friends on booktv who will be filming tonight's discussion. we look forward to hearing any questions you have from mike tonight. we want fewer booktv viewers to hear your questions is also. please wait for the microphone to come to you before asking questions so the booktv viewers can see how smart you really are. tonight borders is pleased to welcome mike mullane. "riding rockets" is the first book by space shuttle astronaut to talk about his experiences for adult audiences. unlike prior astronaut looks which tend to be g rated, technical and sanitized, his story is refreshingly human and candid. mullane becomes the story of an amazing dreams quest. mullane was commissioned into the usa apps. he was selected as the first group of space shuttle astronauts. he currently lives in albuquerque, new mexico. please give a warm borders welcome to mike mullane. [applause] mr. mullane: thank you very much, and good evening. i thought i would start by explaining what a shuttle launch is like. i will read from a few passages, but extemporaneously i want to describe to you what it's like to blast off into space. i'm frequently asked, was i afraid sitting on that launchpad. and i replied, no. i was not afraid. i was terrified. it goes beyond being afraid, folks. unlike a fighter jet where you are sitting on an ejection seat and you feel like if things go bad you can bailout, in a space shuttle you don't have that option. once you are in it, you know everything has to work just fine or bad things can happen. it is a significant fear factor sitting on that launchpad. you get a heavy vibration, it really rattles you. the countdown will continue to zero when the rocket boosters ignite and you are on your way. about 40 seconds into flight, you are doing supersonic, there are shockwaves on the vehicles from the gas tank and rocket boosters. you are really bouncing around pretty good. at t plus two minutes and 12 seconds after liftoff, you will hear this loud tank, see fire across the windows of the boosters, and then it gets dead quiet. for the next six minutes you will continue into space on liquid fueled engines. it's very smooth, very quiet. the only way you can tell you are moving are the g forces pushing into your seat right that is not like the science fiction movies where you see people's faces peel off the front of the helmet. the autopilot shuts off the engines, the gas tank is jettisoned, it tumbles into the atmosphere and burns like a giant meteor. we fire two small engines, we have gas that goes in the tail area. somewhere between about 100 and 400 miles above the earth depending on the mission, and that entire process i just described to you from liftoff 20 altitude, being in that orbit about 200 miles above the earth, the entire process takes 10 minutes. a very short, violent, and terrifying 10 minutes. i would like to read a couple passages from the book, then we will open up for questions and do the book signing. if anybody at the book signing wants to take a photo standing next to me, we will sign the book and take a photo. i had a dream come true. early in my life i dreamed of being an astronaut and this book is about that quest to make that dream happen. i wanted to share with you a passage here. i was reborn on october 4, 1957. anybody know what happened that date? sputnik was launched. the sky in albuquerque was great to be looking for satellites and stars. i can just step outside of my house in albuquerque and i was in space. i thought i would just described to you in one paragraph here, remember back to that moment of watching sputnik come over. that evening i stood with the rest of the city population in the cold october twilight to watch the new russian moon twinkle overhead. my dad watched from his wheelchair. my dad was crippled with polio when he was 33. i developed that also in this book, the effect that had on me for the rest of my life was having a father who was confined to a wheelchair. my dad watched from his wheelchair, cursing eisenhower for being asleep at the switch. i was struck dumb by the spectacle. i was mesmerized i the thought of traveling at such speeds and altitudes. the science fictions of my youth had long depicted's patients flying to distant planets. now sputnik proved it was really going to happen. i could not have imagined a more exciting adventure and i wanted to be part of it. i wanted to fly into space. i'm going to talk to you about the moment that you get -- there's a lot of special moments in an astronaut's life. getting assigned to a flight is one. the big moment you really celebrate is when you are prime crew. that happened to me on friday the 13th in 1980 four, when the mission and front of us, our first mission, it landed and now we were next. i went to describe my feelings of that moment. we were next, we were prime crew. with that title came top priority for simulators and t-38. for me, it also brought prime crew night terrors. until this moment, every time my soul try to deal with the fear and joy of what was fast approaching, i disallowed it. the ius failure, hydraulic failure, and twin satellite booster failures had made me a skeptic. there was too much in front of us that could jeopardize our mission. even now with the horizon clear of any other shuttle missions, it kept my emotions on a very shortly. an engine could blow up in a ground test and stop the program. my health had become an issue. the contractors could find something wrong with their machines. there are thousands of unknowns in this business. don't even think of flying in space, i ordered myself. during my waking hours, i obeyed that order. in sleep, the reality of being prime crew with pre-pass my decision. i would bolt awake with my heart wildly drumming and my brain overwhelmingly aware that i would be next off the planet. every fear i ever harbored about death aboard a space shuttle, every doubt i ever held about my competence to do the mission, every joy i had ever celebrated at the thought of flying into space with flash through my consciousness in a wild, chaotic