little more combat flair operational mindset still a schoolhouse but there's naming traditions and and you know fridays in the in the bar and you're you're still doing combat training and then there's a graduation for that and then it's off to your unit and that is still doing combat training. And then there's a graduation for that.
And then it's off to your unit. And that is, those are combat units.
This is when we're actually doing the no shit, you know, stuff. And depending on where you go, I went to Korea, Osan Air Base in Korea, which was, to me, it's like one of those kind of, it's a remote location, so there's not that many families.
You can do a command sponsor where the whole family will show up, but 69, 70% of the squadron is bachelors. So there's not families there.
So the mentality in Korea is like, light your hair on fire, drinking a lot, going downtown, partying, flying awesome combat missions. It's push it up mentality.
And it's kind of one of the only remaining, there's two bases in Korea, Kunsan, Osan. I don't know how it's changed in the last 10 years since I've been out but that was a good just a introduction indoctrination to the combat mentality.
Are you welcomed or are you treated like an FNG? No, you're an FNG but you have your LPA Lieutenant Protection Association. It's the lieutenant mafia.
So there's the senior level, the lieutenant colonels, the commander, the director of operations, the DO. And then you got all the crusty old majors.
And then you have captains. And then you have the punk lieutenants.
And I think there was nine of us. It was awesome.
It was just an amazing experience, especially being in Korea. I mean, you saw some crazy shit in Korea.
This was in the late 90s. What kind of crazy shit? Oh, just crazy shit.
Like what? Drinking-related crazy shit. You'd go up to Seoul for the weekend.
Just we had money to burn and release some steam and energy from all the combat-focused training that we were doing. So it's like the SEAL teams.
It hard play card culture absolutely absolutely and um all right before we get into it let's take a break before we before we get into korea but i do want to ask you is that you weren't a breitling i am what is what don't don't make fun of me because the battery died on me so it's perpetually 320 nice um It died on me on the way here um i'm too cheap to get a battery to replace it what's with pilots and breitling i know it's a pilot's watch this is my thunderbird watch so this is the one with the thunderbird patch oh damn that's cool yeah so it's um kind of an heirloom i took it to space so this has been to space um i one from Weapons School. It's got my Weapons School patch on it.
I don't know. They're just cool watches.
Is it an emergency? This has an ELT, but if the battery doesn't work, I don't know. Have you ever deployed one? No.
They told us, do not break glass, only an emergency. Yeah, yeah, cool.
All right. Well, let's take a break.
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All right, Scott, we're back from the break. We're in Korea.
It's your first station as a F-16 pilot. You met your wife there.
I did. How'd you guys meet? She just graduated from college and her older brother was an F-16 pilot.

So post-graduation, she decided to go visit her brother with her other brother.

And we hit it off.

She was actually dating another guy at the time.

Nothing happened, but we stayed connected when she left um and then we started corresponding this was back in the like late 90s where mci calling cards yeah um email didn't exist at the time so there's no correspondence that. It was just a couple phone calls now and then.
And when I decided to go visit her in Minnesota, where she lived, for the weekend, vice versa. She came back to Korea for a couple days.
Spent a total of like four or five days together. And then decided to move to italy with me on my next

assignment after living with just spending five days together a couple days together and then she's moving to italy she's moving to italy yeah right on we knew we named our kids before we even you know hung out Right now they call it hanging on. What do they call it?

Hanging out.

What was it about her?

Oh, my gosh.

Now you're...

Man, she's absolutely beautiful.

She's caring.

She's fun.

I don't know.

Just...

We just knew right off the bat.

Yeah, it didn't take much to persuade her and vice versa.

But we moved to Italy together.

That was my second assignment.

So Korea's only a year because it's remote.

Anything significant happen in Korea? With? F-16. Blowing shit up? No.
No, it's pretty stable over there. You're constantly prepared for an invasion.
Big party. Big party.
Nice. Parties.
A lot of traveling to and from Seoul. Sounds like a UConn in the SEAL teams.
Yes. Maybe a Thailand deployment.
Thailand. Although I never did get to do.
Even today. Oh, really? Those are pretty wild.
Okay. All right.
You've been to Thailand? You don't remember? You don't it, do you? Philippines.

No, I've never been to Thailand.

Japan and Korea.

Where's your favorite place?

By far, Italy.

No shit?

Italy?

Yeah.

As far as what?

What's the criteria?

Anywhere you've been, out of everywhere you've been in the world, Italy, that's where you like to be?

Yeah.

Why? The culture, the environment, the food, the wine. What about the culture? They're so laid back and relaxed.
We were so uptight in the U.S., and it's just constant coming and going. That was the biggest deal.
That's interesting. I mean, you're a super competitive guy since childhood, roaming around the streets, looking for people to compete with.
I can be. Everyone else, just chill out.
It's me full throttle. No.
We lived there three years and then an extra three years. So a total of six.
Three before kids and three after kids. So we got to explore kind of two different worlds, I guess, two different timeframes.
But the culture is just laid back. And Aviano is about an hour north of Venice.
It's right at the base of the Domomites. So everything north is the Alps and everything south is farmland, flats, vine and it's rule it's there's no venice's an hour port anone is the biggest town it's i don't know half the size of nashville maybe um and there's no base housing so you live amongst the the local villages and it literally it's you know, the 1500s, and it's just a pocket where some creeks meets and you know crevices in the mountains and we lived in um san giovanni de pocinego just a small town right up nestled um actually it's really cool because the hotel there Mussolini and Hitler stayed in.
Not that that's cool

but Tiny Actually, it's really cool because the hotel there, Mussolini and Hitler stayed in. Not that that's cool, but tiny, tiny little town.
Just beautiful. And everyone's just laid back.
Just Adamani, Adamani. We'll get to it tomorrow.
Adamani. You know, Raposo in the middle of the day, 1 to 3, everything shuts down.
August is completely shut down. So when you get there, it's just like you have this wake-up, you know, this culture shock.
Because you're expecting convenience stores on the corner 24-7 and get what you need. And no, you go at the pace of the locals.
And once you get used to it, it's just like, this is chill.

I biked all up and down.

They do the Giro races and stuff like that.

It's just beautiful.

And the food, I swear it's the water that comes out of the aqueducts underneath the mountains.

So simple.

Very, very simple ingredients.

But the food is the best ever. Right on.
Same with the wine. Right on.
Yeah. So we go back once a year, actually.
Oh, really? Yeah. Going back this week.
My buddy who's on the Thunderbirds, he's the commander of Aviano, the airbase there, and I'm going to be speaking at one of his events. Very cool.
Very cool. So what were you doing in Italy? What was the mission? So I was assigned to the Triple Nickel, 555th Fighter Squadron.
There's two squadrons there, and it's just this constant rotation who's deployed. What's tough about Aviano is that it's centrally located in USAFE, UConn.
So you're constantly pulled in so many different directions because you're close proximity to more or less everything that's of interest. So whether it's a show of force, you know, the Baltic policing, flying out of Romania or Poland, show of forces around the world, Africa, Morocco.
How long does it take an X-16 to get from central Italy to Poland? And that's a good ways. No, it's a couple.
It's not like we fly super fast because when you do that, it's like a race car. You're eating gas.
Okay. So it's not like you have the legs.
You're limited on range and you're going to be conservative. So you're flying airline speeds.
And if you're relying upon those tankers, then you've got to fly their speed or work some rejoin en route. So it's nothing.
Everyone asks, you know, how quickly can you get across the country and stuff like that it's you typically don't gotcha um what's the typical flag time um you can stretch it f-16s if you external tanks depends on how much gas you're carrying but we would do you could probably stretch it out two and a half three plus hours if you're really back on the throttle and high altitude and winds are good and blah, blah, blah. Okay.
But it's not, you don't want to stay too long. The longest flight I ever had, this was actually one of my favorite deployments.
It was punk lieutenant. And we do these traditions as fighter pilots.
We have top february mustache march and so in korea we deploy to alaska for cope thunder just operation uh exercise it's middle of the winter so there's no sun so we have like we're pasty white and we got these flat tops so we're there for a couple you know raging as much as you can rage in you know middle of alaska and then we're going to take our jets and go shoot some missiles for test down in panama city spring break so you got these pasty white dudes and these overgrown haircut flat tops and these we start to grow these cheesy mustaches we thought we were somebody. So that was that nine corps of lieutenants, the LPA.
We did that. It was like a month and a half we were on the road just doing fun stuff.
So anyways, I can't remember where I was going with that. Oh, longest sortie.
Longest sortie. Coming home from that, we launched from Omaha, Nebraska.
And we stretch it all the way to get home to Korea. It's the longest I've ever been in an F-16.
It was 13.2 sortie, 13 hours. Wow.
It was extremely painful. I'll bet.
And we got, I can't remember how many aircraft, eight-ish, eight or 12. And one of the flight leads in my formation, I'm a wingman, just a young punk, and it's day into night, and then there's weather now in Korea, so it's raining, and you're sleeping, you know, it's a long, you're popping drugs to stay awake, and then it's time to get your game on because you're landing in weather at night, wet runway.
And when my flight lead took off 13 hours prior, he had a brake failure. And at night, you know, ambient light and MBGs, you're going to turn some lights down or turn them off or, you know, pop them to pull out the bulb.
And he was getting annoyed by his brake failure light. So he pops it out.
So you don't see it anymore. 13 hours go by and he completely forgets about it.
So he's in the F-16 in front of me he lands brick one puts the nose down applies the brake and nothing so back up you know at that point is to put the hook down and take the cable and if you take the cable the runway's completely shut down so i'm this lieutenant i i'm in the touchdown approaching his aircraft in front of me and i he, he's like, abort, abort. Or I can't remember what he said, but he's like, brake failure.
So, you know, you've been flying for 13 hours. It's raining.
The last thing you're thinking about is your instrument departure when you're just trying to put this aircraft on the deck. And all you want to do is get out of this cockpit.
But pouring rain, wet runway wet runway got to take off and now we got to divert up to suon which is just another base so your asses and elbows just trying to pull up charts and land this aircraft safely but that was the longest sortie ever flew was a long damn time yeah and it's no bigger than this seat i mean it's i got a fist width between the top of the helmet and the canopy, and you've got little rails you can put your arms in. I'm not a big guy.
I've got a buddy who's 6'5", and he flew Vipers. Oh, man.
But it's actually sitting height, so it's from your butt to the top of your head. If you have short, stubby legs, you can be 6'5".
But if you've got a – or no, vice versa. If you've got long legs, you're fine.
If you've got short stubby legs, you can be 6'5". But if you got a, or no, vice versa.

If you got long legs, you're fine.

If you got short, stubby legs and you got a long torso, that's the issue.

Yeah.

That's the reason why the seat is banked back there

is because it just fits into the cockpit, the ACES II seat.

Interesting.

So anything significant operationally happened in Italy we deployed this was late 90s early 2000s before 9-11 we were still doing operation northern watch southern watch so you had the north swath and then in the south swath of iraq that was

no-fly zone for them they'd launch their megs to do these mock runs but they wouldn't get anywhere near and we would sit there and patrol you know every once in a while you'd go after a couple targets uh triple a pieces that were getting too close to the no-fly zone that were a threat to us patrolling.

And then we ended up in a...

We took on the Sandy Roll,

CSAR. pieces that were getting too close to the no-fly zone that were a threat to us patrolling and then we ended up in uh we we took on the sandy roll c-sar as f-16s which is a challenge leave that to the a-10s and the helos but um we deployed to uh insur lake turkey we'd fly across to the northern watch kuwait we'd do the southern watch so we did a bunch of those deployments.
And then 9-11 hit. And I was in my second year.
I had one more year left at Aviano. And I was in my boss's office, the 06.
And I walk in and he's got the only TV on base because this is again 2001 and in italy and they just didn't have that kind of technology and we're watching the tower go down and we immediately went into alert posture because we didn't know what they were going to expect of us uh you know after you know in reflection it was it took a while for there was any true movement and deployments and it's not like we can do much from that location uh takes a deployment to get and that that takes some effort and there's a cycle process there's units back in the states that are on so it's it just depends on where you're at and you same with the seals as far as when you're tasked to go do something but we're certainly not going to respond like you typically would um so as things began to heat up i um got selected for weapons school fighter weapons school now called the air force weapon school because there's more than just fighters there there's everything in the Air Force inventory has a weapons school now but back then it was called the fighter weapons school it's the Air Force version of Top Gun but it's six months long it's like getting your PhD in all things tactics so I was selected that, and then I went to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas,

which is pretty much all things tactics.

So what exactly is weapons school?

So it's a six-month-long program.

You go under the banner of your MDS, your airframe. For me, it was F-16s.
So I go to the F-16 fighter weapons school. And the hierarchy within the fighter community is you start off as a wingman.
And then eventually, maybe a couple of years, you'll go in as a two-ship flight lead. So now you can lead around a wingman.
And then from there, you'll go to a four-ship flight lead. So now you can lead four aircraft.
From there, you'll be an instructor. Your next step is to be an instructor.
And then once you become an instructor, you can become a flight evaluator, just given exams, check rides. But once you become a seasoned instructor, you can apply and compete for fighter weapons school.
And the idea behind fighter weapons school is to hone your skills, tactics, techniques, and procedures for all things F-16s, as well as everything else in the inventory. And you become a weapons officer.
And so every unit's going to have a dedicated weapons officer who's more or less in charge of that organization's preparation for combat. There might be a couple patch, they're called patchwares.
It's a bullseye patch, gray. The commander might be a patchwares, the DO might be a patchwares.
There might be a couple, but the dedicated position that you're more or less your commitment. If you go to this school, your commitment is to be at least for three years a patchware, a weapons officer.
Okay. And you are the expert.
You are teaching your youngest wingman to your most seasoned IP. You're responsible for training them and preparing them for combat deployments.

