← T-Minus Space Daily
T-Minus Space Daily
Space and Veterans.
00:34:06
The military has a long history with space. We hear from veterans who made the move from the military into the space industry.
Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:02]
Maria Varmazas
You're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:13]
Charles Bolden
The IT world used to be simpler. You only had to secure and manage environments that you controlled. Then came new technologies and new ways to work. Now employees, apps and networks are everywhere. This means poor visibility, security gaps and added risk. That's why Cloudflare created the first ever connectivity cloud. Visit cloudflare.com to protect your business everywhere you do business.
- [00:52]
Eileen Collins
Welcome to a Veterans Day special edition of T Minus. I'm Maria Varmazas, and it is Veterans Day here in the United States. So in lieu of our normal programming, we wanted to take today to honor our veterans from our own team at N2K to those that have made massive contributions to the aerospace industry in the United States and throughout this program. Today you'll hear stories from military veterans about how their time serving their country shaped their careers in the aerospace industry. NASA has a particularly strong connection to the US Military. When the agency selected the first groups of US Astronauts, all of them were military pilots. And that held true until selection of the fourth group. Since its inception, NASA has selected 360 astronaut candidates, 299 men, 61 women, and of which 212 have come from the military. During a 1959 news conference when NASA's original seven astronauts were announced, John Glenn commented on the sense of duty that he felt serving in the Marines and as an astronaut.
- [02:06]
John Glenn
I'm John Glenn. I'm the lonesome Marine on this outfit, and I'm 37. In answer to this same question a few days ago from someone else, I jokingly, of course, said that I got on this project because it'd probably be the nearest to heaven I'd ever get, and I wanted to make the most of it. But my feelings are that this whole project with regard to space sort of stands with us now. As if you want to look at it one way, like the Wright brothers stood at kitty hawk about 50 years ago with Orville and Wilbur pitching a coin to see who was going to shove the other one off the hill down there. And I think that we stand on the verge of something as big and as expansive as that was 50 years ago. I also agree wholeheartedly with Gus here on I think we are very fortunate that we have, should we say, been blessed with the talents that have been picked for something like this. And I think we'd be almost remiss in our duty if we didn't make full use of our talents. Every one of us would feel guilty, I think, if we didn't make the fullest use of our talents in volunteering for something that is as important as this is to our country and the world in general right now. This can mean an awful lot to this country, of course. Thank you.
- [03:22]
Eileen Collins
We spoke to former NASA administrator and astronaut Charles Bolden. Bolden had a 34 year career with the Marine Corps, which also included 14 years as a member of NASA's astronaut office.
- [03:37]
Charles Bolden
First of all, I'm a product of the Jim Crow South. And in seventh grade I saw a program on television called Men of Annapolis about life at the Naval Academy and had not thought about the military at all prior to that. And I was so infatuated by this place, the Yard, as they called the Naval Academy grounds, that I decided as a 12 year old that I wanted to go to the Naval Academy. Didn't know anything about the Navy, nothing about the Marine Corps. I knew I did not want to go into the Marine Corps because I had grown up close enough to Parris island to see the young graduates of recruit training come up and wreak havoc in my town after they graduated. I just thought Marines were crazy and I had no desire to fly airplanes because I thought that was inherently dangerous. I started applying when I was in ninth grade in high school for a congressional appointment. For young men and women who may be listening to this and don't know. Everybody is eligible for a Vice Presidential appointment. The Vice President of the United States can appoint anyone who is a US citizen from anywhere. The President can only appoint sons and daughters of congressional honor winners and active duty military. So the other