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Grandfather we begin the program, please remember too silence your telephones and turn off the flash on any cameras and with that, i will introduce our interviewer robert olito. The president of the Poetry Foundation. Robert. Hi. Can everyone hear me . Great. Im robert polito, president of the Poetry Foundation but i think im here mainly in hi capacity as a nonfiction writer and for a number of years almost a decade issue was lucky enough to be the judge for the great wolf nonfiction prize and over those year we got to pick and publish some wonderful books by writers like lesly jamison or kevin young or teresa or kate, and this extraordinary book by Margaret Lazarus dean is the most recent of the gray wolf prizewinning books. Its a powerful book that is about lots and lots of things. Its ostensibly about American Space program but also a book about the way america has evolved since the early 1960s when john f. Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon and return him in a decade. I think its a book about the way that the various generations since then have interacted and intersected with america and i think its also a book that very much in conversation with many of the other great writers and writing about the American Space program, whether its tom wolfe or norman mailer. And i urge you to pick it up on the way out but as were talking, would it be appropriate, i think to start with you reading something and then we could do a few readings kind of from a later and you can either do it from here or the podium, wherever. Guest right here. Can everybody hear me . Im going read a few pages. The book has a prologue, so doesnt need any explanation. I can just jump right into it. Page one. Prologue. Airs space. The smith tone january national airs space museum in washington, dc has a grand entrance on independence avenue. A long row of smoked glass doors, set into an enormous it would edifice. Most oof of the buildings nearby or marble or stone neoclassical. Meant to appear as old as the capitol and Washington Monument which flank them. The air and space museum, completed in 1976 is an expense meant to look ultra modern, futuristic, which is to save it looks like a 1970s idea of the future. I remember pulling open one of the doors as a child. The air conditioning creating a suction that fought in the for the doors weight. When i was sevennin 1979 i first visited the museum with my father and little brother and for years as weekends after. This is what we did now that my parents had officially separated. Out in that our Court Ordered visitation arrangements give our weekends a sense of structure they never had before. Divorce is supposed to be traumatic for children, and as time went on ours would become so but not yet. For the time being there was something festive about leaving or normal lives and going on outing with our father, where we went each weekend was air and space. We stepped over the thresh hold into 0 the chilled hush of the interior. One enormous room opened many stories high to reveal flights hanging from wires if knew the names of the artifacts long before i understand what they had down. The spirit of st. Louis the wright fire, friendship. As a child i was vaguely aware that everything was out of Chronological Order but i wasnt sheer what the corrected order was. The act facts were simultaneously elegant and crude, all of them covered with an equalizing layer of dust. I like too hear their sound hoff my fathers voice and i like the way he explained to me things that most adults would assume were whopped my come preparation. My father was in law school in the midst of switching careers but being with him at the museum shed hough he missed the math and engineering. He told me about orbits, gravity,scape velocity, i tried to understand because i want him to think i was smart. Even at it busiest air and space was always hushed. The only sound the far away murmurings of tourists who walked reverently past exhibits. I looked at the exhibits. In the past men ate food from tooth pate tubes while flighting in space. Here is a tube in the case. In the mast men walked on me moon wearing space suits. His is one of the spots moon dust still ground into the seams elm here were the star charts astronauts used to find their way in space. Sometime they had to do the math themselves in pencil and i could see their scrawled figures on the margin. Here is a moon rook. People lined up to touch the relic. The air and spice supremes like an experience both pleasurable floatingy zero g the flowing world out the world like a jewel. And also gruelingly uncomfortable. The cramped capsules and stiff space suits. No way to bathe and no privacy the merciless nothingness just outside the space ships hulls. In the lobby was an artifact that at first look like nothing more than a large charcoal gray circle. 