theory and vaporize any hope. i would get up for a walk or a run. i want to skip here to talk about the drama that the spouses experience in this business. i think i've done a good job in this book of bringing them in, unlike other astronaut books straight my wife played a huge part in my life, but she paid a price. it was a grueling, emotional, heart rending effort for her to support me in this business. one of the things the spouses have to do is about a month before launch, they have to get together and select an astronaut escort. that is a euphemism. these people are standing next to the spouses on the roof of the launch center and will be there during the launch to help if any disasters happen. with that background, knowing my wife has just selected one of these astronaut escorts, i will read this paragraph. there were no formal criteria for selection of family escorts, whose spouses usually throughout a few names to consider and quickly settled on two. unspoken in their deliberations was another duty for which the family escorts were being selected. if discovery killed us, they would become casualty assistance officers. i suspected every wife knew this comment even if their husbands were negligent in not telling them, they probably heard it from other wives. i told donna years earlier, nasa required her and the kids to watch the launch from the roof of the nasa control center. nasa wanted to isolate the families from the press in the case of disaster. that evening on the ride back from a party, donna turned to me and said, this is a strange business when you have to preselect an escort into widowhood. she was enduring a lot for my dream, and all the wives did for their spouses. i had this dream of becoming an astronaut come true on august 30, 1984, on the first launch of the orbiter discovery. i thought it would share with you the thrill of what it's like when that moment occurs. when that moment occurs, there are technical requirements. when you pass 50 miles altitude, you are an astronaut. that spaceshipone you heard about in the news, that was one of their objectives, to be able to get up to those altitudes. we were approaching 50 miles, the magic line that would officially make a fast drop. i always thought this multitude requirement was being counter bf. in reality, if you did not make it to 50 miles on the shuttle, that probably meant the machine had killed you, as it meant with the challenger crew. by official definition, he did not die as an astronaut. note to nasa, when the ball down hold slow, you have earned your gold. here it comes. congratulations, rookie. you are officially astronauts. we cheered. i suspect judy, steve, mike, and charlie were relishing the moment like i was. i experienced a momentary calm. there were still a few thousand things that could kill me, but their threat could not tell me away from the moment. i steered into the black and watched images of my childhood play in my mind. i saw my homemade rocket streaking upward from the albuquerque desert. my dad on his crutches, cheering. i saw my mom helping me make my fuel in her oven and cleaning out coffee cans for my castles. i saw myself lying in the desert, watching echo streak across the twilight. i was an astronaut. one of the things -- the beauty of the earth seen from space when it's really -- it would be an insult to god to put it in human words to see the earth from space. probably a lot of you have seen photos of grand canyon and thought, this is pretty great. you stand there, and it does not compare to this grandeur. it is truly a challenge to describe as it is. here is my shot, a description, one of the most beautiful sights you can see from space, and that is the sunset. the 45 minutes of my orbit days, i was treated to another space flight of breathtaking beauty that would challenge the most gifted poet. as discovery raced eastward, behind her the sun plunged towards the western horizon. beneath me, the horizon that separated the light from the deeper black of night began to dim the ocean blue. high clouds over the terminator glow tangerine and pink in the final race of the sun. discovery entered the shadow world and i turned my head to the back windows to watch the sun dipped below the horizon. it's light was now being split by the atmosphere. an intense color spectrum 100 times more brilliant than any rainbow seen on earth formed in an arc to separate the black of earth night from the perennial black of space. were touched the earth the color bow was as red as royal velvet and faded upwards to multiple shades of blue and orange and purple. as discovery set further from it, the bow slowly shrank along the earth to the point of sunset, diminishing in reach in thickness and intensity as if the colors were a liquid ingrained in the sky. finally an eyelash sin arc of indigo remained, then it winked out and discovery was fully immersed in the oblivion of an orbit night. i was in the first group of astronauts that included female astronauts, the first group in the space shuttle era, 29 men, six women one of the things that i noticed was the pressure the women were under to never show any difference between men. they knew they were under a microscope by the press that was searching for them to show any difference between them and a male astronaut. sometimes it manifested itself in strange ways. in my first mission i was flying with judy resnick. she was subsequently killed on challenger, but we were flying our first mission together in 1984 and we had an imac camera. the big camera, on earth it weighs 100 pounds and it's very loud when it's operating. my commander was filming a satellite deployment. judy had really bushy black hair and it was up in weightlessness. we were deploying a satellite, and i hear this scream. judy's hair got caught in that belt driven magazine like getting caught in the fan belt of a car. it pulled her head into that thing. i grabbed it. we were all tumbling in the middle of the cockpit. i'm trying to keep her hair from getting ripped out of her scalp. it happened