And it's cyclical.

You know, you'll go through different phases.

You'll, hey, you know, here's my training plan for the year.

We're going to focus on air to air.

We're going to focus on cast during this month.

And then we're going to do our combat prep for the specific mission we're going to do in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then we're going to deploy. And so he's responsible for developing that.
You go to Korea to be a weapons officer, your primary job is to prepare for war against North Korea. So he or she's focused on developing those plans.
Interesting.

So that's the role behind weapons school.

And it's six months, and it's the most intense thing I've ever done. Really? Oh, yeah.
You sleep, eat, and breathe all things tactics. You have no responsibilities other than just to graduate.
You know, the day you show up, you get a manual that's stacked that high on the research philosophy, or radar philosophy. It's kind of a haze, but they're like, hey, here's your manuals.
You have two days to study this, and you're going to have an exam. You know, so it's just this overwhelming fire hose effect, because it's, you know, you're taught all this stuff going through ranks to up to instructor pilot.
That's five, six, seven years before you get to this point, post pilot training. But you take it to a whole new level.
You know, you'll fly one mission and it's phase based. It's that building block approach.
So you start off BFM, that 1v1 dog fighting skills. You got to hone those skills.
Then the 2v2 and then the 4v4 and then these huge massive employments towards the end of the graduation to include all the air to ground missions. So you're learning everything you possibly can throughout each phase and you might fly a one-hour flight assorting bfm1 mission you'll put five six hours of prep into that you'll fly for one hour and you might debrief it for 10 hours you're dissecting every single thing that you did

to hone your skills and become the best tactician that you possibly can be. You can be going to debrief sun setting.
And by the time you come out and sun's rising, you go grab, you know, dinner or breakfast at the 2-5 club or something across the street at Nellis. But that's your life for six months.
And everyone's, you know, on edge. And am I going to survive this program? Am I going to make it through? Yeah.
Because there is a washout rate, and it's very intense. Interesting.
Yeah. let's talk about when is the first time that you

you flew a combat

mission Yeah. Let's talk about when is the first time that you flew a combat mission?

There's certainly different flavors of combat.

Some of the missions up in Korea, you're flying the patrol along the border.

Those are considered combat.

The Northern Watch, Southern Watch, every once in a while you would employ against some triple-a piece out in the middle

Honestly wasn't till the towards the end of my career when I deployed to Afghanistan at the heat of Isis

2015

Doing counterterrorism missions that it was like every day you're employing. You remember the first one? I do.
Yeah. So our configuration loadout, what we're carrying for munitions, we have all my bros are going to give me shit um if i can't remember there's a gbu 38 and a gbu 54 these are 500 pound bombs they're guided either um coordinates that you put in or laser you can use your targeting pod and a laser designator with the same prf code and and designate a target but those are typically not fast movers.
Those are stationary targets, buildings, KS-19 piece out in the open or camouflage, you know, based on the intel, you're trying to figure it out. And we carry a Maverick.
So that's the Tank Buster. That's, I i think a 300 pound um warhead that uh it's a it's a missile and that's can be guided um same but it's typically guided it's it's the way you employ it as a two ship so you got one uh aircraft that's going to roll in three to five nautical mile wheel rolling at certain altitude and pulling at the target general area put the thing on the thing launch the the maverick and it's whoosh it just rockets off your aircraft and the other um wingman is up stacked up high and through all the coordination the nine line the the verification of target identification um the designator's up stacked up high and he's just staring at his four-by-four-inch screen targeting pod.
He's got the thing on the thing, and he's lazing that target, 20, 30-second time of flight, and shacked the target. And so my first employment was against a vehicle that was on the move.
And, you know, depending on your timing and when you flew these missions, day, night, sometimes it got hot. It was like every time you went up, it was kind of you're getting targets.
And the way that it was run back then was just kind of a progressive approach on we're not going to hit your average um what were they called uh mams uh male or military average male age i can't remember the the 3-1 term for them um but it it wasn't like we were just going after your basic terrorist

they were progressively looking for a higher value target based on resources and and you know all the intel and scenario what was going on at that time in afghanistan so um i had one vehicle that had five mams the mails, all terraced, all verified. We'd been tracking it for days because they'd find one guy.
Hugh Mint, we'd figure out who it was, and we'd watch him for the next proof of life. What is it called? You were in on this planning process? No, most of this was done.
I did a little bit at the jock at Bagram, but it wasn't. Most of us, we were just getting the intel feed before we took off.
We'd fly a four-hour sortie, refuel every once an hour kind of thing, and we'd be given a region. We flew out of Bagram, so we're centrally located.
So we were flying all over. And it was pretty hot along the Pakistan border up by Tajikistan.
It was pretty hot. And then some in the mountains up in the northeast corner.
But we would have more and more confidence as things developed. And we're like, okay, this is a high probability sorty kind of thing.
And we get the initial intel. And then once you get on scene in the AO, they would give you an intel update and a nine line if there was a potential for a target and now you're building

your situational awareness over the target area and once you get the information you put in your systems and now you're just trying to get eyes on to the target and then you got to go through the verification depending on who you're talking to most of it we're talking people who are in the jock with feed from high def predators.

Mm-hmm. it we're talking people who are in the jock with feed from you know high def predators um and then you know we had a certain type of munition the predators had hellfires but depending on how big the target was or how critical it was you were going to choose the platform that best suited that target, weaponary in the target set.
And this was a vehicle that had five terrorists in it. And we decided to, it was on the move, so we decided to do a Maverick attack.
And my wingman was going to be the shooting platform and I was going to laze it.

And as soon as he rolled in,

he neglected to go Master Arm Hot.

So there's an option on the Master Arm Switch

that goes simulate, off, or Master Arm Hot.

Well, it's just a habit pattern to go into the sim

because training, you know, 99% of your flying is training. So he goes to the sim, rolls in, shoots.
Shit. Doesn't come off the aircraft because it's loud.
It just whoosh. And so he has to recover because you have a very, very small window in range kind of thing.
So as soon as he comes off, he spooks the vehicle so it stops all five just run oh shit so we burn the target at this point um and we're like that's that was our chance um they're they're gone to the wind so we leave um and we stand off out of earshot um but we have enough gas and a couple hours left so we just wait for the next you know update well lo and behold they decide oh they're gone let's get back in the vehicle so they all slowly one by one come back and they're like holy shit this is developing let's get back in this so we get a little bit closer and again continue to to earshot um and then we switch roles so i'm going to roll in and employ and and my wingman lazes it um but he was pissed hey at his chance so you did it yeah how'd that feel? It's pretty intense.

You know, it's, at the time, it's like ISIS. You know, we're watching people, orange jumpsuits, stuck in cages, drowned and burned alive.
So there was a lot of rage, I guess. And our mindset changed too because what we're taught in survival training, you know, be able to talk your way out, resist any torture you might experience if you're ever caught and how to evade.
And once that all started developing, it was all bets are off, man. I'm bringing an extra, nothing compared to what you guys are carrying, but I'm going to bring an extra couple clips.
I had one dude who was carrying a machete that was strapped to his leg, like, that's going to do anything. God bless him.
But it was like, if you have to go down, you either get hit, your engine fails, good luck.

You know, a fight to the death kind of mentality versus, you know, play your game, figure it out, try to manipulate your situation until someone arrives kind of thing.

But, you know, and it was real.

I mean, we had two guys that got hit.

Total golden BB kind of theory. He was doing an appointment, and whether it was an AK-47, some guy on the side of a mountain, taking, you know, plinking shots, put a hole in his ventral fin, those fins in the back of the aircraft, put a big old hole right through that.
No idea until he got on the ground and did his post-flight check. But he's like, holy shit, there's a big hole.
And then one guy, he was flying too low, too long. And they took a shot at him and it hit his AMRAAM, his AIM-120 missile, which is on the wingtips.
It's for air-to-air employment, which is never going to happen in Afghanistan. But it hit the missile, and the missile caught on fire.
So the wingtip of his aircraft is on fire. And so he's in emergency.
So he's trying to get back to Bagram and I'm sitting supervisory position. And so I have a radio with me and I hear this and I'm going out to see this.
But thankfully the airflow eventually put the fire out. He didn't have to punch or anything like that, but we're flying a single seat, single engine aircraft.
So it's very reliable g and pratt whitney depending on what airframe you're what what flavor f-16 you're flying but it's still only one engine and it you know there's no glide ratio in the viper it's gonna fall like a rock and you're gonna have to punch so how did it feel for you, though? You described your wingman's approach and mess with the Sims, and then you just breezed right by your approach. It's satisfying to grotesque.
You know, in combat, the highs and lows you experience are, it's all too familiar with any type of combat. And I think the most intense emotional experience is having to make

decisions that will hopefully save the lives of the friendlies on the ground. But you also have

to deal with the consequences of your actions, that you're taking the life of the friendlies on the ground, but you also have to deal with the consequences of your actions,

that you're taking the life of the enemy.

I pray that when I meet my day,

I'm judged based on, you know,

making the right decisions based on the information I had at the time.

But it's heavy.

You've got to deal with it.

It happened a lot on this deployment.

You took a lot of lives.

There were quite a few.

Yeah.

When did that start to affect you? What did you start thinking about? Answering to God at the end. It's always been there, and I think it's...
Was it there on the approach? No approach no no there is a moment that and i don't know if other fighter pilots experience it but it's like right before you push the button squeeze the trigger there's just this intense not apprehension but just massive adrenaline rush on, do I have all the information that I need? Am I making, and I don't know if it's the same for pulling a trigger on a gun, but I've employed it all. I've shot the gun in anger.
I've 500-pound bombs, Mavericks. There's always this, I hope this is the right decision.
And I think you have more time to think about it when it's those scenarios where it's an element of surprise. There are situations where they're shooting at me and I have zero hesitation.

I wouldn't even call it hesitation. It's just this intense feeling of, I hope this is the right decision.
Because I think it's one thing to look through a scope or be close to the enemy, but I'm up at 20,000 feet.

Did it make you feel like your career was complete? Yes. I'll be honest.
Absolutely. You know, timing's everything.
I think there's like, in any combat role, fighter pilot, ground guy, tank, whatever it is, you know, the mission is to go and to kill people. And there's a selfishness in that.
And I think a lot of people think they may have a failed career if they never get the opportunity to take somebody's life in combat. And that's how we think of it.
We think of it as, I never got to kill somebody. But is this how we're trained to think like that? I think it is.
It may be not how we're trained, but it's how the culture is. And how fucked up is that, if you think about it, I never got the opportunity to fucking kill somebody.
To employ an anger, yeah. Whereas, you know, most normal people would say, you know, I never had to do that.
I never had to kill somebody. and so I think the culture you know makes you

it makes I never had to kill somebody. And so I think the culture, you know, makes you, it manifests that inside of you.
But at the same time, you know, when you're talking about meeting, you know, God or Jesus and answering, you know, to all those scenarios that you played out, you know what I mean? There's also, I mean, there is a selfishness, because I know what you're talking about. But it also comes down to, you know, I mean, you're a Christian, we're going to get into your experience later.
But, you know, I think it all comes down to what's in your heart, right? You know, you think you're doing the right thing. Right.
They think they're doing the right thing. They're just doing what they believe is right.
And you're just doing what you believe is right right absolutely and if you don't do that thing in several employments i had quite a few it's like if i don't because right now they shot at. And who knows how that's going to develop.
They're hunkered down. The threat's got RPGs, and they're pinned down.
And so if I do hesitate or I miss a switch or I'm willing to make that decision based on knowing it's helping my side, I guess.

Yeah.

No, I mean, it's...

And they're thinking the same thing.

Yeah.

If they don't plant that bomb on the side of the road and kill Americans,

then more of them are going to die.

Yeah.

It's really kind of, you know, it's just fascinating to think about.

Yeah.

Because everybody is legitimately just doing what they think is right.

So who sets the guidelines, you know, who? God. Yeah.
But when did that kind of stuff start entering your head? It was always there. Because there's always that moment when you're pushing there's always the free fall of the munition you know the time of flight anywhere from 20 seconds out to a minute depending on you know how you're releasing it but that whole time is just like it's very compartmentalized.

It's like check and double check that I've done everything that I possibly can to mitigate any collateral damage concerns.

But then the whole flight home, you're thinking about it.

And then going through the debrief and analyzing the BDA after the fact. I mean, I don't know if you ever fully get over it other than, you know, it's there and I'll have to answer for it.
Well, I mean, on the other, you know, I mean, we're not talking about civilian casualties here, but then

on the other hand, everybody's

very aware of the consequences.

Everybody's,

everybody involved,

you know, is aware

of what

the ultimate consequences.

You are aware what happens

if you go down.

You talk, you know, orange jumpsuits, beheadings, burning you alive, whatever, torture.

And they're just as aware of the consequences if they get compromised.

That there's going to be a 500-pound bomb, you know, that lands on their vehicle. And so, you know, it's voluntary.
Everybody on both sides is fully aware of what the consequences of engaging in war is. I guess that's why we sign up to serve.
Yep. So, you know, I don't know.