13 feet in diameter, encased in glass. That is the base of the cone shaped object which turned out when you walked around it to be the crew capsule from apollo 11. The museums curators could have chosen to place the capsule on a pedestal or hang it from the ceiling like the others but instead it position was unassuming on in the floor where people could examine it closely. My father and brother and i did just that. And on the other side we encountered an open hatch revealing a beige interior with three beige dentist couches lined shoulder to shoulder, facing a million beige switches. My father spoked behind he. Three astronauts went to the moon in here. I noted the reverence in his vote. Took them eight days to get and bak. This made no sense this, claim that three full grown men crammed. Thises into this container the side of a volkswagen beatles back seat. Neil armstrong sad there my father said, pointing at the couch at the far left. Michael collins sat here and buzz aldrin sat here. For the rest of my life the syllables of those three names would call up for me this moment this couches the tiny cramped space the with a they capsule then, only ten years old, felt bow futuristic and outdated. Moon landings were fading into the mystery and my father had computer more powerful than the one cared on the separate kraft the moon landings seemed largely fictional and events or parents remembered from their own youth and like to tell us about and therefore boring and instructive. I thought there was something about the contradictions in the capsule. The cozy utility of the interior combined with the risk of death just past the hull. Something about all this i gloved a way i couldnt have described. Still cant. The closest i can come is to say this is the first time i understood that despite their long and growing list of appalling him takes grownups had at least dutch this. This figured out how tofully in space and used which i money minds and machines to make a lovely dream come true. [applause] host that was wonderful. Really beautiful. Maybe we should just sit with this opening for a beginning. Id love to start with some writerly questions rather than just questions about the Space Program which we can get into after a while. The book begins with a moment of kind of loss. Its when your parentses separate. There could have been lots of other beginnings for the book. Was this always the beginning and why did you start it there . Guest this wasnt always the beginning. I started and a couple chapters later i start going as an adult start going to the Kennedy Space center over and over to see all the last launches of the space shuts and many earlier version is started with the occasion of deciding to start this sort of ridiculous project. But as i was finishing the book i kept sort of feeling like i hadnt quite dug in enough yet to the deeper meanings of the questions i was asking. So i was asking what does it mean that the Space Shuttle era is ending . What does it mean that the vehicle which is accomplished so much is just being sort of unceremony obviously retired and put away in museums. But i also felt like there were much deeper and cultural questions, even emotional questions, for the individuals who care about space flight and just in our own experience of the world. And so i found myself wondering for myself, where does this interest come from . Im not a physicist myself. Im not an astronomer if dont know anything about it. But i love it and i feel deeply connected to it, and the more i thought about that, the more i really kept asking myself, where was tea beginning . What was my first entry into the subject . And that was the answer, going air and space as a child. So i dont mean to emphasize the divorce. People asked me already quite a few times about the divorce material. I dont think its particularly tragic. I think its emblemcratic of the era, the 1970s the divorce laws changed and sudden lay lot of people were divorcing and my family was part of that. I dont mean to imply that the story comes from a painful or traumatic place. Those childhood visits to the place sort of i think took a long time to actually turn into a book jo what is so beautiful its without overemphasizing its a moment where something whether something is beginning or something is ending, is blurred in a really kind of complicated way which i think hangs over the entire story of the shuttle because its sort of your family is ending in some ways while your interest in this is starting. Guest right. Right. I think that cultural moment is really interesting time to be starting this, too. It sort of surprised know think about the first times i went this, was about seven, so it was about 1979 and that was only ten years after apollo 11. That seems long to me. Host it was already in a museum. Guest yes, already in the museum covered with dust, and those events already seem historical. The Technology Already seemed out of date. So that confusion finds its would into the into. Host when did you had make the decision to structure the book around the last three shuttle flights mainly. Lots of flashbacks. Guest right. A lot of other material in between. I think i first came up with the idea i should write about the end of the shuttle and the fall of 2010, which is about when that decision was made final. Nasa decisions are never never feel all that firm because their decisions are made by congress and when Congress Makes a budget theyre deciding what nasa is going to do in the future. So the news came out that the shuttle is going to end after these we have these maybe more missions left to do, and that felt uncertain but it also seemed like this is probably going to be the end of an era. So i did start with the idea i should go to three launches. They that is one launch for each of the three orbits still flying itch went to other eventsisms invited to go to things i would not have anticipated i would have a chance to go to, which was great. I think