pretty quickly, but the machine jammed when her hair got stuck in the gear in the circuit breaker popped and it stopped. it was in our eyes, our mouths. i want to pick up at that point now. we have jammed this camera with judy's hair, remembering the issue of never revealing you are different than males, obviously females have your hair than us males do in many cases and certainly judy did. let me read a paragraph on how this all played out. hank is getting ready to pick up the microphone and called mission control to tell them the camera is not working because of this hiar jam, -- hair jam, and they will have to replan the targets we are filming. we males had been missing the real issue, as hank of the microphone, judy lashed out at him with something along the lines of, if you so much as breathe a word to mcc about my hair jamming the camera, i will cut your heart out with a spoon. it was a brief moment as we struggle to understand judy's rage. she was only the second american woman to fly in space. the press had her under the a microphone. the hair jam incident was a mistake with her name on that. not only that, it contained the worst possible stand against feminism that judy had demonstrated that women were indeed different for men. hank, who had stared death in the eye on many a mission, now faced a man's worst nightmare, a really pissed off woman. no communist gunner had appeared as deadly as judy at that moment. under her searing glare, hank did what we all would have done. he wanted to return with all his appendages. he called mcc and said the imax camera had a film jam and mike was working to clear it. eventually mike was able to breathe life back into the camera, with rescheduled targets, he and hank continued their filming while judy stayed far, far away. our toilet is a vacuum cleaner. the urinal on hours failed about three or four days into the mission, so we could no longer use the urinal and had to pee in plastic bags. it's hard enough in weightlessness for men to be doing this. for females it can be worse. the crown went back and look at their figures and found there was enough space in the urine collection tank and cryptically sent this message to us trade there are three man days of space remaining in that tank. us men would have to pee in plastic bags and judy would continue to use the urinal. judy would not use the urinal because she knew that word would eventually leak out that she had been cut some slack because she was a woman and she knew she could not do that. nowadays, this all sounds silly to probably a lot of you. but back in those days, you have to remember where those women were. ok. one of the things we do in the space business that we are ill-prepared for is public speaking. we had no training in that trade nasa expected us to go out and be just as good flying rockets as at the podium. staring at the camera for c-span, i was reminded this passage right here. the most dreaded form of public speaking with a tv interview, a streak of antiaircraft fire passing your windows not get your heart rate up like looking into a black camera lens and hearing 3, 2, 1, your live. for me it was a cadence that always brought on nausea. once as i was listening to this on the air countdown, the anchor leaned into me and said, it's just like a shuttle launch. when you hit zero, there's no going back. he was right. you were flying. the camera was scattered in urine images and words -- scattering your images and words into every living room in america. i imagine people at their breakfast tables laughing as i choked, trying to respond to a simple question like, what's your name? it was tough getting used to that, being in the limelight and having to develop some skills at talking publicly. thought i would just close here with one last paragraph. down at kennedy space center, the astronaut memorial that has a granite face that has the names of the astronauts who died in the line of duty chiseled into these granite panels, mirrors on the back that reflect the light through these etchings and granite panels. and i'm talking about being a retired astronaut and going down to the kennedy space center. keeping in mind that four of my classmates died on challenger. on my visits to the memorial, and in-flight company it was 35 new guys. 35 new guys, shortened to tfng. i will take a seat on my bench and stare at the tfng. i will remember the last moment i saw them. it is how i will always room of her them. -- remember them. young, happy, soaring with the knowledge that they were next up. i will remember each of them in my prayers. i will also include a prayer for their spouses and judy's family. the life those spouses knew also died on the 28th. metal platforms had been installed around the display so tourists could climb up and walk around. i will join a group of families and watch them take photos and listen to the marvel at the complexity of the switch panels. invariably my attention will be drawn to a child among them and his or her amazed young face, i will be transported back to 1957. i'm standing in my front lawn with the identical expression, watching sputnik 1 twinkle through the terminator. i thought i would share some of those readings with you. probably booksellers hate me to say this, but i would make this comment. this book is inappropriate for children. if anybody is by a get here for little billy, wait until little billy is over 18 and till he reads it or he might be asking some interesting questions. i guess i will read the first opening sentence for those of you who have not purchased the book. it reads, i was naked, lying on my side on a table. it is a very real, honest book that captures the joy, humor, and fear we experience as astronauts. i'm happy to answer any questions now. think we have to wait for the microphone to pass around. all of you are probably is terrified as i am. if anybody has a question, feel free to raise a hand there and we will get it for you. fire away. >> could you describe what it's like having the shuttle main engines ignite for lift