I think a lot about it.

But, you know, the whole thing is, you know,

Jesus knows what's in your heart,

and I think that's all that matters.

Absolutely. that's all that matters absolutely

we're definitely influenced by our experiences too and that's why especially the older i get the more centered i want to be on following jesus and I mean look look how screwed up our world is and it's easily it's easy to get caught thinking the sky is falling and and the world's gonna end but if you're centered in your faith, we're not in control.

We're all sinful.

We have free will, and that's probably our demise.

You know, but we're not in control.

I hope I made the decisions that I did in combat for the right reasons.

How long were you over there?

Fighter squadrons typically do like six month rotations.

So that time was six months in 2015. Before that that they're anywhere from 90 days to six months we were coming and going it's been half Aviano that central located I mean you're barely had time to enjoy the country because you were constantly coming and going you come back back to the states to do red flag exercises big coalition force type exercises with hundreds of aircraft at nellis air force base in las vegas where we spent six years for various assignments but yeah that that deployment was six months How many missions did you fly, do you know? I was flying every other day, probably.
Every two days, sometimes. I was in a leadership position, so you got the squadrons.
And then above that is the group and the wing. I was at the group level, but flying with the squadrons.
I was just old. Into my career, I was a 20-year point, so I would fly as much as they'd let me.
Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy, man.
I haven't done one of these type of interviews in a little bit. Yeah, it's...
You strike a chord with the whole feeling complete in a career.

And I don't know if it's just the fighter pilot or the operator mentality.

It's the warfighter mentality, man.

It is the warrior mentality.

Because that is certainly how it is in our world.

I've done things that take me off that track

with the Thunderbirds and Tests and

Aggressors. But it's almost a blessing and a curse.
I mean, you get to experience, maybe not you get, you experience something that, I mean, there's just next to nobody that experiences that. No.
In fact, I've been speaking more keynotes and stuff, and one of my stories is combat, and it's like, I almost have to take a step back, Because even doing interviews and talking about it,

it's like you've got to put this in perspective. How do you apply this to someone who doesn't necessarily go to work that's life or death situation, other than our frontline providers? it's

yeah it's

it's a tough conversation to have, too. I'm struggling to articulate exactly how I feel at this point.
It's just because it's definitely there. No doubt, especially as you get older, you know, and kids and...
Would you want your kids to go to war? Would I want them to go to war? If your kid wanted to be an F-16 pilot or whatever the equivalent is today. You call me old.
You know. It is.
It is. It's almost a legacy platform.
Would you want them to have those experiences? If you ask me what I want them to serve, I would be honored. I will never pressure my kids if they want to be whatever they want.
I don't, I could care less. I just want them happy and to pursue something that they're passionate about, not some societal expectation.
Sports, employment, jobs, whatever, academics. I just want them to pursue something they are passionate about because that's exactly what I did.
I feel very blessed and happy of what I went through. So if they wanted to serve, I would be very proud and honored.
And there's a chance. A couple of my teenagers might.
But if they don't, I don't care. As long as they're living a life

that they're happy with.

I certainly don't want them serving

just because of me.

Now, to get to your,

I've been avoiding your question.

I want them to go to war.

I would say no.

And that's,

I don't know if that's selfish

in the fact that I don't want my kids at risk and the shit I've seen and been through. I, because there were plenty of times, not even in combat, just, I was a split decision of death because of just the nature of the business.
You know, I bought on a Thunderbird show and I delayed a rejoin too long and the aircraft pulled nine Gs. I pulled 10.5 Gs because I thought I was going to hit the ground.
And, you know, I recovered 100 feet from the ground, which is, in a fighter jet, that's damn close. And so it's just like those split decisions could have gone completely different.
I've had plenty of people. A good buddy of mine was stationed in Aviano, Trojan Gilbert.
He was in combat, and he was strafing. And recovery for strafe is like 75 feet.
So you get in amongst them when you're shooting the gun. And he ended up dying in combat.
And so it's just like it doesn't take much. Yeah.
But you could also get hit by a car walking across the road. Well, I think I'm more asking, you you know do you want I think about this all the time you know especially with a kid no and uh I mean you know who I have on this show and this the stuff that we talk about and the toll that it takes and the burden you have to fucking live with afterwards and all I mean I don't know what I don't know what it's like for pilots, but I mean, the suicide rate amongst special ops guys is just astronomical.
You can see it. You can see the load we're all carrying.
I mean, immediately. And I just, I think about that.
I mean, it really fucking changes you. How? Like, how do you see it? Body language, care of themselves? You can see it in their eyes.
I mean, it's like stoic, emotionless, lack of humor. It's just a fucking heaviness.
Is that because of enduring all the experiences? Or is it the intensity of the experience? I don't know. I think the verdict's still out on that.
I think it's just all of it. I think it's resentment because other people didn't have to experience it.
They don't understand. I think it's the experience itself.
I think it's the guilt. It's the loss.
I think it's all of it wrapped up, and that's the product that you get.

I think you guys certainly have it a lot worse because you're down there. It's a lot different from 20, 30,000 feet.
Yeah, maybe, maybe not. But, you know, it sounds like you're struggling with it.
Yeah. Maybe that's what brings me closer to my faith.

Hopefully it's not like me trying to justify.

Yeah.

How did you find your faith? So I grew up, we went to church in Georgia, but it was more of a formality. I think the extended family was part of the expectation, but I don't remember much of it.
Sunday school, getting donuts and Krispy Kreme afterwards, that was about it. Once we moved up at age five, we didn't step foot in a church.
It wasn't a part of my upbringing. I always believed there was something.
I just didn't. I was ignorant.
I just didn't have the education or mentorship. And it actually wasn't until, in fact, I didn't even know if I was baptized.
We grew up Lutheran. And then married my wife, and she's very strong Christian.

In 2011, I was, we were, I can't remember where we were stationed, but we were on vacation in Minnesota. Her parents' house, live on a lake, cabin on a lake.
and our kids are I can't remember

2, 4

and 6 living on a lake, cabin on a lake. And our kids are, I can't remember, two, four, and six.
Two girls and a boy. And our four-year-old's going to be baptized.
And so that's part of the trip to up north. And so we're up there for for vacation things are all going on and and um um it's fourth of july and we're we're having uh prep for fireworks we get the whole all the dads are getting together the kids have been playing on the lake all day and it's evening now they're you know shepherd inside take baths and get in their jammies and get ready for the fireworks.

And we go out back, not the lakeside. We go up garage.
It's like 300 yards away.

Tree lines. It's out of earshot and everything.
And my four-year-old daughter, Maddie,

she sneaks out of the house, sneaks down to the dock. She's looking for a toy she left.
And she reaches over and falls off the dock into the water. And I'm up completely earshot away.
Can't see, can't hear anything. We're in the garage working, music's going.
And all of a sudden, I'm overcome with panic. Just complete panic.
Hair on the back of my head, I start freaking out and I just run out of the garage and I run around the house and I don't even know where I'm going. And I just run towards the water and I don't even know what I'm looking for, but I'm just panicking, starting to yell.
And all of a sudden I see a body out in the water and it's, it's Maddie face down in the water about, I don't know, 50 yards off the dock. And I dive in, pull her to the dock and resuscitate her, and she comes back pretty quick.

And I'm screaming to God, please save my daughter. And we take her to the ER, and she gets checked out, and absolutely nothing wrong.
No idea how long she was down. The doctor thinks she was down for probably about two to three minutes.
And the sheer divine coincidence of the entire situation is that we were baptized just hours before together because she was scheduled to get baptized. And my wife says, hey, we don't know if you've been baptized.
Do you want to get baptized with Maddie? And I'm like, sure, I'll go along to get along. I believe in something.
Sounds like a good idea. We bond.
And this was literally hours before saving her life. And that was God.
Divine intervention. There's no way it wasn't.
Because I was heads down in the garage, couldn't hear anything,

and I just sheer panic.

So he was getting my attention.

And I'm still, you know, processing my faith.

It's a journey.

I am fully committed.

It's, you know, a common question when you go to interviews and stuff like that.'s like what are you reading you know what's the latest book you read I'm just reading the Bible I find my guidance and messages and you name it I'm reading the Bible just to because I think that's the answer to everything. When did this happen?

What's the timeline here?

2011.

2011.

So this was 14 years ago.

Yeah, and so that's what brought me closer to Christ.

And it's only getting more and more intense or matured over the years. You know, going to space, there's just moments that you're trying to make sense of everything.
And it's just this, it's a battle. It's a journey.
It's challenging because back to that whole, you know, we have free will. We can think, we have the freedom to think anything we want and make the decisions that we want.
But I'm trying to focus my life on making the decisions that puts God first. And that, you know, it's kind of why I want to speak more at this point in my life, is to share my stories.
Hopefully, God can use me as a voice to get His message out. Have you had any more experiences? Nothing that intense.
There were moments on Orbit where where I'm trying to reflect and, you know, it's

this, I had this overwhelming sensation of feeling insignificant on orbit.

Just looking down, knowing there's 8 billion people down there on the planet.

And, you know, I'm traveling around every hour and a half and 17,500 miles an hour. and I'm just trying to make sense of it all and put significance behind it.
And I've been reminded constantly when I get into the Word and start reading, it's just like, it's not about me. It's stop making it about you.
There's a greater good. There's a greater cause.
There's a higher purpose. I'm just, I'm so stubborn and I need to learn how to listen better.
Because that's what I, you know, that's that journey. That's that struggle that I feel.
It's like we're just constantly bouncing off the bumpers through life.

And it's like, it's selfish endeavors.

And then I got to bring it back to more of a centrally focused faith walk.

And yeah, it's a bit of a ramble.

Well, that's a pretty big experience.

It was for me. I'll bet it was.
And you said your daughter was in there for, they estimate, 20 minutes? No, two to three minutes. Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where the hell did I get 20 minutes? Yeah, she would...
We were two to three minutes. I mean, holy shit.
I mean, she was blue when I pulled her up. Never felt so helpless in my life.
You know, feel like you're invincible. What did you do? CPR? I started resuscitating.
She started, you know, after 30 seconds or so, she starts coughing up and getting a little bit of her color back. And she comes too.
Then we're worried about brain function at that point,

oxygen deprivation, and take her to the ER.

Check her out.

Absolutely nothing wrong with her.

She's a healthy little four-year-old, pigtails.

Yeah.

Now she's a pain in the ass, 17-year-old. What do you mean reflection when you're up in space? I can certainly talk about this when we get to space, but they call it the overview effect, and it affects people differently.
it's it's a cognitive shift that happens in your perception of it could be your perception of visual what you're seeing of the planet um life perspective um it can be spiritual it can be intellectual um but when you see the planet from especially where the that we went to, it's the highest that anyone's been in 50 years since Apollo 17. It's the highest Earth orbit ever flown.
And it's almost like this, my immediate response or feeling was like, it's this visual illustration of what life must have been like back at the creation of the heavens and the earth, because all you can see is oceans and continents. You can't make out any details, you know, because when we, that's on the apogee, the furthest part of the orbit, it's highly cyclical.
So it's pretty close on the perigee. The backside was really close, 190 kilometers.
So it's 1400 by 190. So it's um uh pretty close on the perigee the backside was really close 190 kilometers so it's 1400 by 190 so it's it's very far and then we skim and when you're skimming the atmosphere it's like you can see contrails you can see geographical features all these land masses and but up above it's it's it looks like you know what the planet must have looked like its creation.
So when you have this perspective and you're going through this overview effect, it's just, for me, it was that feeling initially of insignificance and trying to make sense of it all. And it's what's unique, and it's almost like this, and that's why I'm so interested in some of your podcasts, like the NDEs, and when Pastor Burke talks about some of the things that he's interviewed, the 1,500 people with the NDE experiences, It's like, and this is by no means anywhere near what they've gone through.
But the light, the radiant light projected on the earth versus seeing it from the surface, looking through the atmosphere, and it's filtered by all the different gases. It's just this radiant glow and it's almost like this transcendence of your senses.

It's not just visual.

It's almost like you can feel the radiant glow of the light of the planet.

And it's bright, but it's not like looking up at the sun kind of blinding light. It's just this radiant and it's constantly evolving because you're traveling so fast and sunrises and sunsets are happening every 90 minutes.
Our orbit was 106 minutes just based on its shape. And it starts off, the phenomenon is called the thin blue line.
It's the dawning of a new day. It's just this arc of a blue-purplish hue as the sun starts penetrating the atmosphere.
And it just grows and starts to split into this radiant sunbeams. And then it starts to light up the entire planet.
And then vice versa on the backside, on the sunset, as you see the the night start to eat up and then even at night so when when at night you're seeing all the cultural lighting we saw the northern lights so all the green beautiful uh waves um you see all the stars billions of stars um because you don't have the light pollution that you're used to seeing the moon obviously glowing um you're seeing strings of starlink satellite systems um and then you have this pulsing of the draco engines it's just these constant engines that are firing to keep you oriented in the capsule based on you you know, the priorities to point the satellite, the antennas towards the satellite for communication purposes. So that puts out this like constant hues of orange and yellows and, and all of that together, you're just constantly seeing something new.
And it's just, it's not something, you stare to sunset for 5, 10 minutes as the sun goes down. It's just this constant evolution of this radiant glow.
And it just feels like it's more than just visual. That makes any sense.
Again, it's, I'm having a hard time articulating. It's only been five, six months since we were up there.
And that's, you know, the ISS, they're up there for six months. They're at 400 kilometers.
We went an extra 1,000 kilometers past that. So slightly different perspective.
Yeah. Does that strengthen your faith? 100%.
I am a firm believer God created everything. I don't see how it couldn't.
It'd be a sequence of millions and millions of miracles to happen. You know, you look at the planet and then you look at the other direction, it's intimidating.
I mean, it's black. There's to think what's out there.
Endless. You know, it's, that is intimidating.
I'm hoping at some point in my life, I'll make more sense of the experience. And I hope I didn't miss my opportunity while I was there trying to absorb.
Because you're a very operated mindset. You're focused on the mission.
We've got 40 science and research experiments. I don't want to screw it up.
And we've got the spacewalk on day three and the Starlink test going on and all this radiation testing we're going through. And you know, that's, you got this mission mindset,

but this is also something that very few people have experienced.