i had started with the idea that i see the last launch of discovery and endeavour and each of them would be a Different Event and that following that trajectory would sort of follow what its like for something so big to wind itself down. Host were you always a major character in the book . Was it always you going to the launch or was there a ever a version of the book that was a little bit more abstract and historical. Guest it was always first person. It was always me going to the launch. And partly because i so admire the nonfiction writers who do use those techniques where they talk about their own experience and being in a place including the experience of being bitten by a mosquito or the experience of being tired or needing coffee or wishing you werent there. I find that i respond really well to Historic Events being written about in that really honest and subjective kind of way. I mean, i think i hadnt quite realized how much i would need to put myself into it in order for it to make sense and that is something i worked on throughout many drafts. It often felt like i was putting myself in as a character but wasnt entirely being honest about my own involvement in these events and so i think i had to push myself to put myself into it more even though for me and i think for a lot of writers its not very comfortable. Host when did that happen and how did you do it . Guest i think very gradually. It had to do with the advice got from readers and various drafts including my husband who is also a writer and has always been a good reader for me. But also my editor at gray wolf, steve woodward, who helped me finish the book. I kept getting feedback that it was working but we dont feel you there yet. Or i dont get how you feel about this. I kept sort of trying to speak for everyone. All space fans feel this way or all americans feel this way and theres a place for that but ultimately i think in this kind of nonfiction i had to be able to say i feel this way for my own very idio sincratic recents and that in a weird way that speaks to peoples emotionally more effectively than trying to speak for everyone. Host what about the other major characters . Omar and buzz aldrin who are kind of opposites in a lot of ways. Guest yes, thats interesting. So this book really wouldnt have happened in the way it did if not for my friend omar, who is a person who works at the Kennedy Space center for many years, his father worked at the Kennedy Space center for his entire life. So he is really grew up in a nasa family, grew up in that part of the country and knows the shuttles very well, and i got to know him when hi first book came out. He wrote to me. We became as one does, in the modern era we became friends threw social media followed each other on facebook and twitter, and as the shuttle era started winding down he started inviting me to events at the Kennedy Space center, which are not open to the general public but space workers air loued to invite family and friends for certain events, and so i real use wouldnt have had access to things i saw but aside from the physical access, i felt like by getting to know one person and his family, i was able to see a kind of individual and emotional dimension to what it means for this era to be ending that i might not have gotten otherwise. To meet people whose entire careers, entire lives have been devoted to making the space vehicle fly and they are seeing it being put into museums is yes. Host you simultaneously are kind of virgil, like to your guest i love that. Host also somebody who is watching his world diminish to a certain extent, kind of fall apart, in the course of the book. So he serves lots of functions. And then kind of set against him is somebody like buzz aldrin. And i think thats one of the set pieces of the book where you meet him and introduce him. Its a book festival in fact. Guest this one. Theres a chapter in the book in which i spend the day with buzz aldrin and i was asked to introduce him at a book festival not because im famous or important but because i was the only writer at the same philosophy who had written anything about space. So we were sort of thrown together and because of the such a big festival and his event was headliner we were in an auditorium that seat thousands of people and wound up being trapped together the entire day and it was a chance not just to meet someone who walked on the moon, which is really remarkable, but also a chance to talk with him about what it means to him that the Space Shuttle is ending. Which it was at that time. I think there were still five flights to go at the time i met him. And its something to me to see how my guesses as to how he would react did not always measure up with how he actually did react. He went know moonin 1969, and ever since then has just been waiting for us to get our act together and go to mars, and he doesnt quite understand as i dont either issue guess why that hasnt come to pass. Host as we talked before he was a bit like kind of spock at a star trek convention, waiting for them to make the next movie or Something Like that. Guest yes. What he did that we know him for, he did so long ago now but he is just he has this magnetic kind of rock star appeal. People wait outside in pouring rain for hours just to shake his hand and thank him for doing what he did. So its a weird kind of combination. He is in his 80s. A long time ago that we went to the moon. But i kind of