category is congressional appointments which come from your two senators, US Senators and your Congressional representative. And when I was in high school, the leader of the South Carolina delegation was the venerable Strom Thurmond. And Strom Thurmond and Olin D. Johnston were my two U.S. senators. Albert Watson was my congressional representative. And all three of them made it very clear that they were not, could not appoint a black to any service academy. I had fortunately applied to Yale and University of Pennsylvania and was accepted and had also applied for Naval ROTC because by that time I decided I really wanted to go in the Navy. So when President Kennedy was assassinated my senior year In High School, November 22, my hope of going to the Naval Academy went out the window because I was counting on an appointment from the Vice President and Lyndon Johnson I had been talking to for a number of years by mail. And he kept saying, write me back when you're a senior in high school. So my mother kind of, she saw how devastated I was and she said, are you going to quit? I said, what do you mean? She said, you're going to give up? And I said, well, what do I do? I don't have another place to go. She said, you figure it out. So I pulled out an old typewriter and I typed out a letter to the President of the United States to Lyndon B. Johnson. And I said, look, this is me. I'm the same Charles Bolden that's always wanted to go to the Naval Academy. I need help and I understand I can't get an appointment from you, but please, if there's anything you can do to help me get an appointment to the Naval Academy, do it. And I've never heard from him. But within weeks, a Navy recruiter showed up at my front door, asked if, you know, I was the one that wanted to go to the Naval Academy. I said, sure. And then several months later, President Johnson sent a retired federal judge from Washington D.C. judge Bennett sent him around the country visiting with schools in the south, mainly looking for qualified black and Hispanic young men who wanted to go to the, to the service academies. And so with those two supports, I ended up getting an appointment from Congressman William Dawson in Chicago, Illinois. So my, my application package was built and everything as me coming from Chicago. So that's how I got to the Naval Academy. Although I said the two things I would not do were go in the Marine Corps and fly airplanes. The very first person who impressed me, who made an impact on my life when I got to the Naval Academy was my first company officer in my first year, my freshman year, Major John Riley Love. He was a young Marine Corps infantry officer who was responsible for the 150 or so of us and 29th company of the 36th at the Naval Academy. He was like my dad. He was tough, but eminently fair. And he saw to it that every opportunity was presented to me as a midshipman. Although there were only, I was only black in our company, there were only four of us in the graduating class, in the class of 1968. And when I got there, there were only 12. So there were 12 blacks out of the 4,000 members of the brigade. But, but major love was always there for me. And I said, you know, I could do anything. I want to, I want to be like him. I want to be like Major Love. I went to the Basic School, which is a six month course of study in Quantico, Virginia to teach everybody, no matter what you're going to do, to be a rifle platoon commander, to be an infantry officer. And I found out during Our three day war in the cold and snow and ice of Quantico, Virginia at the end of November that I really did not like crawling around in the mud. And so I said, I don't think I'm going to do this. I told my wife that I was going to go ahead and take an aviation option and go to Pensacola. She was unbelievably happy because she had been trying to talk me into that. So I went to Pensacola, fell in love with flying the first time I got in an airplane, and that's how I happened to become a Marine who ended up flying airplanes.
- [08:45]
Eileen Collins
There are so many threads in your story that I'm hearing about perseverance and also being open minded to new experiences and having really great advocates along the way as well who are sort of there for you at key moments. I'm wondering, just keeping on the thread of your start in the military and your amazing career in space that followed after, how do you feel that the two interplayed how one prepared you for the other?