And I hope at some point I can communicate and articulate

that impact it had on my perspective. Yeah.
See, I don't know, man. You know, we're talking, you know, back to the decision-making and all this, you know, killing people, combat.
What's it going to be like when we meet him, things like that. One, if he was done with you, then I don't think he would have experienced that up there.
You know what I mean? I think he's still working on everybody, no matter what you've done. And it's those experiences that draw you to the light.
And, you know, I don't know. I think about this kind of stuff all the time.
And I think... Is he still working on you or is the book's written? You're just...
I think he's... You're in your next chapter.
I think he's working on you or is the book's written? You're just in your next chapter. I think he's working on you all the way until the end.
It's a tricky world. I think there's only two influences in this world.
There's fucking good and there is evil. And that's it.
And it's kind of weird the way you just described the earth with the lightness and the darkness and continuously rotating. Because I just, I don't remember who I was talking to or how this even came up.
But I described it as, I was talking to somebody about the end.

Kind of like revelations type stuff, like the end, because everybody's, oh, you know, is the sky falling? Are we in end times? I mean, a lot of people think we are, and everybody's looking for the signs. and the way I described it was I think,

I don't think anybody knows when the end is. I mean, even in the Bible, it says nobody, Jesus doesn't even know when the end is.
And the way I kind of like think it's happening is, if you look at like a marble, like a two-tone marble, you know, but maybe it's fluid in there and in the two colors are just constantly fighting each other for what takes over the marble you know i think that's very similar to good and evil and there are times that it looks like evil is potentially taking up more surface area than good and then and then things start to change and then you see you know what i'm saying and i think that's just constant it's just a constant battle for total control of the planet and what that looks like and And it's the two influences, you know, going to work against each other. And even like this conversation right now, you know, that we're having, it's going to get people thinking.
And it's going to get people thinking that have never thought about that before. And the colors are going to start to change.
And more good is going to start to overcome more darkness. And the way you just described the planet with the light and the dark, I mean, that's kind of how I think of this all, man.
And it's just constantly evolving. It's always changing just like that marble.
you know what i mean absolutely and and and he knows how tricky evil can be i mean we were both immersed in a culture where that became the normal.

I got to kill somebody. I finally got the opportunity to kill somebody.
Or I never got to kill anybody. You know, and that's not fucking a good way to think.
you know but I mean

you get

you enter into, you enter into the military at a young age. You're with all your idols, the people that you want to be, the F-16 pilots, the lineage all the way back to World War I,

and you want to live up to what those guys have done.

And I joined the SEAL teams, and I want to live up to the Vietnam generation

and the World War II guys.

And, you know, like it's just it becomes you.

It becomes you.

You immerse yourself into that culture, and then it seems good.

It seems good. It seems good.

It's a fucking deception.

It's a deception, whether you're doing it for the country or whatever.

Yeah, we all did it for the country, right?

Well, who says the country's good?

Right.

And who says that country's bad?

And, yeah, we can talk about 9-11 and all that kind of stuff, you know what I mean?

But what were we doing there for 20 years right 20 fucking years you know and so and so when i say like he's still working on you i mean it's not over you know you're either going to succumb to good or you're going to come to evil and i think i think there's seasons of it and when you start steering one way the other way is trying to pull you back and both of them you know what i mean and and and they talk about deception and how how satan is the master of deception and he he uses temptation, whether that's money or sex or living up to a culture. Yeah.
And it and it may seem good it may you know maybe it is but it's it's it's it's you know we're just fucking humans man yeah i love that analogy i mean my first thought was and i didn't even comprehend it until you mentioned it but you talk about good and evil light and felt this warm glow looking on the planet. Just loved.
It was mesmerizing. I even wanted to put my eyes off it.
And you look through the Ford hatch towards space and it's just this intimidating. It's almost like you're at that cliff scuba diving in that black abyss over the ledge.
You know, you feel a lot more security, probably where that ambient light's coming from. Yeah, there's something there I like.
But how do we, I mean, you talk about that marble and the constant, whether it's a struggle or not search, but constant evolution, looking for equilibrium. And this is rhetorical, but how do we influence more good than evil as that morph continues to happen with the marble of good and evil? Yeah, that's a good question.
Or do we, it's in God's hands. I mean, they say everything's in God's hands, right? But it, I mean, I think, you know, we talk about free will, and I think that is really the only free will that we have.
It's good and evil. It's good and evil.
You can either choose to believe or choose not to believe because everything else is so fucking contorted and twisted and decept. You know, there's just so much deception out there.

And I think that, that,

I think that you cannot,

as hard as this sounds,

I think you cannot succumb,

you cannot sacrifice your values for temptation.

Does that make sense?

You should not or you physically cannot?

I think you should not because that is staying true to yourself, which is good.

And temptation is everywhere. It's money, it's sex, it's culture, it's all of that stuff.
And you just see people every day. They sacrifice their values for temptation, and they justify.
if you catch yourself justifying you know why you did something or or do you know what i'm talking about we've all done it right absolutely all done it i did this to this person probably wasn't that great of a you know it wasn't a good thing to do but now i'm stuck in the justification process like that well i had to do that because this happened to me and that happened they did this to me and so this is how i justify it or or you know somebody fucked you over or you fuck somebody over and you have to then then you catch them justifying or justifying to yourself why you made the decisions that you made.

And that alone in itself is, that's succumbing to evil. Evil.
Do you think, I've always tied authenticity to being true to your values. Do you think you can be authentically evil? or do you think

people are naturally

you be authentically evil? Or do you think people are naturally authentically good, and as long as they are authentic, they can maintain true values? I think that we are more evil than we are good because it takes more effort to be good and not succumb to temptation than it does to be evil and succumb to all that shit. Because the reward doesn't come until the end to be good.
The reward to be evil is immediate.

It's an immediate reward.

So we're evil and weak.

Shit on. shit hot yeah you want to take a break sure let's take a break I'd like to invite you to gain access to an exclusive experience on Vigilance Elite Patreon our patrons are the the driving force behind the success of this show, and their support allows us to keep doing what we do.
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If you haven't already, please take a minute over to itunes and leave the sean ryan show a review we read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support thank you let's get back to the show that was a good. I have a lot to think about.

Now I'm 51.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was heavy.

Where were we?

I have no idea.

Yeah.

Any more thoughts on that?

Plenty.

But that's what he's doing.

He's at work.

You know?

He's got my attention, that's for sure.

I just wish I could.

I mean, he's trying to save us from this.

That's the whole thing, right?

Well, look how stubborn the prophets were, man.

They had a tough time listening, and he's telling them outright,

I'm going to die for your sins and and they had a hard time believing and they were with them you know thankful we do have the the stories in the bible yeah you know he just he sprinkles these things in our lives, like your daughter. Mm-hmm.
You know? And it's, I mean, that sounds like a very profound moment, you know, not just because you saved your daughter's life, but spiritually, you know, it's, we're all looking for some type of proof, right? And because it is, it's hard to believe this stuff.

It's just, it is.

But when you get those little, sometimes they're not always little.

Sometimes they slap you in the face just like what happened to you.

I mean, that's what that is.

It's, in my opinion, that's what that is. That is, here's what that is.
It's, in my opinion, that's what that is.

That is, here's what you needed, you know, so that you can believe.

And from what I've noticed in my journey, and I'm not very far along in this either.

It sounds like our childhood was very similar.

I mean, I grew up Catholic, and I didn't really, you know know it was a hassle to go to church i didn't want to go i didn't want to go to sunday school i didn't want to do any of that i never i never took it seriously until what i guess about two years ago you know and ever since then like i just i'm just always paying attention and I see, now I even see little things that get, that get dropped, you know? And, and I just look at them like, oh, that's, all right, I'm on the right path, or that's the sign that I needed.

And I think it happens all the time. Absolutely.
But we just don't have the humility to listen. We think we have all the answers.
Yep. or we're so distracted in our own bullshit that we're not,

it's impossible to see it because we're not we're not looking and so the the you know the more i can get out of the noise and and start paying attention it's just like having your eyes wide open, you know, everywhere. They come all the time.
It's pretty cool. Pretty cool stuff.
Especially when you know it's real and you know what it is. And you're convicted.
Yeah. It's just building that conviction is what's tough.
Yeah, though, that stuff that you were talking about with Earth, that just made me, I just had that conversation, or just used that marble reference. I think it was last weekend.
I can't remember who the hell I was talking to, but that's just how I envision it. That's just how I envision what's going on in the world and how it all plays out.
But what got you interested in becoming an astronaut anyways?hips that I'd built and fostered over the years. When I was coming off the Thunderbird assignment, I met a gentleman by the name of Jared Isaacman, a very successful entrepreneur, no military background, but started his very successful multi-billion dollar payment processing company, parents' basement when he was 16.
His passion has always been aviation. So he progressed, started the hobby early, 18 years old, and just worked his way up in civilian world um and he started a civilian air show demonstration team former fighter pilots former thunderbirds and i was not a part of that but i had met them while they were doing air shows just through the community um and then that's when i first met jared and then a couple years later, I'm the commander of the aggressor squadron for the Air Force.
So there's two units within the Air Force that have dedicated missions of doing adversary support, OP4, just replicating the bad guys, China, Russia tactics. And that's your sole purpose in life versus, and there's only

two units, one in Vegas and one in Alaska. Otherwise, if you're like stationed in Italy

or Korea, you're generating your own bad guys organically. So you'd be in your F-16,

you'd dumb it down and simulate foreign tactics, threat tactics, help me train, and then we'd swap roles next day. It's not a very good use of resources.
But there's two units dedicated to do this. And one's in Vegas where we have a lot of the red flag exercises, the big coalition exercises.
The weapons school is located there. So there's a lot of reasons why people go to Vegas to train.
Airspace is good. Area 51 area.
And I was the commander of that organization. So that was my job.
And his air show gig went on for about two years. And he wanted to do something bigger.
And he's always been a patriot. Service has been a big part of, you know, who he is.
And he had the resources to kind of, you know, develop some of this, um, uh, novel ideas. And one of them was let's, let's turn this fleet of fighters doing air shows into a commercial adversary organization.
And now we can provide this service to the military, DOD, Air Force, Navy, Army, and a casserole, and the Marines. And it's going to be a fraction of the cost.
So instead of doing it organically all over the world, you know, 20 grand an hour at the

cheapest. And it's going to be a fraction of the cost.
So instead of doing it organically all over the world, you know, 20 grand an hour at the cheapest,

let's do something where it's a fraction of the cost using old fleets of fighters that he will acquire.

A4s, L159s, F1s, countries that are either disbanding their fleets of old fighter jets. that there's not a big market out there people there's not many customers um or they're upgrading their fleet of generation aircraft to the next level um so he goes out proactively and acquires a fleet from new zealand or fleet from uh czech republic from Spain, from France, and builds the largest

privately owned fleet of fighter jets.

Wow.

And this is while I was an aggressor.

So we had a little bit of interaction.

He's just bouncing ideas off me and just seeing if it's, you know, what's the likelihood of

the Air Force, you know, interested in this kind of concept.

And so he builds this company, you you know build it and they will come kind of before he even had a contract and um they did put in a lot of hard work and and eventually when i retired i was coming off afghanistan i'm like the last thing i want to do is go fly airlines. That's a typical career path coming out of the military.

And long story short, my wife was diagnosed with cancer when I was deployed, right before I was deployed.

And she's got to pick up the family, a 10, an 8, and a 6-year-old, move from a foreign country back to the U.S.,

establish care in Boston with her oncologist, and her husband's deployed to a combat zone. So God bless her and her service to her country.
So I was coming off of Afghanistan, and the last thing I want to do is go fly airlines. It's not my jam.
I needed to do something different. So was building this company and I'm like hey you got any room for an old fighter pilot because I was staring at like if I stayed in the military beyond 20 it's you know Colonel you're going to one year remote here and a joint staff here and you have less and less control over your career and we didn't know what kristin's future was going to look like with with her issues so he brings me on the team and he secures a contract with the air force just a basic proof of concept contract and that just ignited the industry turned into a six billion dollar it's four primary players in this field.
And they would just acquire all these fleets of aging fighters, kind of sweeten them up with better avionics, more capability. But the platform was still kind of a third generation, fourth generation.
So it gave more iron in the sky for F-22s and F-35s to train against. So we established this first contract in Vegas, started supporting the Super Bowl of all Super Bowls, red flag exercises and weapons school.
And we did that for about five years. That was a blast.
was, I started offline, but I'm like, I kind of want to do something different. So I got involved in the business development side.
Uh, so I did that, uh, for about five years. Um, he ends up selling the company cause he's going public with his, um, with his other company.
And, uh, as soon as he as he left, the culture changed. And I lasted about a month, and I'm like, I'm out.
And so he pulls me over to Shift 4 to do business development, or strategy. Fish out of water.
So I was doing FinTech, trying to figure it all out, just learning from him and his team. And they're recently gone public.
It's kind of a big deal company. But he started having conversations with SpaceX.
So he starts building this relationship. And it ended up being the first opportunity for a commercial flight, the first all-civilian mission to space.
So he secures the relationship and the contract for this mission. And he you know, he's got a core of individuals like me,

and he brings us all together.