a real outpouring of affection not just for what he represents and what he did but for himself as a person. He took a real personal risk. Those guys did not know sure they would come back safely and theres a sense of gratitude combined with the heroism we put on to a person like that. Host one of my favorite suspects of the book was the way it is in conversation with other writers and other books and thats become i think almost like a kind of subgenre in a way of literary nonfiction. A book like nicholsons bakers you and i his literary relationship with john updike, and i wonder if youd talk a little bit but how you saw that aspect of the book because i think it for me as a rather, it kind of helped define you generationally in the book but also as i was trying to the beginning helps define a bit like where america was in the 1960s and where it is now as this is coming to an end. Guest there were a few book that were sort of my space literature cannon going into the project, and i knew these books even before it was announced the shutting was going to end. I had been reading about space flight for a good ten years before that. But the three sort of main books that i felt like i was in conversation with in this project were i norman mailers fire of the moon his first person account of seeing the launch of apollo 11. Tom wolf, the right stuff and a book by an italian the book called if the sun dies and all three books we would cart gore rise as creative nonfunction. None of them called journalism. They all have a real personal subjectiveed idiosyncratic approach and theyre all books i at mire. So i do throughout this book i kept sort of Touching Base with each of them and the things they experienced and they they interpret what they were seeing, but of course they were writing in a much earlier era and especially for mailer, and they were writing books in realtime as these things were happening stop there are books that filled with a sense of hope and the sense of optimism that now that were doing this were going to keep going to space all the time, guess. The next generation, everyone will go to space and the generation after that, children will be born in space. And so its odd for someone in 2015 or in 2011, which is when my launches were taking place to read these books and see these experiences they were having that were so similar to mine. System launch king from the Kennedy Space center but their interpretation would to the be more different from me meaning im describing to the things that im seeing. Host its a bit like the phrase that you use in the past you read the 70s idea of the future. A literary version of the 70s good of the future. Form farman mailer the launch of apool low 11 thought this is the beginning of the era in which people are constantly going to the moon, and it wasnt. We went to the move six times and that was it. So its an odd task for a writer in 2011 to go and see such a similar launch experience, and yet to know what im seeing is the end of the space vehicle and there are no clear plans for what is supposed to happen next. Host would you be willing to read about that . Maybe from the end of the book since i think you actually kind of covered the earlier passages. Guest yes. So normal mailer especially is a writer im sort of in conversation with throughout the book. Sometimes warring arguing with sometimes arguing with him, sometimes admiring his book. It feels strange to be arguing with a dead man in my own head. About at the end after the last launch i had a chance to go back again for the last landing and so what im going to read is a passage immediately after that landing if had a chance to Wander Around the press site at the Kennedy Space center which during launches is overrun with press, as you imagine. But land little get much less coverage so theres a sort of empty expanse of press site i had and i had the full run of for a while and while i was there i was thinking about other writer what who normal mailer think of me, mother and a wife, following in his footsteps at kennedy . Fell back upon itself we cuckoo both be stand only the piece of grass at the count downclock on the same day, what would we see in each other . I doubt very much that our encount were be anything like those hived a have had with other space people on me own time. I do it we swap stores of space coast motels bad food and surgeon burns the finer points of liquid fuels. Would he wake by me assuming me to be somebodys secretary wife nonwriter nonartist nonego nothing to contribute to the world but to care for and feed a male ego and his babies. It said not long before that the prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best meat possible for herself and conceive children who will improve the species. Or would he out of boredom and isolation and a lowered standard that come with launch conditions attempt to bed me . Would he corp never at a space party, ask me to din ply me with wine . Douse it make my shallow the latter seems less depresses because in trying to seduce me he would have to talk to me, pre ten to listen. Its important to remember that as destuck stiff as tattoo tied of mallards towoman, everytime also a loss to men of his time that they were denied the pleasures of taking care of children the pleasures of home life to which the corrected more than a paycheck and a last name. And they were denied the hospital uncomplicated friendship of women professional