![]() And once they get through that, they can understand the rest of the stories. So, I figured, the people who want to read this stuff are going to have to do a little bit of homework in the first two chapters. Without giving you the background on the systems and the operations, throughout the rest of the book I would be constantly trying to explain what everything was and it would break up the stories to a certain extent. The first two chapters are what I call the educational portion of the book. I didn't want to write a chronological biography-you know, I was born in a little log cabin in northern Minnesota kind of thing-but I realized this kind of story has to be more or less chronological or it doesn't make sense. I found a great editor, who is very much an enthusiast, and I said, "What would you like to see in the book? I think I started with 20 chapters, and he said, "Let's shoot for about 12," and that helped focus it down and I was able to combine some things and make it work. If I tried to tell the whole story, I would have written an encyclopedia. It took me a long time to finally wrap my head around the fact that all I could do was tell some stories, my stories. ![]() When Gene Kranz wrote his book, it was about Apollo and that was a couple of years. When Chris Kraft wrote his book about being flight director, it was about a couple of years, basically during the Mercury program. The difficult thing was getting my head wrapped around the fact that I couldn't tell the whole story. He spoke with The Elective about the book, his time at NASA, and what he’s excited about when it comes to the future of space travel. He sat center seat on 39 missions, nine of them as lead flight director.ĭye takes readers (and space nerds) into JSC’s Mission Control Center and behind the scenes of the Shuttle program in his memoir Shuttle, Houston: My Life in the Center Seat of Mission Control, which was published in July. He was with the Shuttle program from its earliest days, through the Challenger and Columbia disasters, the development of a relationship with the Russian space agency, the construction of the International Space Station, and the end of the Shuttle program in 2011. Thirty-one years later, he retired as the longest-serving flight director in U.S. But when he entered JSC, he didn’t know what he’d be working on.ĭye was thrown into the world of operations, doing two stints as a co-op then accepting a job in the Flight Operations Division as a junior flight controller after graduating in 1982. That’s what led NASA to look for co-op students (think interns-plus) and to select Dye as one of them. The agency was ramping up the Space Shuttle program and staffing up. When Paul Dye first stepped into Houston’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) as a Cooperative Education Student in 1980, he was a third-year aeronautical engineering major from the University of Minnesota who dreamt of working on airplanes.
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