off and shut down three seconds before launch? mr. mullane: his question concerns my first launch attempt in june of 1984. the way the shuttle countdown precedes, you get down to 6 seconds, the three liquid fuel engines start -- why do we do that, by the way? what do you do with a liquid fuel engine you cannot do with a solid fuel engine? turn it off. computers check those engines and make sure they are working fine. boosters ignite, and you are on your way. on my first launch attempt, we got down to those final seconds. you are terrified out there. you are watching the clock. you get that heavy vibration. as scared as i was, i remember thinking, whatever happens, i'm going now. 5, 4, 3 -- silence. our engines, one of them was sick, so all of them were shut down. we had seen that scenario in training, but it had been a long time and we were not up on the step on that and it really shocked us to all of a sudden have alarm going off in the cockpit. so now the vehicle is rocking back-and-forth. most scared i've ever been, this was it. something caught fire on the launchpad. we can't see that, but we hear that word fire. they turn on the fire suppression system, so water is spraying everywhere. my heart is in my throat, hearing that word fire. the ground reports seeing a small fire on the launch pad. i remember looking at steve hawley, the mission specialist sitting next to me. his eyes were as big as saucers, and i knew i was looking in a mirror. i look at holly and he looks at me and he says, i thought we would be higher when the engines went. i wanted to hit him. there's nothing funny about this, holly. it was a terrifying minute or so. obviously nothing serious did happen. any other questions? i'm sorry. >> could you tell us your thoughts about retiring the shuttle and replacing it with the cev, which i understand will still be using some of the shuttle hardware? mr. mullane: the plan right now for the shuttle is the new nasa administrator after columbia came in, he said hey, we have to stop flying the space shuttle, we will not get onto to the moon and mars, we will fly the minimum amount of times to build out the international space station, then we're going to ground it. at that point we will go to a cev, crew exploration vehicle, which will look similar to the old rockets. it's back to the future in that design, but it is much safer than the shuttle and it will be a vehicle that can ultimately get astronauts back to the moon. a shuttle will not be able to go to the moon or mars. i'm foursquare behind that. it's the right future for nasa. >> it's hard for me to believe that you were awkward at one point. mr. mullane: he says i'm such a great motivational speaker, it's hard to believe i was nervous like everyone else. i saw seinfeld once do a standup at the eulogy. most people would rather be in the coffin than delivering a eulogy, because of the fear of public speaking. it is something that really does scare all of us. the only reason i do professional speaking, motivational speaking on teamwork and leadership to corporations around the country, and i'm comfortable with that because i have done it for so long, and i have my powerpoint prepared program. i'm like everybody else. if somebody at a party says we have astronaut mike mullane here, why don't you stand up and say a few words, my heart is in my throat. i don't have a few words. i learned to get better at it. >> how far do you think we are to breaking beyond the solar system? mr. mullane: there will have to be a significant breakthrough in propulsion to do that. 13 years to pluto, or whatever it is. the lifespan if humans are so short, we will have to come up with some way of doing suspended emanation -- animation or her with an engine that will rapidly accelerate people to tremendous speeds to make flight outside of the solar system possible. 100 years seems short to me. that is hard to guess. i told you the most asked question i ever hear is the toilet question, how do you go to the bathroom and space? it is a vacuum cleaner. the second most asked question is the alien question, have i seen any aliens or ufo's. i can't answer that, really. cia won't let me. jsuust kidding. i have never seen any aliens or ufo's. do i believe there is alien life elsewhere? yes. that said, i do not think they have come here to visit. if they ever do, they will make a significant contact. if they come here, i think they will land at laguardia. i think they would come and make a significant impact. i do this tongue-in-cheek, but i say it does not make sense to me that some brilliant alien civilization will go to the trouble of building an interstellar states craft, traveling this tremendous distance, see earth teeming with life, and hover only over beer drinking new york fisherman. that does not make sense to me. >> to use the china or other nations as moving forward into space travel? mr. mullane: china certainly. they have launched two men missions now. china says they want to go to the moon in the next couple years. india certainly might someday have a manned program. it is so expensive, i think you will see more and more cooperative efforts, as we see with the international space station. why don't we go ahead and start the book signing, and if anybody has a question while i'm signing, you can ask it then. thank you very much. next weekend, vietnam hearings 50 years later. from february, 1966, the senate foreign relations committee chaired by fulbright giving equal time to critics of the war and members of the johnson administration and hearings that were televised live to the nation. 13, atturday, february 10:00 p.m. eastern and sunday, february 14, at 4:00 p.m. reel american history tv. only on c-span 3. each week until the 2016 election, wrote to the right house brings you archival coverage of presidential races. next from the 1992 campaign remarks by democrat bill clinton on the night of the new hampshire primary. he calls himself a comeback kid, framing his second-place finish behind paul fungus as a victory. in the weeks leading up