collaboration and respect intellectual rapport simple favors, games of online scrabble. As much as i victim normal mailer the events he got to take part in i cant envy him his era. He and i never could have been friends in it. I would not have been allowed to about a writer in it, or if i managed to make place for myself as joan didion did readers would have hastened to assure each i was a bad mother, a bad wife not pretty or nice enough. This is familiar from the narratives about women astronauts. You can go but well say you abandoned your children. We can say youre unnatural for not having children. A deem of below allowed full participation. The dream is alive. I suppose the dream is still in process of coming true. Host if find that very moving and i think its at the core i think, of the conversation that is almost in a way like a kind of ancient greek conversation in which you have the golden age and the silver page and bronze age. He is write about the golden age and youre coming in the third age, of that, and maybe in less literary terms how have 0 you come to kind of think about that version of the future versus your generations version of the future . Guest thats a good question. I think it seems for a moment there in the late 1960s it seemed as though technology was going to change culture and technology was going to change the ways in which people behaved. Change the ways in which people behaves. And this is like what has happened in a couple of generations since then is we have had to confront the fact that has not come to pass in the way we expected. Now that people have walked on the moon everything is differents and it felt like there is an implication that we dont really have to do anything differently it is all just a different house and everything will be better and problems can be solved, cancer will be cured. Any problem can be solved through technology and specifically solved through large federal projects based on technology and it is the mixed history of what has happened since then. Technology has continued to evolve and given us things we did not have at the time of the moon landing but we have lost the sense that technology will change culture, technology will change us and we will be better, a better civilization as a result of things we lost that sense that there is something collective. We all know what ipads and iphones can do for us personally. That is why theres a conflict in terms of what is going to happen in space flight. A lot of space flight fans are interested in seeing Smaller Companies with shareholders take up this project of getting to space and have that be something driven by private industry. Other space fans feel that would be to destroy what was actually noble and good about space flight in the first place which was that it was done by all of us, for all of us with scientific goals in mind more than turning a profit for somebody. That sense of patriotism and cold war competition combined the was behind kennedys mandates and mission. There was the sense they had done something we could all be proud of sort of unequivocally. Not that everyone was. There was conflict at the time about whether that was a great way to be spending that much money, not argumentthat argument continues to this day and it seems even people who objected to and there was a sense that we had shown we can accomplish something incredible together and in a short period of time that no one company or individual could have gone on their own. Host one of the exciting aspect of your book is is simultaneously an elegy for that era but not too deep inside of it, a rallying cry for lets try to figure out a way to do this again because it was really important. What do you think king sculpture from being interested in projects like that . We have the standard economic explanation, things like that it seems Something Else is missing. The cash. Guest almost everyone i talk to about this seems to be in favor of continuing spaceflight projects. There are certainly people with high sums of money and how they are better spent, there are people who disagree with the way nasa did what they did and continue to do what they do but beyond that there seems to be an interest in space flight and a love for space flight that transcends ideology, transcends the values that divide this country more and more and that is interesting to me. I meet people who are clear that taxes are bad, taxpayer funds should never be spent on anything but when you mention i am going to a shuttle launch that is great nasa is awesome and everything they do is awesome. Theres a real contradiction. Keep the government out of my medicare. Exactly. Not to say i think there is hypocrisy at every glove level in terms of how people connect their own complex values with the idea of spending billions of dollars sending people to space. Theres always going to be some kind of contradiction, but i feel like i see an interest. I see a love for space flight in the people i talk to including young people. Imac University Professor so i see people, i talked about what i know and they all seem to be as enthusiastic as i am about going to mars. How does that happen when theres not a national sense of urgency behind that. Especially when theres a sense of panic at economic crisis the projects that seem peripheral are the first to go. Going to mars will take decades of steady funding to be toward that end that is Something Congress