And he's like, hey, here's my vision.

And, you know, we're all excited.

We might get to go to space.

And he's like, no, this is not taking your buddies fishing.

You know, this is something bigger. We're going to make an impact with this.
So that's where we started to develop. And this was 2020, right in the middle of COVID.
We came up with this concept of the first all-civilian mission of space. We're going to randomly select this crew.
And within six months, we're going to train them for space, take elements of NASA's training, because they take three to four years before they go to space. So we obviously don't have that luxury and resources.
And commercial space is about to make this huge paradigm shift in their philosophy. There was only two, I think two i think civilians that had been to space one on a soyuz um or both on a soyuz i think i'm not sure someone's going to fact check me on that one but um but this was like this is the big deal um and so we randomly selected his crew and we wanted to partner with partner with a nonprofit so we could have a continued impact, positive impact on life on Earth.
So we, well, back up even a second. Once he pitched this idea, I'm doing whole fintech, VP of strategy.
I'm like, I'll do whatever you want. This is more up my alley.
And so I take on the role as the mission director. That's a little false humility on my part.
And the fact that a mission director sits in mission control and controls, that's not what I was doing. I was doing all the legwork, the coordination, the fundraising, logistics, sitting through the training, but more just because I was doing all these cats and dogs.
So we ended up partnering with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital because he's supported Make-A-Wish.
he just, this means a lot to him. And we had this platform and this opportunity to continue to improve life on earth.
But let's, you know, let's explore what's out there as well. So we ended up giving one seat to St.
Jude. And then we were going to do a sweepstakes for another seat and a contest for the fourth seat so we ended up selecting um christmas i think it was either right after day after christmas or not we we have a conversation with the ceo at st jude and we end up giving one seat to haley arsenault i think she was 28 at the time she was a a cancer survivor.
She beat cancer when she was 10. And she went on to be a physician's assistant at St.
Jude because they saved her life. Great story.
She's a rock star. So we picked her, and then we did a sweepstakes, the Super Bowl commercial in 21, and that kicked off our sweepstakes to raise money for St.
Jude. Everything 100% for St.
Jude. Whatever we made in this project was St.
Jude. Ends up being $250 million.
Wow. And, you know, less than, you know, a six-month period.
So we do sweepstakes, 30 days, and then we're going to randomly pull a name out of the hat. And each seat had a quality or concept behind it.
Leadership, hope, generosity, and prosperity were the three seats, if you will. Jared's leadership, hope was Haley, generosity was the sweepstakes, donations.
Come to find out, we picked a name out of a hat, and the individual who was selected medically disqualified himself. And so based on his generosity, he's like, I got to give the seat back i i can't do this flight but i appreciate that and and we're like no this is your seat you can do whatever you want with it and so he actually through his generosity gives it to one of his buddies um who also made a donation and that was Chris Sombroski and then we did a contest for the last seat

and that's the whole, you know, he was an entrepreneur. He had many opportunities or he, you know, through his hard work created opportunities and entrepreneurship.
And he's a big believer in that. So we had a contest, you know, someone who was starting a small business and we social media helped us all these marketing companies that helped us and um we a panel of celebrities picked you know the best video promoting their small business so dr cyan proctor was the individual pick for that seat so the crew set it's like end of February, beginning of March.
Immediately pick them up, take them to training. And over the next less than six months, they go through training.
And we do various things for the training. Centrifuge, the altitude chamber for pressure altitude, just getting an idea of your hypoxic symptoms and stuff like that.
And then all the simulator training. We climbed Mount Rainier for some experiential training.
Some of the things that astronauts already do. We just kind of, fighter jets, we train them.
Jared and I obviously flew and the other two crew members. Or yeah we'd swap the three in our back seats so we'd give them experience in fighter jets and blah blah so we go we do this and it's hair on fire for six months just coming and going constantly going to headquarters spacex headquarters in la uh we go to johnson space center for training with nasa collaboration elements and then we go to Kennedy Space Center for training with NASA, collaboration elements.
And then we go to Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, because all human space flight's out of there. Majority of the launch is almost 95% of them.
There's been a couple that weren't off of Pad 39 Alpha. But it's the historic one, shuttles, Apollo, right there in Cape Canaveral.
And then they go to space. They spent three days in orbit.
Very successful. Splash down in the Atlantic, and, you know, we wrap it up in September.
Did a Netflix documentary called Countdown, five-part series, kind of explains the entire project. It's pretty cool.
The week, or the month leading up to their launch, conversations about the next project began because we're having too much fun. But this is, we never do things, it's always what's the next step up.
And so we started to formulate a program, which became the Polaris program, which is a three-part, up to three missions. And it's a developmental spaceflight program.
And this is analogous to Project Gemini.

So if you look at NASA's history, you've got initial spaceflight with Project Mercury.

Prove that we could get to space.

And then you leapfrog, that was the 50s, and then leapfrog over to the late 60s and 70s

when we went to the moon.

You've got the Apollo program.

Well, in between there there in the 60s

over a five-year span there's 12 missions called Project Gemini and the purpose behind that

developmental program was to solve some big challenges they had to figure out how to dock

vehicles in space to do a spacewalk to do long duration missions longer duration missions than

Mercury multi-crew missions these are all things they had to solve before they headed to the moon

Thank you. Long duration missions, longer duration missions than Mercury.
Multi-crew missions. These are all things they had to solve before they headed to the moon.
So in a similar fashion, we kind of built the Polaris program off of a developmental concept. Where we're helping identify what challenges does SpaceX and other companies face trying to get back to the lunar surface and Mars and beyond.
The first two missions of the Polaris program are aboard the Falcon 9 with the Dragon capsule. And then the third flight is supposed to be the first human space flight of Starship, which will might be launching in the next couple hours, Test Flight 8.
Wow.

Largest rocket ever built, bigger than Saturn V. That's the vehicle that I believe will

go back to the moon and that will go to Mars. So that's the idea behind the Polaris program.

And then the first mission we did in September, it's called Polaris Dawn.

And based on our conversations with SpaceX andon about what do we want to accomplish again what challenges well we got to do a spacewalk it's the idea is that we want hundreds if not thousands of people bouncing on the surface of the moon we got to build a spacesuit um so what and we got to do a spacewalk so let's do the first commercial spacewalk well we're pushing the envelope so let's extend the capabilities of the falcon 9 and the dragon capsule and go further and fast you know further and further than someone anyone has been in over 50 years and you know what came out of that is let's set the Earth orbit altitude record.

It was originally set by Gemini 11 back in 1966.

Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon went up to 1,368 kilometers.

Put that in context, the station's right around 400.

Starlink's right around 350, 300, 350 kilometers. Where do we want to go? Well, ideally, let's go touch the lower portions of the Van Allen Belt, higher radiation level caused by the gravitational pull.
And let's just push the envelope. So it was about the spacewalk.
It was about the altitude. And then communication is a big challenge, especially when we talk about going to Mars.
Eight months, the broadband requirements and the latency issues. Imagine sending back a ComByte that's 30 minutes old, if not hours.
It becomes obsolete at that point. You've already solved whatever issue you're working on or your situation is a hell of a lot worse.
So Starlink is the future of communication with it being laser-based. Let's see if we can get it to work from space for the very first time.
Works on Earth, great. We would take these dishes.
We actually took some to the Ukraine in the beginning of the war to drop off. So St.
Jude Satellite Hospitals, because they were getting destroyed in the beginning, so they had to relocate and take all these patients and kids to Poland and Macedonia. And we delivered some Starlinks.
So, Jude could set up their hospitals and have telecommunications or telemedicine capability with doctors back at Memphis. So, works on Earth.
We've got to figure out if it works in in space which was a cosmic feat in and of itself for the engineers to figure that one out um and then oh by the way we're going to be up there for five days that's the life of you know that's about as long as you can exist up there in that capsule alone not docking with a space station let's fill fill it with science and research. And we'll focus those 40 experiments on, again, what are the challenges the human body faces for these longer duration missions in the future? Because that's going to be the, you know, kid's opinion, that's the biggest limiting factor is going to be the human body.
Because austere environment of space is it's tough you know besides being a vacuum you got to deal with zero gravity loneliness psychological issues just we are meant for 1g on earth yeah so so those were the four main objectives um and then we spent three years training for those objectives. How did you get picked? So based on my contributions during Inspiration 4, and the fact that I had operational test background, I did a lot of tests.
There's a unit called the 422 Testing Evaluation Squadron at Nellis, we do um we test new weapons new software new computer systems and on the platform it's not a test pilot Chuck Yeager type developmental test that's done at Edwards that's done testing on the platform this is more specific to weapons and software upgrades and capabilities. So I've had background experience in doing operational tests.
And this being a test program, it was kind of a logical fit. I caveat that with there are plenty of people in this world that could have been in my seat.
I know I'm very blessed to have this opportunity. And again, God's influence for sure, especially going through the training.
Because you've got Jared, a very experienced astronaut, been to space already, already highly intellectual individual, knows these systems inside and out. And oh, by the way, we're going up in the same capsule he's already been up in.
So he's, he didn't even have to study. He does because he's a dedicated individual.
But, and then we have our two other crew members and we kind of, this is a collaboration partnership with SpaceX. So we gave two seats to SpaceX.
And we selected Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. And they were both engineers that were involved in the first mission.
So Sarah, she was a graduate at CU Boulder, one of the smartest individuals I've ever met. She was hired as a SpaceX engineer to be the lead astronaut trainer.
So she teaches astronauts how to operate the vehicle. So she knows the systems inside and out.
In fact, she's teaching our instructors things as we go through this program. And then Anna Menon, she's got a master's in biomedical engineering.
She used to work at NASA. And she was hired by SpaceX to pretty much write the procedures, the nominal procedures, contingencies for our vehicle.
So again, these two know the systems inside and out. And then you got Kidd, outdoor education, barely graduates college.
So I know my place. It kind of tainted my attitude or approach in the beginning.
And it took some failed training events to wake me up. And that kind of gets back to that whole, it's not about me.
There's a lot riding on this. and I need to step up because I'm being way too reliant upon my crew to pull me along.
Because we go into this program, it's developmental. We only have three years to focus on these huge milestones.
So it's like, hey, we're going to assume everyone's knowledge is right around here. We're only going to focus on this top tier stuff.
And I'm kind of going along, get along. I'm also, I have this fear of failure, fear of judgment and doubt.
Not that they would ever judge me. But it's like, I'm hanging on and I'm, you know, when I'm asked questions, it's like, I'll deflect with humor.
I'll respond questions with questions. Phone a friend.
Use way too much leverage on the crew. Not fully grasping, hey, this takes a full team.
This takes all four crew members. Because there might be situations where, you know, they lean on me in time of need.
And if I fail them because I didn't get my game where it needs to be, this could go really bad. And, you know, my wake up call was actually, you know, it was a training scenario.
We're in the simulator. There's kind of three levels of training that we did.
did physiological training that's the centrifuge the altitude chamber the vacuum chamber the zero g flights there's the the practical training that we went through experiential mountaineering scuba diving skydiving flying fighter jets and then there's the procedural where we spend a majority of our time in the simulator. And they would give us very difficult situations, scenarios.
You know, some very unlikely, but, you know, it's to test our knowledge and our experience and our teamwork and all that stuff. And one of the scenarios was Jared is incapacitated.
For whatever reason, he's out. And now we've got to do an emergency deorbit.
And based on the configuration of the cockpit or the capsule, there's three displays. And Jared and I sit in the middle as the commander of the pilot.
And we are the only ones with access to those three screens. And that's where all the systems and procedures are.
And then the outboard seats, Sarah and Anna, mission specialist, they can't see the screens when they're strapped in their seat. You know, 90% of the mission, we're out of our seats floating around and doing whatever, and you have access to the screens.
You just float underneath. Well, Jared's incapacitated.
Well, in nominal procedures, he's doing everything, and I'm backing him up. I'm just kind of verifying what he's doing action-wise and checks and balances.

Well, he's out. So, kid's there to save the day, and I fail miserably.
It's the most humbling experience because I can't keep up. I make the wrong decisions.
I can't rely upon these two because they can't see what I'm looking at on the screen. It was just, it was an epic fail.
and that was the attitude adjustment that I had.

