Space Shuttle program

Oh, absolutely unhinged.

I mean, on one hand, we had the terrifying literal life or death realities of the nineteen eighties space shuttle program.

Right.

And then sitting right next to it was news about a seventy-seven-year-old rock star playing a private keyboard concert for an audience of abused bears.

She's an astronomer and a physics professor who is selected out of thousands of applicants to go to Houston's Johnson Space Center.

Right.

She is slated to be one of the first women in the highly competitive space shuttle program.

And we really have to inject some historical context here to understand the stakes for Joan.

Mercury.

Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz test project, space shuttle program, shuttle mirror program, international space station, commercial crew program, Artemis program.

The Artemis program is the current program to bring humans to the moon again.

If you are hearing this way later, we already made it back we set foot on the moon everything went according to plan and we are looking at making a space station on the moon so we're gonna drop a couple humans deposit them on the surface of the moon and have them set up somewhat of a permanent habitat on the surface of the moon.

Your Center for Space Phenomena and History, simplified.

This week, we will be discussing NASA's Space Shuttle Program and the rise of the ISS.

One year before Skylab was launched, President Nixon authorized the Space Shuttle Program.

Four years later, in 1976, the prototype orbiter Enterprise was unveiled for atmospheric testing.

It was launched in 1977 on the back of a Boeing 747 to test glide and landing characteristics.

Hot gases penetrated through the shuttle, and the spacecraft disintegrated over Texas.

All seven crew members aboard lost their lives.

and this major failure paved the way for the eventual retirement of the space shuttle program.

But in there, there's going to be s- a rollercoaster of denial and feelings and grief that you're gonna feel about losing what you know so intimately and so well moving to this new arena that you don't know as well.

Well, we haven't talked about NASA, but I would like to talk about it, um, because, you know, your path got you to NASA, and you had a very important role there when they shut down the space shuttle program.

You know, it's funny when you told me the story, you know, I, I love all the HR professionals, uh, doing that hard job, but really part of national security concerns were you and your team handling that transition when they shut that program down because there's a lot of very smart people with a lot of good information and good knowledge about our rocket program, and we need to take care of those folks.

So can you tell us how you wound up at NASA and what it was like shutting that program down?