does not seem to do well. If we could do all in one year we might talk and into doing that but there needs to be something on going that will be a challenge. You read a lot about this, and in a way been obsessed with this before you started the book but what were the biggest surprises for you when in the course of writing the book and laying it out . There are ideas people in my generation have grown up with not having experienced apollo or gemini and mercury before that, a lot of ideas about space flight in that early age that we grew up with the dont turn out to be entirely accurate. There is some were retroactive things ago on especially in terms of up until 1969 it was never entirely clear whether this was going to work. There was this enormous project to follow through on kennedys promised to send astronauts to the moon and bring them back safely but there was uncertainty whether that was physically possible. Overtime as it became more popular there was sun 70 about whether the funding would go through. I learned about that subsequently because the idea i had grown up with was it was a triumph, everyone supported it from the beginning and because of this massive unanimous support that it happened but the more i learned about it the more i learned there was a lot of uncertainty and controversy, there was not always a clear majority of americans who supported apollo. People died along the way. Astronauts were lost and every time that has happened, apollo one fire and with both shuttle disasters every time happens there are people who withdraw their support and dont want to go to space anymore as a result of that. That is a piece of the story doesnt make it into the triumphant legend my generation was raised with. Where there surprises in the people you met . You meet a fairly wide cast of characters over the course of three1 2 launches. The sort of private one at the end. Yes, i went to a space x launch that was scrubbed. I met so many people who worked at the Kennedy Space center or have worked at the Kennedy Space center in their lives. What i expect that of certain level is to find as exciting and inspiring as i find their work that they would find their work boring as normal people do. Especially a person whose job is to sweep the floor of the Vehicle Assembly building or a person whose job is to guard an arbiter and make sure only the right people get access to it. I thought i would meet people who were bored by the work or taken it for granted and what surprised me most is every Single Person i met was proud to go to work every day, they had an overall sense of where their work it into the history of American Space flight, they were proud of that and passionate and im sure there were people who were not great at their jobs but i never met any of them. I have a huge admiration for the people who have done that work. How would they explain what they do to skeptics . People who would say the money could be better spent on other things . What would their other emotional or intellectual it can be hard for people with that passion to communicate with skeptics at all. There is such a deep love for space flight among people who have it that the skepticism seems completely bewildering, it is like saying you dont support humanity or america. I see this a lot even for the short period the my book is not in discussions on social media and sometimes seeing people kind of coming to loggerheads or one person saying stop the shuttle because a was a terrible and stupid vehicle and other people saying the shuttle is the most beautiful thing human beings ever created. They cant communicate with each other. They are speaking from such a deeply held ideologies that they cant communicate with each other. That was one thing i was trying to do in this book. I can pop those divides. I love the Space Shuttle and i love spaceflight but i dont work for nasa. I am not a scientist or engineer. I am an english professor. I know people who dont know anything about space flight and dont get it and dont know why the money is being spent. I felt like i was able to bring together some threads that people who are too deeply entrenched in one view or another would not be able to see. How do you see the generational story . One way of reading the book is Space Exploration is just the latest example of these wonderful activities that the baby boom generation got to do, mocked up and people dont get to it any more. Wikipedia that is negative. Kind of what happened to popular musical what happened to other things in the minds of certain people. Theres a sense we missed it all from the time we were old enough to learn about music or learn about technology or in the realm of space flight my earliest space memory was going to the air and space museum my first memory in real time was the challenger disaster. That is a different entry into thinking about human spaceflight in being allowed to stay up late to watch Neil Armstrong walked on the moon which is the experience for people 10 or 20 years older than me. There is a sense that our parents raise us with these legends that everything was so cool in the 60s and now everything is lame. I dont think that was ever released a case. I dont think people become smarter or more creative or better in certain periods and then forget all that but there is a sense at least in terms of space flight, we had a kind of faith in our government or a faith in collective effort that