- [09:12]
Charles Bolden
You know, I think because I'm asked frequently what was it like to go from the United States Marine Corps to NASA? I found it a very easy transition. One of my flight instructors was a guy by the name of Major Pete Field. He was another Marine. You keep seeing these Marines come into my life, but Pete was, he was a test pilot who had been sent back to the training command to teach people to fly airplanes. And he would subsequently go back to Patuxent river as a test pilot to run the F18 development program for the Navy and Marine Corps. Every time we flew, Major Field always talked about being a test pilot and he talked about how demanding it was, how precise you had to be. It wasn't a scarf hanging out the window like people envisioned. It wasn't very glamorous at all. It was very, very demanding and precise. And so I kind of said, boy, that sounds like what I want to do. And so I started applying for test pilot school as soon as I graduated from flight school. It took me about six years or so, applying twice a year, being told no, until finally I went out to the University of Southern California. As I was a Marine Corps recruiter when I came back from, from Vietnam in Los Angeles and USC offered a Master's degree program in which I enrolled and I finished the degree requirements, got my master's degree from usc and I said, okay, I'm going to apply one more time and if I don't get in this time, I'm going to take it as a message from God, that, nah, you're not intended to be a test pilot. I put my application in and lo and behold, the Marine Corps selected me that year and sent me back to, to Patuxent river to start training to be a test pilot. And I became one. Coming from the test community into NASA was just like coming from NASA to NASA. Because the way we do things that, you know, in the space agency are essentially the same way we do them in a military test community. When I went back to the Marine Corps, to the operating forces of the Marine Corps after my 14 years in the Astronaut Officer, I found that the transition was again, very easy. Because I had gone from serving as a commander on a space shuttle twice, where I had a crew. There were seven of us on both of my flights, but I had a crew of seven and a $2 billion spacecraft for which I was responsible. And I had had to work with the training team to get us appropriately trained. And I was responsible for getting the vehicle to space and back safely and in one piece. And when I came back to the operating forces of the Marine Corps, I found that I was back in an organization that was the same size as NASA, about 18,000 people. When I got to my command in the Marine Corps anyway. But I was fortunate to go back to the Naval Academy first. And that allowed me to get what the Marine Corps calls regreened. So I got back into a military environment right out of the Astronaut Office, fell in love with it. I was the Deputy Commandant of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy. You know, I found it very easy to go from the space program to the Naval Academy and then back to the, what we call the Fleet, the Fleet Marine Force. So it was an easy transition going both ways because the astronaut office was fundamentally a military like organization. You know, the original seven were all military officers. So they had built the Astronaut Office structurally and functionally to be very much like a military organization.
- [12:55]
Eileen Collins
Charles Bolden's career also had an impact on his son, Che Bolden, who is the president and CEO of the Charles F. Bolden Group. And the Group is an executive leadership firm that focuses on cultivating and enhancing new leadership archetypes and is particularly focused on the future of space. Che shared his experiences as a son of a Marine and an astronaut, and how it shaped his career choices.
- [13:26]
Maria Varmazas
My first introduction to the military came before I was even aware of anything. My father was a United States Marine, came, was commissioned in 1968 out of the United States Naval Academy. And so when I came along in 1971, he was already well into his career. And so everything I knew and experienced as a child all the way through, through to my formative years was as a military brat. I wouldn't necessarily consider us traditional military brats because in 1980, my father was selected to become a United States astronaut. And so we moved to Houston, Texas, just prior to my fourth grade. And as a result, I ended up staying in the same place for a good amount of my youth. All of the people that I found to be incredibly impressive for a variety of reasons, they commanded the respect of their community. They were kind people, they took care of the things around them, and they always tried to make things better than the way they found it happened to be folks who had been in the military, specifically Marines. And so that was a very easy pointer for me to say, all right, maybe military service isn't so bad to create decent human beings. And so that's how I kind of grew up in the shadow of the United States Military and eventually became a military serviceman myself.
- [14:32]
Eileen Collins
Can you tell us a bit about your military career, please?
