Peggy Whitson

[laughs] So it's that same kind of a thing, but you just get put in enough of those situations that starting, you know, with basic shorter runs and building up and building up, um, having a coach, having people that, that work with you through it, and, um, eventually gaining proficiency and being able to do adva- advanced things like rescue your partner and things like that.

So by sheer coincidence, I actually did a corporate speaking event with, with Dr. Peggy Whitson, like, two days ago.

No way.

And so...

Yes.

I mean, she, she, like, or she selected you, right?

She did, and I have the best story for you because the one question I remember from my astronaut interview was when we were talking about rock climbing, and Peggy Whitson looked at me and she goes, "Were you ever scared?" [laughs] And I was, uh, I was really thinking about-

You're like, "Obviously, yes." [laughs]

And just to kind of blast you here now, 10 recent aviation firsts again in the last kind of 30 years.

So we talked about Eileen Collins commanded a space shuttle in 1999 and Nicole Malachowski was selected for the Thunderbirds in 2005 and she flew The 2006 season, Peggy Whitson became the first ISS commander in 2007.

Jeannie Lovett, the first woman to command a U.S. Air Force fighter wing in 2012.

And her earlier fighter pilot first falls outside this time window because we're looking at last 30 years, but she had some really cool accomplishments there.

In these two simple tricks, a mundane object becomes visual fodder for speculation.

Back in March of 2017, astronaut Peggy Whitson was on her routine EVA when the camera suddenly lost focus on a white oval that seemed to hover just beyond the Canadarm2.

The footage that came back was only a few seconds before NASA abruptly paused the stream and pulled the live feed into the station's internal network, sparking speculation online about an extraterrestrial intruder.

On May 18 of this year, one crew member filmed an incandescent shape streaking into the atmosphere over West Africa.

But there are episodes, let's say, and maybe some cases in which you can read between, uh, read between the lines.

There's an episode in the book, as a matter of fact, where, uh, my co-author actually did the, uh, Brian Gallagher actually did the interview with astronaut Peggy Whitson, and she was very generous with her, with her time and has a lot of really insightful things to say.

But she pointed out that on one of her missions when she was commander on ISS, she had a crew mate who was homesick early in the mission, just like completely off the wall, off the charts homesick, almost couldn't function.

That's the kind of thing that you might be talking about.

And also within our mission, what's quite interesting, the Axiom 4 mission, every country has chosen slightly a different path to implement the mission.

So we flew with Peggy Whitson, who was the commander of our mission.

India had this... much stronger relationship with NASA, but finally flying what we call PAM mission, the Private Astronaut Mission.

Poland has selected this very clear path to implement the mission through ESA, through the European Space Agency.

Indeed.

Peggy Whitson is our astronaut from

Beaconsfield.

Beaconsfield, Iowa.