allowed us to get something done that it is hard to imagine what it would take to create that. And a belief in the future that would allow for this to expand. Investing in this technology will inexorable the lead to Something Better happening next and that is not necessarily always the case. I wonder if there are any questions out there . Yes . I guess everyone should walk to the microphone if they have a question. It is not true that anyone has walked on the moon. Woman landing was a sciencefiction film made at a military films studio in nevada. Question. If the flag planted in the sea of tranquillity is on the moon have you or anyone else looked through a telescope and seen it there . If it is there, i have something to do with putting it there contrary to my pacifist and anarchist convictions. I talked a little bit about the theory that the mill landings were faked in my book and i would like to talk to you after this if that is okay. It would be easier to talk 1on1 than with me up here when i cant really see you. I would like to meet you and hear what you have to say. Thank you. How are you . Out side of the Apollo Mission being endlessly fascinating in terms of the Technology Available at the time i am wondering about the longterm effects of posttraumatic stress disorder that would come from being on an Apollo Mission, going to the moon and coming back. Apollo specifically . That is a good question. People who were involved in that program, theres a wide range of ways they talk about that experience now and the wide range of ways it seems to have affected in going forward. Some of them really seem to be ignited with this love for the experience that they had and they go out and talk to people and get children excited about technology some people like alan bean has become an artist and spends his time painting these beautiful scenes of what the experience on the moon, some have become sort of soured. None of them are extremely negative about it but some are more enthusiastic than others. I never heard any of the refer to anything like ptsd morning traumatic. They were so well prepared for the experience and so well chosen as far as i can tell, choosing test pilots was a smart place to start. Putting them in the hand of Untested Technology and were able to keep their cool in that situation was a smart place to start. I never heard any of some talk about their experience in those terms although it could be that they have chosen not to or their training has trained them not to talk about it in those terms. Thank you. Norman mailer talks about coming back from the moon and try to explain what happened to them to anybody else, at they were metaphorically on two different planets with everybody they were talking to. It is common to see in interviews with astronauts especially astronauts who went to the moon and, to hear them saying i wish i could put into words for you, it is possible by choosing people who have this ability to keep their cool in terrifying situations we inadvertently shows people who couldnt think about their own demotions or put those complex emotions into words. There might be a connection between those things. After getting caught up in manned space flight as you did with your book and all of your research i am curious to hear what your considered opinion or hopes for the future of man spaceflight odd because i have been fortunate enough to see all of it and it really was a perfect storm based on the geopolitical times that allowed the United States to do what we did, to go to the moon. Watching it you could all see at the point, you mentioned this in the book of little bit it flattened out and went downhill after that. We lost the last couple moon flights and then the challenger disaster, the columbia disaster, you could see it hit the National Psyche that that caused. I dont know that one country will do anything like that again except maybe china. You see a lot of people the technology and maybe even the political will to try to do it. Theyre doing it on their own. They are not involved with the International Space station, they have been almost from scratch with probably stolen Technology Working their way slowly into orbital flights, they plan on going to the moon, going to mars just the geometric progression, a larger progressions and going to the moon. What do you think . Will we see it in our lifetime . It is an interesting king the Chinese Agency reinventing spaceflight from the ground up with mercury and gemini and now trying to to put a space station of their own, we are at a point where there is an idea at least the private companies, by taking over what the Space Shuttle used to can develop their capabilities and show us what more they can do and some people are very confident nasa by having just one behemoths in space flight, was sucking up all the energy and projects and now that the shuttle has been retired is going to be like when dinosaurs died out it less all the mammals have space to evolve and that is how we came along that is a positive way of looking at the end of the shuttle. Other peoples a by taking go for flights to low earth orbit which is what the shuttle did, spacex or boeing, that will only get us back to where we were in 1981 with the Space Shuttle so that is not a leap forward. What it would take to create the forward is probably going to be a cooperation between private companies and nasa and the Russian Space agency and the European