- [14:36]
Maria Varmazas
I had all the same dreams as a lot of younger kids. I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a lawyer, wanted to be an actor, wanted to be a pilot. But throughout all of that, the one thing I kind of knew was a consistency, was that I wanted to serve. I didn't know what that meant at the time. I just saw these examples. And so I decided to apply to United States Naval Academy. I commissioned as a second lieutenant, United States Marine Corps, in 1993. I went down to the basic school in Quantico, Virginia, just like every other lieutenant. Not knowing what the Marine Corps had in store for me, I was fortunate enough that TBS was fun and interesting, and so I performed well enough to get an aviation slot. And then I became, at one point, a student Naval aviator down in Pensacola, Florida, to learn how to fly and become a pilot. My eyes weren't the best, and so I got what's called a NAMI whammy. So NAMI is the Naval Aeromedical Institute, I think. And they're the ones who are responsible for saying yes or no on someone's physical qualifications. And they said my eyesight was not good enough to be a Naval aviator. Unfortunately, there was a spot as a Naval flight officer, as a student naval flight officer to open up. And so I moved over into that field. After that, I progressed on to become a weapons and sensors officer in the F18 Delta. I flew that almost 2000 hours, became an instructor across the board in every possible vertical that we had. I went to Top Gun, I went to the Marine Corps Fighter, Marine Corps Weapons and Tactics instructor school, went to combat. But a variety of things in the military service, as those who have done it, it starts to wear you down a little bit. So I needed a little break. So I accepted orders to the Command and Staff College in Madrid, Spain, and went to school in Spain for a year. And then I ended up working in the embassy for two years after that. And so that opened up a whole new world for me. Where I had been an aerospace and aviation expert, now I was kind of an international affairs or diplomacy neophyte. You know, I was just learning the trade. But it was enough to broaden my horizons and expand what I was looking at doing when I came back to the activity Marine Corps. After spending three years in Spain, I got assigned as the weapons and tactics instructor slash officer for the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing. And then we deployed to Afghanistan for a year. While I was there, I got exposed to this thing called uncrewed systems. Used to be called unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, or as most people know, drones. And so I was kind of bit by that bug. And so I went from being a crewed or manned aviator to a uncrewed or unmanned aviator almost in the blink of an eye, just because it was a new area where there's a lot of interest. And it was exciting to me and so started to advocate for that a little bit more. Eventually became the commanding officer of an unmanned squadron, uncrewed aircraft squadron BMU2, down in Cherry Point, North Carolina. Amazing pivotal time in my life. It showed me that the true value of the military is not in our gear, not in our equipment, none of that. It's in the people. I really enjoyed my time as a Marine. I actually finished my 26 years in critical infrastructure. Yet another jack of all trades type of a move. But once again, it told me that technology is there to improve the way human beings work and interact with one another. And that was a great last experience in uniform because it set the stage for me to move into the things that I'm really interested in doing now.
- [17:40]
Eileen Collins
Would you mind walking us through what you're working on right now?
- [17:43]
Maria Varmazas
I would love to. All of the experiences I was given both growing up and then in my time in the military really did set the stage for what I consider to be true life calling type work now. So as I kind of mentioned earlier, I grew up in the shadow of shuttle, but I really didn't pay that much attention to the space business. You know, my father being an astronaut was to me akin to my father having worked at one of the petroleum plants that were nearby that we worked in. Or if he had been an engineer or even a teacher for that matter, you know, he's just my dad. But space to me was a job. It was not until I had retired from the Marine Corps, set out on my own and trying to become an entrepreneur, and I was trying to find where I fit. And there were only two things that I knew that I was pretty decent at. I know leadership. Whether I'm a good leader is not the point, but I know what good leadership and bad leadership is. And I also know people. You know, I just. I have a good way and a relationship with people in which I can connect with them and have them connect with other people.
- [18:44]
Eileen Collins
Former NASA astronaut and retired Air Force colonel Eileen Collins was one of the first women to serve as a test pilot for the U.S. air Force. She was the first woman ever to pilot the space shuttle and the first to command a space shuttle mission. She shared with us what it was like to lead the way for others.
- [19:06]
Sassy Duggleby
So the Air force decided in 1976 to allow women to become military pilots. And it was a test program. Now, I was not. I was still young and in college when the first groups went through. So they selected 10 women. It was a very, I want to say, competitive program. It was nationwide. Those 10 women went to pilot training in Phoenix, Arizona. And I heard about this in the news. I started following it and I said, well, this is what I want to do my senior year in college. I'm an rotc, which is the Reserve Officer Training Corps. And I'm on track to be commissioned as a second lieutenant. And the job they had set up for me back then, we called it Strategic Air Command. And I was going to be a computer systems design engineer. I was going to work in missile targeting. I mean, that's what the Air Force had me set up for. This is back during the Cold War, and it was 1978. Well, this test program then opened up to women just graduating from college. So I became eligible. And previous you had to be on active duty. So now the younger women, I was 21 years old, were now eligible. So my professor of aerospace studies sent my name in, and There were about 100 women from around the country, and eight of us were selected. I was sent to Vance. This, to me, was a massive dream come true. I mean, this was a huge turning point in my life when I was selected for this program. And of the eight of Us four went to Arizona, where the other women had trained, and four of us went to Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma. And we were the first four women to ever go through pilot training there. We might have been the third class overall throughout the Air Force, maybe the fourth. I tried to figure out. I'm not sure which one we were, but we were one of the earliest. And the times that I spent at Vance as one of the first women to ever train there, I wrote a whole chapter on it in my book because there were so many interesting stories that happened and how the men accepted us and some that. Some that didn't accept us. But it was, to me, just a dream come true because now I'm 21 years old and I'm flying jets, and I went solo in jet aircraft, the T37 and T38, at the age of 21. It's a huge amount of responsibility to give to somebody at that age. But frankly, people that are 21 are highly, I want to say, ready to take on responsibilities at that point. I was a college graduate, but I was living my dream. And I'm not going to say it was easy, because I was studying constantly, because not only did I want to get my wings did I become a pilot, but I was part of a test program, and I wanted other women to have the same opportunity as me. And if we had failed, then those other women, they would have shut down the program, and the women younger than me wouldn't have had the opportunity. So we were doing it for ourselves as well as other women.