I'm like, on the screen. It was just, it was an epic fail.
And that was the attitude adjustment that I had. I'm like, I got to step up.
I got to, I got to change. I got to be more humble, you know, have more humility in the fact that I need to rely upon my, and be honest with my weaknesses and lean on my crew members because they got to get help me get my knowledge where

it needs to be and i need to be i need to be authentic in the fact that if i'm going to set goals to get my knowledge to where it needs to be i got to be true to myself and know where my limits are but it's it's got to get to a certain threshold if if you know because again getting back to this is 100%, this is zero fail. We have to, you know, have mission success or we're going to set the entire space exploration program, not just SpaceX, but everybody back.
And we're doing things, we're doing some crazy shit. Anyways, that's a lot.
That's it. Wow.
And how long was this timeline? Three years? Three years we were supposed to launch. The biggest challenge, and talking about SpaceX, I go on all day long how smart these people are.
The long pole in the tent was the development of the EVA suit. So they had to build a brand new suit that, you know, the IVA suit they wear to and from the station, it's meant to pressurize in the case of a depressed situation and keep astronauts alive.
But it's not meant intentionally to go outside of the capsule in the vacuum of space. So they had to build a new suit.
So they took the prototype, the IBA suit, and spent years enhancing, you know, with a big focus on thermals because it's a 250-degree plus or minus swing when you're either in the sun or in the clips of the wow so it's plus or minus 250 degrees um mobility is a concern because it's pressurized so and we had to come up with a way to bring the entire capsule down to vacuum because we don't have the luxury of um an airlock like they have in the space station So we have to bring the entire capsule down to vacuum because we don't have the luxury of an airlock like they have in the space station. So we have to bring the entire capsule, which means we're all four going to be pressurized, which has never been done before.
Never had four astronauts involved in the same spacewalk. So we had to come up with this novel pre-breathe approach profile where we're going to bring the pressure down in the capsule,

increase the oxygen levels,

because we're trying to mitigate the risk of DCS.

What's DCS?

Decompression sickness.

Oh, okay.

Nitrogen bubbles, scuba concerns.

Yeah.

Because if we do it too rapidly,

because on the space station and the airlock, they're going to pre-breathe 100 oxygen and it's going to purge all those nitrogen bubbles out of your system so dcs isn't a huge concern it's still minor but it's not huge we don't have enough gas oxygen on board to purge our entire system so we have to come up with this stair-step approach where we'll increase the oxygen mitigate the risk bring the pressure down so we get closer and closer so we're climatizing the body to those lower pressures with increased oxygen levels and we're not eating up our gas consumption too soon.

Anyways, so... levels and we're not eating up our gas consumption too soon anyways um so uh back to the suit their big focus in the development of over that three-year period was thermals mobility they came up with these new funky joints um uh certain bearings on all these joints to have mobility because you want it pliable when you're not pressurized you want to be able to move you know it's a one piece it's got a big old spiral zipper around the waist it's just a zipper you know you just cinch it down as it's maybe almost like a dry suit okay but it handles pressure so we were just over five psi delta so as we're coming down you know we're at 14.7 at sea at you know sea level and then you know as you go up to the mount everest it's i don't know where it's at you know nine ten psi and then eventually you're going to work it down until, you know, you can't survive anymore.
And that pressure delta is always going to be a plus 5. So as long as we maintain that plus 5, the suit's pressurized and we can bring it all the way down to a vacuum.
And then open the hatch and go outside. And so that was a big focus is coming up with all these different thermal layers, like 12 different layers.
The visor had to be changed. They added a helmet-mounted sight or, yeah, more of a HUD, not a queuing system.
We didn't laser. It just projected like pressure, temperature, duration.
Like a heads-up display? Yeah. Okay.
That's exactly what it was. A little monocle.
And it's just, this team was insane. They would, it's like a monster garage.
So they would piecemeal. I'd be walking around this Frankenstein suit.
This glove is, this arm is completely different and this bearing is different. And we would be trying out all this stuff.
We'd go home on Friday. We'd fly back on Monday for more training and it's completely revamped hey we're going to try out this hud with this monocle um see what you like give us some feedback and and this was what it was like over the course of two and a half years going through this program is developing and you look at the the initial like holy shit i'm going to space in this suit, to the final product.

It was like, it was insane.

Damn.

And that took, you know, decades for other EVA suits to be developed and billion dollar programs.

This was done on, you know, millions.

I don't know how much it costs, but in two and a half years. I mean, it's umbilical, so we're attached to the vehicle to pump in that oxygen, nitrogen, nitrox.
But full faith and confidence, this is only, you know, it's probably revamped. You know, it's been six months.
They're probably on, you know, version six to nine at this point on a new suit. And they'll come up with some self-contained.
They got it. You know, they're like, I was like, I'm like the 51 year, I'm like the oldest dude.
They're all like 20 something, 30 year oldsyear-olds. Brilliant, brilliant.
Very passionate. I love that organization because Elon and Gwen, they set the vision.
There's no doubt this is the vision for the organization. But they're very flat structure where everyone is empowered.
And everyone feels empowered. And that just breeds and fosters this environment of passion.
So, you know, they're willing to work those long hours and long days because they're doing things that are changing the world. You know, Starlink and everything they're doing at SpaceX and what they're able to accomplish in such a short period.

And they have this, you know, the fail fast mentality.

Like when you see Starship, if it blows up, it blows up.

It doesn't matter.

We're going to learn so much from that,

and they'll take it and make the next version even better.

So what do you tell in your family? They've got to be worried about this, right? I'll tell you, it was, yeah, we had our moments. It was tough.
Yeah. Deploying to combat is one thing.
You know, when you intentionally sign up to go to space on a developmental test space flight.

Especially when you thought we were into our retirement years.

Yeah, it was tough.

God bless her for hanging on and putting up with me. Is she glad you did it? Yeah, I mean, certainly pride is not a great thing to...
But she's proud of all the accomplishments and what we did, and she's very thankful it's over, obviously, and I'm safe. Like I said, she's a believer, and she knew it was in God's hands.
But it's still a leap of faith, especially watching that rocket go off. Being strapped to that rocket is an unwavering level of trust.
Because I'm in control you know fighter jet yeah yeah i'm doing

the inputs i can control that and oh by the way if shit's not working out i can punch any jet rocket ship's a lot different yeah what's i mean how okay so how long did it take you to get up there.

So,

and how

exactly did

this go?

Was the

spacewalk at

the same

altitude? it take you to get up there so um and how did how exactly did this go was the spacewalk at the same altitude as the no everything was done different altitudes um highly elliptical meaning we was we'd go far and then pass on the backside really close so 1400 kilometers by 190 our entry altitude was 1200 by 190 so that was just to kind of go through some checks in the systems and then after a couple orbits we bumped up we did some phase burns to get up to that 1400 we set the record we did about eight orbits at that altitude to do some um radiation testing um and then we brought it back down to 750 ish and that's where we did the spacewalk so was that the last thing no that was day three so five days. So the first day, bleeding into the second day, was the altitudes.
And then we phased down immediately. And then the third day is when we did the spacewalk.
And then the rest of the days, we're all assigned some research, Starlink testing, everything else. Let's walk.
Let's walk walk so initial entry into space so even touched on this i mean even the even strapping in you know i i don't know if i told you it's it produces 1.7 million pounds of thrust so that's equivalent of of 70 f-16s 69 f-16s because i'm a fighter pilot one F-16s. 69 F-16s.
Because I'm a fighter pilot. One F-16 is Mach 2, 1500 miles an hour.
Pulling 9 Gs. This thing is like the equivalent of 70.
And what's the big delta, people ask me what's it like comparing to a fighter versus a spaceship? Spaceship. Is I'm in control in a fighter.
So if I'm not digging the G forces, I can ease off. In a spacecraft, it just continues to accelerate.
Doesn't give a shit how you feel. And it's different G forces.
So in a fighter jet, it's head to toe. This is the Z axis, I believe.
So it's centrifugal force that when you pull back on that stick, it's centrifugal force that causes that G force and that pulling of the blood and lower extremities, the fear of passing out because the blood leaves the brain. That's why you wear the G suit and do the G strain to kind of restrict that blood flow.

That is a lot different because in a spaceship,

based on the orientation of the seat,

the G-forces is through the chest.

So it's this, and it builds up to about four and a half Gs.

And so once you, you know, right before liftoff,

this rocket is alive.

It's venting, it's hissing,

it's making all these knocks and pings.

It's swaying. So theing it's making all these knocks and pings it's swaying so the strongback gets retracted and it's just sitting there balancing just waiting to go and you can feel this sway and it's just man and you all you're doing is watching the clock you're strapped in you're i mean they they cinch on you you in Apollo 13, they put your foot on your yanket.

They don't mess up the suit, but it's pretty damn tight. And visor's down, and, you know, here we go.
How long are you in there before takeoff? Or before launch? What do you call it, launch? That's a whole different story. I have an old man bladder.
Yeah, I was wondering that. I mean, besides that, I mean, I don't know how you were in pre-mission going to combat, but me, I feel like I got to pee like every two minutes.

Like, oh, shit, I got to go again.

Oh, shit, I got to go.

Like, then you hear the helos.

Oh, yeah.

I got to go.

People always ask me, what was, were you scared you scared? But that's a lot of anticipation. Dude, I wasn't scared.
I was scared about drowning in my own pee. I peed eight times because we went delay after delay for weather.
And I couldn't hold it. So we wear these, they're called mags, maximum absorbency garment.
Depends. And I went eight times, and I'm drenched, and I'm freezing.
I got trench foot. It's just like pooling.
It's like I'm in the middle of this, and I'm freezing my butt off, shaking. I'm literally just shivering.
I'm like, ladies, let's just get to space so I can get into some warm clothes. And then I'm thinking to myself, zero gravity.
Is this going to float up into my helmet? You can just see the headline now, astronaut drowns in his own hang. He, I don't know.
So that's what was going through my mind during this launch phase um but back to the launch it just you know that once the clock expires those nine maryland engines they just they just come alive and it's like an earthquake it just shakes your world you know you can't concentrate on anything it's just and it's like slow-mo because it just lifts off. And it just slowly starts to build and accelerate and faster and faster.
And the first segment is two and a half minutes. And you're watching the clock and you're watching your profile.
And you're going up. It's an inclination of 51.6 degrees.
And it takes you right up the coastline. And the reason why is if anything happens, the capsule will ejects off the booster and splash down in the Atlantic Ocean.
So you have all those resources along the coast versus going directly out over the Atlantic, and now you're in the middle of the ocean, and you never get recovered kind of thing. So it's accelerating, and you're going faster and faster and faster.
And two and a half minutes is you're waiting for MECO main engine cutoff. And the G forces start to build up and it's, it's four and a half G.
So it just feels like somebody is just sitting on your chest and there's a lot of pressure on the neck. So it's hard to talk, um, and breathe.
And it's just, it's an endurance event. So in a fighter jet, it's just, you pulse 9Gs and you deplete your energy state.
So you can't, can sustain 9Gs. But four and a half for two and a half minutes is fairly intense.
And then Miko happens. And when Miko happens, it's just a big old boom.
And you get launched forward in your straps. And you float because of that de-acceleration because that you know you're no longer connected to the booster and you're waiting for the separation to happen and it's the longest 10 seconds of your life because you have to have the adequate separation for the second stage to light this is a big old merlin vacuum engine it It's only one engine, but it's massive.

220,000 pounds of thrust for one engine.

And as soon as that light, as soon as that engine light, it's just a BAM!

You're back in the seat.

And now you're on a six-minute ride.

And those G-forces build back up to four and a half.

And now you're just on this trajectory.

Eventually, you get to about 200 kilometers. And you level off because you're kind of above the atmosphere.
And you're just accelerating. And you're trying to get as fast as possible.
And you get up to 17,500 miles an hour is orbital velocity. This keeps you in orbit.
Otherwise you get pulled back down into Earth. Because gravity is constantly pulling on you, even at 17.5.
but you're just falling in the same orbit all around

Earth. But if you go slower, eventually gravity pulls you back into the atmosphere.
You hit

all the gases in the atmosphere and you slow down, drag. But once you get up there, you accelerate 17.5, Mach 25, you're going five miles a second.
And you're waiting for that CCO to happen second stage cutoff and that's where that second stage will separate and when that happens again it's just this boom you've separated now you're floating and now you're in that that transition that you know fluid shift organs are shifting brain lift um did Did I explain this? I don't even remember if I did or not. A little bit.
I talked about the space adaptation, the disorientation, that tumbling. Other things that happen is the fluid in your body is shifting.
So it's free floating. So your organs are actually kind of moving around.
And your brain is floating in CSF, but gravity's pulling on it. Well, up there, it starts to shift up, and it floats inside your skull.
And it causes this space fog. It's almost like this fullness.
And if you see images of us, we look full, like bloated, swollen. It's almost like if you hang upside down from your bed, that blood rush,

it's just constant. And it's something you have to get used to.
And it can have an impact. Like I had this chronic headache, mild headache.
I actually did an experimental surgery for this mission a couple years prior.