Space agency, the International Space station has been a fantastic example of what nations can do together cooperatively. It has been very complicated and there have been snags in the process but the International Space station is a space station that has been in orbit since 2000 six people have been living on it and it has been inhabited since then, six People Living on it right now from many Different Countries and that is the blueprint for what it would take to create a mars project. Weather a kind of cooperative project will inspire people to want to pay for that is hard to say. The idea about apollo is we were willing to spend at its peak 5 or 6 of the federal budget, we were willing to spend that only because it was a sort of proxy war with the soviet union. And we would never inspire people to spend that kind of money for a peaceful projects. I hope that is not true but i am not sure what it would take to make that happen. What would it take to get you gillick in space . Guest i dont think i would be a great astronaut. Is not something i aspire to although the International Space station has been in orbit for so long and the russian soyuz has been in operation so long, if i were offered a seat on soyuz i might go. Any other questions . One last question from any one . Please join me in thanking, margaret for writing a remarkable book. [applause] once again. Thank you to Margaret Lazarus dean and robert polito. She will be signing books in the lobby right outside. Every weekend booktv offers programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. Keep watching for more on cspan2 and watch any of our past programs online at booktv. Org. Heres a look at the current bestselling nonfiction books according to indy bound which represent sales and independent bookstores throughout the country. Topping the list, david mccullough, two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize recounting the birth of flight in the right brothers. That is a look at some of the current nonfiction bestsellers according to indy bound. It all just, if you ask me why i was doing this, in my late 20s, would always be the same, it might be funny. Things have changed. I was looking for it might be funny. I thought it might be funny to sneak into a building thought it moon honey, democracy and when the islamic state. He was calling himself Osama Bin Laden ha we called him up, must have thought he was dead, really successful. And the democracy is okay and on the first day the first thing we did was watch the lion king the only way he can relax, they call me the why and, great warrior, a great fighter. Then he needed to get a collection box, went to the local wholesale warehouse and the only collection box in stock would be a giant novelty plastic cocacola bottles. I said isnt it funny you are collecting money to overthrow the west, palpable symbols . He was like yes did two engage them. Taking him to show for him to office world where he got the future of britain pamphlets because of this Worlds Special promise if you find a photocopy, office world, give you a difference or something. And he was getting some leaflets. And almost like taking of sideways glance to omar. And omar turned to me and said a very sensitive moment. Then he said i let you in my wife i would like something in return and i said what . He said can you drive me to this meeting in birmingham. I drove him to what was basically a secret terrorist base but definitely a secret radical islam a Country House in birmingham. They wouldnt let us in. Omar got into trouble flapping us along so we had to wait in the parking lot. He said yes please, at doing god knows what. This gritty on warts they have in birmingham. Then omar hounded me as a jew and said he had Training Camp. Been there for of year, never discussed my religion but he said, he certainly said look at me with the infidel the trainees, and a jew they all went oh and i said it is better to the jews and an atheist and someone in the crowd went oh actually i am an atheist. A jihad Training Camp. They surrounded me and asked what it was like to be a jew. And treating me a coral reef. And this was all 1996 1997. I met someone from the board of deputies, the antidefamation league. And he said britain, i think he meant me as well, has woken up. Paranoid. Four years later and ever since 2001 omars people have been implicated. There have been a number of occasions a suicide bomber has blown themselves up and would have omars number stored in his mobile phone. That happened on a number of occasions. One of the drivers whether he had Training Camp end ed up blowing himself up somewhere and omar himself is in prison in beirut. A few people have said this was happening you were making it kind of comic story. This is like a burgeoning thing and you were in the middle of it but this sort of comic story and i guess that happened, it happened. The comedy happens. We were there and we were there by luck in a way but we word there so kind of a valuable record of the world being about today change. You can watch this and other programs on line on booktv. Org. Physicist Freeman Dyson is next on booktv talking about his book of essays dreams of earth and sky in which he writes about global warming, biotechnology and more. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone. Thank you very much for come. The usual reminders, thank you very much for that. Please silence yourself known then