- [22:10]
Eileen Collins
And it's not just astronauts who've had their careers shaped by the military, of course. We spoke to Sassy Duggleby, CEO of Venus Aerospace, who told us how her husband's time as a US Navy reservist shaped the idea of launching her own company.
- [22:29]
Che Bolden
Andrew was in the United States Navy Reserves in the Navy capacity. He's called an engineering duty officer, and he does ship repair. And 2018 was a really bad year for the Navy, and they had more ships that they needed repaired than they could get back to the United States. So he actually got called up and we deployed to Japan. And so we pulled our daughters out of school. We have two kids, pulled the kids out of school, moved to Japan. And it was actually living in Japan that we had the idea for Venus. It was a Sunday afternoon. We were sitting out kind of on our balcony overlooking Tokyo Bay and talking about that it's 13 hours to get home and just how big the world really is. I mean, we had traveled Internationally, but we never lived overseas. And it was literally that Sunday afternoon, Andrew said, well, you know, there's this new rocket engine coming down the pipeline that he had been watching both as a professor and then at Virgin Orbit. And he said, I think if this rocket engine's ever proven, he said, we could put it on a plane and we could be home in an hour. And so that was the moment I actually laughed at him. If I looked back, but we started dreaming on what would it look like? Like, what if this engine really is proven? Could we commercialize it? Could we actually take that step? So fast forward, you know, it was proven at a university kind of at the academic level in 2019. And so we kind of incorporated the company. I started figuring out, how do you raise venture capital? And then as soon as we got Virgin Orbit to the first launch, which was June 2020, we quit our jobs. And it was the middle of COVID And, you know, our kids were home from school and started fundraising and really digging in and saying, we think we have something here and we really need to go pursue this.
- [24:05]
Eileen Collins
And we should mention T minus producer Alice Carruth is married to an army veteran. Although she met her husband after he left the military, his continued career as a civilian for the US Military led her to her career in space.
- [24:21]
Charles Bolden
Adam was in the Signal Corps and served two tours of Iraq and left the military to go and work for.
- [24:28]
Eileen Collins
A commercial company, but really was attracted.
- [24:31]
Charles Bolden
To go back into the military as a civilian contractor. And that's how he ended up in Qatar, where we met. And really, it was meeting Adam and moving with him to the US and to New Mexico that led to my career in aerospace. I had no idea about space before I moved here to the state. And really, it was being here and learning about this incredible history of space in this state that led me to realizing I could become a communicator in space. And now, as the producer of T.
- [25:03]
Eileen Collins
Minus Space podcast, Brandon Karpf joined N2K straight out of the Navy. This is his story.