One of the big concerns is intracranial pressure. So the fluid in your spine, the CSF in your brain, the pressure changes zero gravity.
So it actually applies pressure to the ocular nerve and changes the shape of your eyeball. It flattens your eyeball and it affects the visual acuity.
And it actually can cause temporary blindness. A couple of astronauts have had temporary blindness.
So you imagine the concern. You're on your way to Mars, and you go blind, or you lose significant visual acuity.
We don't know much about it, because we've only done non-invasive experiments. Contact lenses that take pressure measurements.
Little guns you squeeze and point into the eye take measurements. But those are all non-invasive.
They're not as accurate as we would like. And NASA being somewhat risk adverse.
there's never been an invasive experiment. There's no real volunteers and commercial isn't really a thing yet.
Well, I, kid's dumb enough. Yeah, I'll do it.
So I signed up for this experimental surgery where they're going to surgically implant a transducer underneath my rib cage. And that transducer takes measurements.
And it's got a catheter that runs up into my spinal column. So they drill a hole into my spinal column, and they slide up about 10 centimeters of this catheter.
And now that fluid can flow into the transducer, and we have this wand. and just we just you know brush the wand over the transducer and it takes a measurement so you take measurements before during and after and now you can you can understand the pressure changes um so we can learn more about it unfortunately the i did the surgery um and for some reason the the technique used, the catheter, backs out of my spinal column, and so I just have a big hole leaking CSF.
And that was debilitating. I couldn't function.
I literally just, you know, lay down. I couldn't, you know, it's just this massive, massive headache.
And I have the utmost respect for hydrocephalus patients. The swelling of the brain is absolutely debilitating.
So they had to do emergency blood patch into my spinal column. And then eventually, I had to do another surgery to remove all the shit in my face.
I had 11 surgeries the one year leading up to space. Damn.
Random shit. Damn.
Appendix, gallbladder, ERCPs, this, hernias, you name it. Old.
But it was a... So you go straight up to...
Sorry, yes. Yeah, you go straight to...
You said there was some... You did a couple of orbits at a lower altitude and then shot up to...
What was it? 1408.1 is the record. Which will be broken in no time once we continue to explore and push the envelope.

And then we did that for eight orbits because the radiation level was a concern.

Cycles on the hardware, software, as well as the human body didn't want to expose too much.

It was the equivalent of like three to four months living on the ISS, what they're exposed to in our eight orbits. It's a pretty intense band of radiation called the Van Elmenbelts.
And then we brought it down to 750-ish, I think it was. You were up there for how many days? Three days? No, up there was just eight orbits.
So 106 minutes times eight, whatever that equals, hour and a half. I don't know, 12 hours, 12, 14 hours.
So when you were up there, I mean, could you see the whole Earth at once? No, there was, I wish I had pictures. Do you have pictures oh yeah absolutely iphone that's we took thousands of pictures with our iphone can you send me some absolutely they're all over the internet um we have a flicker page i'll send you that's got really cool with videos um time lapse The best pictures actually are from outside the capsule.

It looks like CGI. It looks fake.
It's not. Just like the moon.
But it's just, they modified, again, standard SpaceX badass. They had a camera outside, a selfie cam with a fisheye lens outside the hatch, the nose cone.
So it had this beautiful picture of the spacewalk, just time lapse of all the evolution of the light, all that stuff. So I'll send you plenty.
So could you see the whole? No, you could see a good portion of it, but we weren't far enough away. There was enough underneath.
And, you know, windows aren't that great. I mean, there's two windows.
They're about that big. And then the Ford hatch, the actual hatch has a window in it.
What's it like looking out into nothing? Very eerie.

Sometimes, it depends on the lighting, but you could see stars, and sometimes you couldn't.

Especially when the Dracos are firing, all you see is this hue of yellows and reds from the fuel exhaust.

But there were times where it's just billions of stars i mean more than you could ever imagine um we did see constellation of um starlink it passed like 70 kilometers away ish which it's pretty close i mean relatively speaking um they track all. It's called MMOD, micrometeorite orbital debris.
Any shit that's, you know, worthy of, well, anything that big would put a hole in your castle. What was the routine up there? Were you guys just, did you have to be redoing stuff? Oh, yeah.
No, it was constant. We packed a lot.
Ten pounds of shit into a six-pound sock. It was a lot.
Because we wanted to make it. I mean, how many astronauts have there been? We know, we've got to maximize this opportunity and leverage every minute and second we have.
So we had a very intense timeline. And then you talk about all the adaptation to the environment.
It's just like you're challenged. Any downtime? Sleep.
I slept maybe three, four hours a night if I was lucky it's tough i mean if you're a back sleeper it's it's okay because by the time you fall asleep you're flat as a board levitating like exorcist type above the bed and these seats are like bucket seats almost like a racing kind of seat. But you loosely connect the seatbelt because you would float away.
But by the time you fall asleep, and falling asleep is tough because since you're floating, you feel like you're falling. So it was just like once you hit like REM, it's like you get startled and wake up because you feel like you're falling.
And so you go through this cycle until eventually you get so tired. I'm just, you fall asleep.
And then when you wake up, you're just this flat as a board. Um, we'd have these little, you know, down sleeping bags, just these little profile kind of things for comfort.
Um, Jared would sleep up on the top. I think Sarah slept on the bottom.
I slept in my seat. And, you know, it was just wherever you could find space.
What are you guys eating? You know, it's like, so people ask, what does mountaineering have to do with spaceflight? Well, there's a lot of consistencies. And, you know, when you climb a mountain and we did, one of guides took us, Ed Vesers.
I don't know if you know Ed. He's the only American to summit all 14 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen.
American. Anyways, he took us down to Cotopaxi, Ecuador, in 19,328-foot volcano.
Multiple days, get up close to the summit.

By the time you get up there, man, you're hungry, you're dehydrated, you're sleep deprived, you're dealing with oxygen, you know, issues with altitude, you're in confined space on the tent and very consistent to how you feel in a capsule. This gets to your question.
You're just not that hungry. You're eating camp food because we're going to bring this entire capsule down to vacuum.
So if there's much, if there's a lot of water in any of the food, it just daps it. It's just going to freeze it and, you know, it's not going to taste good.
So we had a little bit of fresh food to kick off. cold pizza these empanadas and little

little of tastes good so we had a little bit of fresh food to kick off cold pizza um these empanadas and little little hawaiian roll sandwiches otherwise that was gone i was the only one eating i mean i'm you know being an endurance guy i'm just like and i felt great so my crew members were like here kid and so i only one eating this stuff. But otherwise, it's like Clif bars, beef jerky, that kind of stuff.
Yeah. Just to sustain until you get five days, five days.
I mean, you didn't really want to sleep, but you felt like you had to do something. You want to make the most of it.
But all of our time was science and research.

And then the prep leading up to the spacewalk, that was a big deal. How much time do you get to look at Earth and look at the vastness of space? I mean, just little glimpses.
Yeah, because in the brightness of the sun, it's not worthy of pictures, so it's not like we're focused because it's so bright and it's dark in the capsule. So it's really tough photography-wise.
It was more the transitions that were like, oh, my God, that's amazing. The thin blue line, and then as sunrise and sunsets happened, that was really cool.
The low altitudes catching, crossing over Egypt and Gaza, or Giza and the Nile and Suez and Israel, that was beautiful. Because your profile, the way you fly around the Earth,

it's pretty consistent.

You're descending over Europe into Africa, India, Australia,

and then you start climbing back up through the U.S.

and then back down.

It's just how the orbit is with the rotation.

Interesting.

How long would it take to orbit the Earth?

It's 106 minutes

for our orbit.

It's usually like 90 minutes

for like the station.

Hour and a half

to get around.

We were an hour

and 46 minutes.

That's because

of this highly elliptical

profile that we did

with the,

the furthest

is called the apogee

and that was a 1408

and then the lowest, closest on the backside of that orbit is called Perigee. And that was the 190 kilometers, which is like you're skimming the atmosphere.
It's close. Yeah.
So we were just doing, you would catch a glimpse while you're doing all the science and research.

Blood samples and simple stuff that we don't think about that we have to solve for.

Like triage.

You know, you stick 100 passengers on a starship that's headed to Mars, shit's going to arrest um you're gonna have to incubate cpr whatever those aren't easy things to do especially in the volume of like a starship where you don't have leverage per se whereas a small capsule do we had to do a cpr um test little compression thing little um trainer kind of thing click click click and just simply getting leverage to do CPR for two minutes because it's equal and opposite reaction you push and now you're floating yeah how do you get leverage you just put your feet on the ceiling and so you'd have to move the patient over to one seat because you can't get to the patient underneath the other two seats. You got to think about every little detail.
Airway assessment. So the shape, everything changes shape-wise.
So your airway becomes more constricted. So if you're going to incubate and need to stick something down someone's throat, it's a different shape.
So we don't know exactly what those changes are. So I did a endoscope camera exam of my airway.
So this camera, this long little antenna, just stick it down the nose, down to the airway, and you're taking images before, during, and after the flight. And all the smart people will go back and take this information.
CGMs. Someone's going to have diabetes who goes to space.
A simple CGM little device doesn't work so well in space. So just simple stuff.
Drawing blood. Because as soon as blood is floating.
So you're so used to gravity on some of these devices that draw blood, they weren't working in space. So we had to test new ones to draw blood.
So what, does there have to be suction? There's a little bit. It's like part of it was centrifugal force.
The one we tested didn't work. It was a device you just slap on, you push a button, and it's supposed to, like, draw, but it was having difficulties because zero gravity.
The fluid is just floating. Man.
Another cool test was an ambulance in a box, literally just a suitcase, Pelican case, and it had all these leads. And so you go in cardiac rest, we're sticking all these leads on doing a, and we can do an EKG and oxygen, blood pressure, pulse, anything and everything.
All that's fed through Starlink down to the smart doctors on Earth. And they can monitor patients from space with this new device.
It's never been tested before. Very interesting.
Cool stuff like that. Yeah, yeah.
Wow. So the spacewalk.
Mm-hmm. So this was...
I mean, that had to scare the shit out of you, right? Yeah. I think getting town to vacuum.
Especially looking out into nothing. That was...
The fear came before that. And it was as you started to go down to vacuum.
Because this suit, it's the only space suit that is a single panel of a visor. This iridium, whatever, glow gold, plated kind of thing.
It is the only suit that is a single layer. The EMU suits, they're multi-lay you know different shades and stuff like that um so it's literally just this thin between you and death you know because if if you lose pressure pray that it's a slow leak and you can repressurize the capsule in time but probably not yeah i didn't want to think about that too much um but you're you know one on the HUD because that's your suit pressure.
And it should be additional 5 PSI D above whatever the capsule is. So if we're at like 10, I'm reading 15.
And then as it comes down, you know, eventually I see five. And I know the capsule, we're in a vacuum.
So we can just simply open the hatch. And so that is just a, and then it's just this whole compartmentalize, the box breathing.
You know, I'm just, because you're in in this confined space and if you're claustrophobic at all i mean there were there were events in training where you're you're playing along with the scenario when you're rushing around because something happened is you know an emergency situation and the visor is down it's 12 layers thick, and the idea is to retain your heat.

But that is a huge concern because at some point,

you cross a threshold where your body can't cool itself anymore.

You're just going to cook inside the suit because it can't cool fast enough.

The airflow isn't that great.

There's some vents right here just right by the visor and the gas from the umbilical. But if you catch yourself overheating too fast, it's a point of no return kind of feeling.
And you start to have this hyperventilation feeling because you're just trying to calm yourself down and so you would experience

this in training because you're you're jumping all around and you're at 1g having to fight the pressure of this suit and it's just um so it's almost like that meditative state you had to get into for this spacewalk because of you did not want to like ever get yourself anywhere near I never did, especially where I was sitting and what I did, my role during the spacewalk, because I stayed in my seat. So we only had enough gas to send two astronauts out 15 minute increments.
That's all we had. But technically the hatch, it's literally right there literally right there i mean space is right there i just didn't get to stick my head out wanted to but i'm locked in my seat belt and same with anna and then jared and sarah were the ones that in the middle seats did the swap um so it was one at a time one at a time that's all it fits because you're pressurized so the volume in the capsule when you're pressurized especially jared's not a not a small human he's six something six two um or six one i don't know what he's but he takes up a lot of that volume you know i'm just a widow guy so i and i'm over my side man isna's over her side and sarah's small so but so enough room for him to get up do his thing 15 minutes did some uh mobility testing out there um i mean the outside holy shit by yourself i thought that i thought you'd have a buddy or something yeah you have a kevlar cord for a tether, and then you have the umbilical.
So it's, and then I guess I could grab him if I had to. What are they doing out there? Mobility tests.
He got a beautiful view. So as soon as he opened the hatch, well, we actually had an issue with the hatch opening.
I can talk about it. But as soon as he got the hatch open, man, earth just filled that entire, it was, it was unbelievable.
And I got a great view of it. And Jerry got a great view about halfway through his window sunset happened so it

got all black so sarah actually went out it was just black we're in the eclipse of the plant so it's pretty dark when she went out there's ambient light from the capsule and and there's there's lights up there and she's got a light on her um visor but it's um our camera um but the hatch so um our protocol was jared is going once we get down to vacuum everything's good he's going to unlock it break the seal get out of the way and it's going to be automated because they were concerned about him exerting

too much force and generating heat and that was a big concern um well as soon as he unlocked and and broke the seal it would automatically close on its own come to find out the residual pressure from our suits

was forcing

the hatch to close.

So he would open a little bit more, but it wasn't enough. Finally, again, based on the training that we went through and the rehearsals and these scenarios, it was meant for it.
Our backup game plan was just to do a manual. Jared's just going to open the hatch.
So that the the first issue um the only issue that we had was he had to default to a manual hatch opening which was kind of cool and so he opens it and and there's earth um and he goes outside first commercial spacewalk it was wow it was surreal and a lot of people there were a lot of doubters out there you know social media is an evil thing but um a lot of people doubted um what we were doing what spacex was able to accomplish um i'm sure elon gets it constantly i mean just starting the rocket business and doing boosters landing on you know on drone ships and now catching boosters with chopsticks it's it's it's not a matter of if it's just when when are we going to accomplish all these things? And so he comes back in, and then Sarah goes out, and then she gets her 15 minutes. And then we're just, our role underneath was just to manage the umbilical cords and safety, monitoring the systems, because if anything happens, it's like abort, abort, abort, get back inside, close the hatch, repressurize.