- [25:12]
Brandon Karpf
I was raised in a family that deeply respected military service, but we didn't have a lot of it, really. The only member of my family whose military was my grandfather. I was his only grandson, and so he and I were quite close. He was a Army infantry officer through the entire South Pacific campaign of the Second World War. He enlisted in 1939 when he saw the war coming, deployed out to Australia, received a battlefield commission, fought in most of the campaigns under MacArthur, trying to get back to the Philippines, Borneo, New guinea, some of the other islands throughout that island chain of the South Pacific, was wounded in battle twice, contracted malaria twice, Had a couple extraordinary, harrowing experiences behind enemy lines. Was pretty highly decorated. Needless to say, he had a tough experience and never really shared his experiences with his three sons. But when I came along, suddenly he started to share and communicate, and I was really the first and for some of the stories, the only member of the family who heard what he went through from an early age. When I was in late elementary school growing up In New Jersey, 911 happened. And having been primed on military service and national service and the ideals that my grandfather fought for when 911 occurred, a classmate of mine, her father was killed in the North Tower. That really affected our community and ignited in me probably what was ignited in my grandfather in 1939, which was this drive to want to defend innocence and defend our way of life after being attacked. From that moment on, my life really focused on getting to military service. I told my dad even that night that we had to do something. I remember staying up all night watching the newsreels. And that really was the end of innocence for me and for many in my generation. My dad, being probably a smart man, didn't want me to enlist, so started taking me from a young age to visit the military academies. And one of my neighbors, incredible gentleman, graduated west point class in 1957, fought in the first battle during the Vietnam War and the cavalry, actually memorialized in the movie we were soldiers. He was my next door neighbor growing up, retired colonel, and he really wanted me to go to West Point. So my dad took me to West Point first and I loved it. That's where I wanted to go. Until the following year, my dad took me to Annapolis. And the moment we stepped foot in Annapolis, the first words out of my mouth were, how could anyone in their right mind want to go to West Point when a place like this exists? So go Navy, beat Army. Annapolis is an extraordinary town. In fact, it's where my wife and I moved once we got out of the Navy.
- [29:04]
Charles Bolden
It's beautiful.
- [29:05]
Brandon Karpf
It's incredible. So that's where I went. I worked incredibly hard to get there, and I got myself there with the nomination. Had a wonderful experience in Annapolis. Commissioned as a really as the first fully physically qualified to commission from the Naval Academy. Cryptologic Warfare Officer in the history of the Naval Academy. Commissioned as a cryptologist, Served in the Cryptologic Force at Fort Meade, both on the national side as well as the maritime side and the cyber side with Cyber Command. And that was great fun. The people I got to work with there, the missions that I got to work, the exposure and the experiences I had were life altering. I'm proud to say that some of the things I worked on made a difference. I know saved people's lives. Doesn't necessarily mean that it was easy. Really opened my eyes to an incredible world, especially across cybersecurity and cyber operations, and ignited the passions that I have today still around developing talent, developing knowledge, developing insights, and delivering those to professionals working across high tech to make everyone more effective at their mission. From there, spent some time on a ship tour out of San Diego doing more traditional cryptology. And at that point my wife, who is also a naval cryptologist, she and I decided we were kind of tired of the lifestyle and it was time to move on. At which point I left the service, separated and joined the private sector. So my service, I really attribute the skills, the proficiencies, the knowledge, the capabilities I have and what I've accomplished in the private sector to the years I spent in the Navy. It was the honor of my life to serve in the Navy. I will look back on that time with great appreciation and great pride. I met the best people of my life in the Naval service. I worked with some of the best sailors, Marines, airmen, soldiers, extraordinary human beings doing extraordinary things every day. Even though this is Veterans Day and not Memorial Day, I would like to dedicate this entire episode to my teammate Shannon Kent and her family. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your sacrifice.
- [32:12]
Eileen Collins
That's it for our special edition of T Minus for Veterans Day 2023. To all our listeners who are US veterans, we thank you for your service. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us@space2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth, mixing by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music and sound design by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Brandon Karpf and I'm Maria Varmazas. Thanks for listening.
- [33:10]
Maria Varmazas
T minus.
- [33:26]
Charles Bolden
The IT world used to be simpler. You only had to secure and manage environments that you controlled. Then came new technologies and new ways to work. Now employees, apps and networks are everywhere. This means poor visibility, security gaps and added risk. That's why Cloudflare created the first ever connectivity cloud. Visit cloudflare.com to protect your business Everywhere you do business.