And we could live in those suits for hours, if not days, pressurized.

And we would eventually repressurize and deorbit if anything ever happened.

Man.

Yeah.

How long do you think it'll be before the majority of Americans have been to space? You know, it's absolutely inevitable. I believe it for sure.
It's going to happen. The concept of launching these starships.
And as soon as it starts taking the first human, it's not going to be long after that it's because they're already building

out the it's called eclips or the architecture the infrastructure inside these they have prototypes of um they got them down at star uh star basin in texas where they do the launches um these mock-ups of what it would look like in theory and it's almost like these um little cubicles they're spiral stacked inside this immense you know it's i don't know if it's 30 by 30 30 foot diameter across but it's ours was 12 feet i think it's 12 feet 12 or 14 feet i think it's 12 feet is the diameter of our capsule this is like 30 and it's like you have all this volume to float across across. And the idea is these little cubicles, almost like these Japanese trains that have just enough space to lay down, but hundreds of these spiral stacked up inside this capsule, and you've got multiple levels.
So now you have all the living quarters, and then you've got the eating quarters, then you got the the operations where the crew of you know six to nine people in charge of the vehicle are going to operate and then you have all these passengers that are just going for the ride but i think we're ways away i i think we're feel like my kids are gonna take a school field trip there to to space to low earth orbit yeah but it's this this thing is the lymphak the body um you know if 50 space adaptation syndrome get sick could you imagine a hundred people no and 20 30 people puking what a shit show it would be bad so hopefully we can solve some of that um i don't know if it's drugs or i don't know what's it like coming back um well another thing we did on orbit is the starlink tests oh yeah i don't i don't i mean i can briefly cover this but um so the idea was going to do a global music event sarah gillis is a professionally trained violinist absolutely beautiful um extremely talented um and we're going to do this global event this you know flash mob where all these orchestras around the world are going to perform and and she's going to perform in space, and it's all going to be broadcast via Starlink because it's never been tested up there. And we weren't sure about the probability of success.
It was just an unknown. Because it's all lasers, you know, and these little glass, I don't know what they are on the actual star link that they had a line all these things and they're traveling 17-5 and you're traveling 17-5 to figure out the math to make all this happen and now you're passing through their orbit in your elliptical because they're circular they're at 350 let's call it passing through them, so you've got to communicate.
And it's just like smart people figure that stuff out. So we didn't know if it was going to work.
As soon as we got up there, they're like, we think your Wi-Fi is working. Can you guys get on your iPhone and see if it's working? We literally, and so the way you communicate with anyone in space is, it's ground stations strategically placed all over the planet.
And as you're going around, you're communicating line of sight to all these stations. Or you utilize what's called TDRS satellites, just national assets.
I think there's only five or six out there and it's high demand, national security of stuff and you timeshare based on if you're on the iss and you know if we were going to utilize that it's going to be about maybe 80 coverage otherwise we're in blackout we're not talking to anyone kind of thing starlink is is hopefully going to change that and so they say hey we think it's working can you guys get on your iPhones and check? Literally, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. All these messages start populating in my phone.
And we're like, can we call our families? We literally, I call my family. So I dial my wife and she patches in and we're FaceTime.
My kids are at school. I got two in high school, one in college.
They step out of their classroom and everyone, picture, we have like snapshots of our phone. There we are talking to our family.
And I can only think back to when I met my wife and I'm in Korea and she's back in Minnesota and we're using these MCI calling cards. And I get maybe five, 10 minutes out of it.
And I deployed to Kuwait. And I got two phone calls, five minutes each, over 90 days.
And that's all I talked. And oh, by the way, I proposed to her the day before I deployed.
And we got married three days after I got back from my deployment. And so we're engaged.
I talked to her twice. Jeez.
Anyways, so I think back to just, I don't know, what was that, 25 years ago? And now here we are. I'm in space.
I'm 1,400 miles up. I'm traveling 17,500 miles an hour.
I'm currently over Africa on my way to India. And my kids are in and I'm talking it's just absolute mind blowing what we have access to talk about information flow we took some Starlink to Philippines so St.
Jude could set up some of these at remote locations.

And so all these people who live in jungles now have access to this telemedicine.

Otherwise, who wouldn't?

And it's just now we got Starlink down to our phones.

It's just living a different world.

We do.

We do.

Man, so coming home. So it's a drawing-out process to get ready because you've got to strap everything in because it's a violent ride.
I think it's more violent coming home than it is going up. Your body is deconditioned, so you're used to zero gravity, but we've only been there for five days i mean these astronauts on the space station when um when i come when butch and sunny come home in a couple weeks um you know they've been up there for six plus months they're way deconditioned so it's it's tough because you're not using the skeletal system,

your ligaments, your tendons, your muscles like you normally do. That's why they dedicate hours,

three hours a day to working out up there on the station. But our five days, you still feel deconditioned.
So the moment you start this reentry and what happens is you turn the capsule around,

you fire the Draco engines into the direction of your velocity and that slows you down so as as you begin to slow down now gravity starts taking over and you enter your your d orbit profile and as soon as you start coming down you hit the atmosphere and that's what really slows you down. Because you have all this drag.
But it also generates plasma, heat, fire. So that's what you enter the blackout phase.
So as you start, the first step of the whole process is to separate from the trunk. So you've got the capsule and then you've got this extension.
It's called the trunk. It's got solar panels because this entire vehicle is energy depleting.
So we need the solar panels for energy, for power. So you separate from the trunk a couple hours prior and it's just this big old thump.
And that's, okay, we're committed because we can't survive in this capsule for too long. We've got to come home.
So you're coming home anyways. You get in your suit.
You get in your seat. You strap in.
And engines start firing. And it's just this constant repetitive as these engines are firing to slow you down.

And then it just slowly starts to build,

this vibration, this chatter.

And as you start to hit the atmosphere,

you've got your two little windows,

and you can see just enough.

And you initially see these sparks.

It almost looks like campfire sparks up high.

And then all of a sudden, it turns into these streaks. and then it just turns into fire.
You are literally on fire. And it's like, I think it's like 2,600 degrees.
So it's, you're cooking and you're praying that TPS, the thermal protection system, your protection on the belly is working. Yeah.
Because if any MMOD hit that stuff, you didn't know about it.

Well, you probably wouldn't find out. You just wouldn't survive it.
And then you hit blackout, and it's just you're hauling ass, and it's shaking, and you start to build up those G-forces again because you're slowing down. You're going from 17.5 down to like 350 miles an hour.
So this is just massive G-forces. So again, 4.5.
But it's a lot longer. And the fact that you haven't been at Gs on orbit, 0.2 feels, whoa, I feel heavy.
4.5. It's like, okay, I don't know how long I can sustain this before I feel like I'm gonna pass out you're so hyped up on their journal in any ways and then you're just watching the clock for certain milestones you're looking for the drug shoots to come out and then once the drug shoots come out it's they'll pull the shoots eventually and those are explosives so it's another big old you know the panel gets blown pulled and you know it's they're superimposed images on our display so i can actually see it happen so it's the first point of relief is okay the drugs are out they look good they're not tangled or anything like that like a parachute and then the big moment is when those chutes come out and it's just a big oh it's almost like a car crash it's just this boom big four four big chutes come out and then now it's just a soft ride down the the impact is is like a car crash like a fender bender it's pretty it's pretty intense that's why it's only built for water landings versus land you'd break your back if you landed on the on the land and then you're just trying to get used to gravity and you're bobbing you know um waiting for them to pull the recovery because again it's spacex they got everything in top fashion they have this dedicated boat it's literally within a mile of where you splash down they know exactly where you're going to end up they pull that boat they send out special ops guys a bunch of pjs they all have military backgrounds they're on their jet skis and uh and they're fast boats and they pull right up to the capsule.
They do some sniff tests because hyper goals is a big concern. It's just this fuel that can kill you if you breathe too much of it.
So they do a sniff test to make sure there's no leaks, put some straps on the capsule, and then they pull the big boat up right behind you you they get this crane and they just literally just pick you up put you on the deck slide you right

up to a deck where the hatch is and they open the hatch doctors come in check you over give me a

thumbs up because millions of people are watching the broadcast and you don't want to when you step

out or you can't stand up or for whatever reason they check you out and then one by one it's like

Thank you. and you don't want to, when you step out or you can't stand up or for whatever reason, they check you out.
And then one by one, it's like wave to the families and crowds. And then they do a med check.
Helicopter comes, get in the helicopter, and they fly you back for the reunion, the family reunion in the hangar. How was it to your family? It was awesome.
I think that was actually one of the highlights because it was, you know, getting emotional just thinking about it. It's just like this relief knowing that she's at ease now.
Because for me, I'm living and breathing, man. I'm on cloud nine.
This is my jam. But for her, knowing that it's over and she can kind of just let go because she's trying to hold it together for the kids this whole time.
And, you know, from the launch to the spacewalk to the splashdown, it's just all these. And having to think about the inevitable, or not the inevitable, but God forbid the worst thing that could happen you know having to live with that thinking about it for years leading up to this it was just kind of a emotional it's over for her damn well that's a hell of a journey man that is a hell of a journey, man.
That is a hell of a journey. Yeah, it's...
It was only September 15th we splashed down. Launched on the 10th.
We were up there on the 11th. September 11th.
Talked to Folds of Honor in space, which was cool.

We called Dan Rooney and a couple of the families, the CEO.

So that was cool.

Sarah did her music event, and Anna wrote a book, a children's book, for her kids.

So she read that on Orbit.

We all kind of got a little taste. Very interesting.
Yeah. Is there anything I should have asked that I didn't ask? That was a lot.
Well, you know, when we met at inauguration, you would offer to take me up in an F-16. Oh, I did? You did.
I'll settle for the first podcast in space. Oh, the first podcast in space.
I think that is definitely, that's right up your alley, man. That would be awesome.
We got the connectivity for it, for sure. Yeah, shit, we could do it live why not you got to pick your uh who would you interview all right let's turn the tables let me and we uh ask you questions who would you interview in space well i mean you know elon seems pretty fitting so but man that would be that would be really something wouldn't it yeah but would you go yeah space that was actually one thing that that upon reflection getting down and you know i'm trying to make sense of it all and i keep on ego why they're bring it back to myself and what was it what was you know the significance of it all and blah blah blah and then i have the conversation with people and they're like oh my god what was it like They immediately go into this mental simulation where they put themselves in the situation.
And it's a hell no, there's no way I'll go. I just don't know if I could do that or I'll sell my firstborn to go to space kind of attitude.
dude. And that's what makes me realize, okay, stop making it about yourself.
It's so much more than that. It's about inspiring this next generation to want to go, to be that person.
I talk to my wife about this all the time. I think the possibility of our kids going to space is greater than them not things are just evolving so fast you know i think it'll become the norm before i die if i live up you know and it's not it's not just the moon and mars it's going to be low earth orbit as well i mean they're going to create habitable structures whether it's a bunch of stars the volume in a starship is equivalent to the iss so the entire structure of the iss up there is the same as a starship wow so now spacex has dozens of these lined up down there and just waiting to launch to test.

They can manufacture these and they give us the numbers when we go down there for tours and stuff.

It's crazy. It's mind-blowing how quickly they can build these rockets.

And they're only getting more and more efficient.

You know, that's his business model.

It's like, okay, Widget X. The production productions of widget x by company y is slowing us down let's bring this in-house 3d print it and do it ourselves and that takes out that whole delay so you know they become more and more efficient and they're again these engineers are empowered to do that you know with the um with the ability to take risk as needed, safety always being the primary concern, to be able to create all these starships.
And it will be reality when they're launching all the time, constantly. And now you take these starships, one of them,

how about docking three, four of these together,

and now you have three or four space stations up there,

create hotels and, you know, whatever.

Research labs and 3D prints and organs.

It's a fascinating subject.

It's, I guess, you know, the new frontier. Well, Scott, what an interview, man.
I covered a lot of ground there. And, man, it was an honor to sit here with you and learn about your life and get into some pretty deep discussions and talking about space and God and everything, man.
It's been an honor. Thank you.
Honor's mine, man. I just appreciate the opportunity.
What you're doing is absolutely amazing. All the power to you.
I wish you a lot

of success because you're changing lives and just getting the message out, whatever it might be.

This is the message that people need to hear. Not necessarily my story, but all the things and

people you interview. You've talked about, like DJ.
He would never have a platform like this. And now everyone knows his story and the sacrifices that he's made.
And there's dozens and dozens more like DJ that you're allowing this opportunity. We owe you the thanks brother it's cool to be able

to do it thank you thank you but all right Scott God bless brother all right brother

Michael Rosenbaum and his Small Bill co-stars take you behind the... We'll see you next time.
yeah i mean i get it the scene you did and this is the one that got me fired okay what here we go i love the excursions with me and welling it's everything that superman stands for it's talk

well talk but we always talk about it it's a great thing the smallville rewatch podcast

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