Podcast #21 – Retired NASA Astronaut Steve “Oz” Oswald on Leadership, Space & Possibility

Doug Dvorak (00:01.376)
Good day Mission Podcast community. I’m your host and podcast navigator, Doug Dvorak, and I’m extremely excited to bring you inspiring stories from incredible guests like the one I have on now, Steve “Oz” Oswald. These individuals are on a mission to create remarkable possibilities, not only that enhance their own lives, but also make a significant contribution and lasting impact on the individuals and communities they serve. Stay tuned for some truly amazing conversations.

My guest today is astronaut and space shuttle commander, Steve “Oz” Oswald. Hey Steve, how are you today?

Steve Oswald (00:40.174)
You’re doing great, Doug.

Doug Dvorak (00:41.684)
Great, great to have you. Welcome to the Mission Possible podcast. A little bit of backstory about Steve and his illustrious career. Steve was born in Seattle, Washington, but considers Bellingham, Washington to be his hometown. He graduated from Bellingham High School and earned a bachelor’s of science degree in aerospace engineering from the US Naval Academy and was designated a naval aviator. A great career, Steve flew aboard the aircraft carrier

USS Midway and attended the United States Naval Test Pilot School, he remained at the Naval Air Test Center conducting flying qualities, performance, and propulsion flight tests. Following tours on an F/A-18 and as an instructor and as a catapult officer aboard the USS Coral Sea, Steve resigned from active Navy duty and joined Westinghouse Corporation as a civilian test pilot.

As a reservist and rear admiral, Steve flew the RF-8 and the A-7 when he transferred to the Naval Reserve space community. Steve joined NASA as an aerospace engineer and instructor pilot and was selected as an astronaut candidate. Some of his varied and very exciting technical assignments within the astronaut office have included flight crew representative to the Kennedy Space Center and the mission control center during space shuttle missions.

and also served as Assistant Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center. Steve has piloted three shuttle missions, the first two on Discovery, and he was the right seater or pilot and commander of the Endeavour. With the completion of his third space flight, Steve had logged over 33 days in space. Again, welcome, Steve.

Steve Oswald (02:32.267)
Now, good to be here.

Doug Dvorak (02:34.473)
Tell me a little bit about, know, I’m a Top Gun guy. I assume how you got your nickname. What’s the backstory on pilots within the military or the Navy getting nicknames?

Steve Oswald (02:47.161)
We call them call signs. But yeah, it’s kind of like the Maverick and whatever his sidekick was. I can’t remember. That first Top Gun movie was not my favorite movie, but the second one was much better. Better airplane with the F-18 than the F-14 and the first one. But anyway, we tend to get, and it’s not like you get a choice.

generally of what your call sign is gonna be. You get those from your squadron mates usually within the first month or so of your time in your first squadron. And some people don’t do anything noticeable to earn a nickname, so they might have one that’s related to their last name or something. But I actually earned mine, and it’s a long story.

Probably not worth telling here, but I was and still am mongo to a lot of my Navy buddies from back in the day.

Doug Dvorak (03:56.096)
Interesting. So Steve, what inspired you to become an astronaut and how did your journey begin?

Steve Oswald (04:03.362)
Well, you know, to make a shorter story longer, I actually decided that I wasn’t going to be an astronaut when I was about 11 years old because I went down to the World’s Fair was in Seattle and my family went down to see that and they had one of the early Mercury capsules there. I don’t know whether was Shepard’s or Grissom’s or who it was, but

We stood in line, my dad and my brother and I, and we got up to this thing and looked inside it and it was tiny. And I looked at my dad and he’s 6’1″. And all those Mercury guys, they had a height limit of 5’7 or so, just because if you were taller than that, you couldn’t get in it. So I just blew off the whole astronaut thing, you know, when I was 11. And then…

I finished my first tour on Midway and went to the Naval Test Pilot School and about halfway through my first year there they selected the 1978 bunch and there were 35 people in that class of astronauts, first class of shuttle astronauts and there were two of the guys that were selected were actually stationed there in Pax River with us. So I knew those guys and I knew that they were

you know, pretty much as screwed up or as good as I was, depending on the day. And so I applied at 80 and didn’t get selected in 80, but I did get interviewed. And I really wouldn’t expect him to get selected because I think I was 28 years old then. And I just didn’t have the experience that a lot of the other guys did. But Charlie Bolden was selected in that class.

number of great guys. And then the next selection was in 84. By then I was out of the Navy and working for Westinghouse and didn’t get selected again. But I found out that I was the N plus one pilot. So I was one guy out of the, out of that selection bunch. So they, I got a call from a friend of mine, one of the guys who had been stationed at Pax River when he was selected. And

Steve Oswald (06:30.506)
And so they offered me a job to come down and be basically an instructor pilot, flying mostly the T-38, but a couple other airplanes too. And so I went down and did that. We got there in November of 84. And then I was selected in the spring of 85. I moved over to the astronaut office.

Doug Dvorak (06:52.721)
Interesting. Steve, before joining NASA, you had a decorated military career. How did military service shape your mindset for space missions?

Steve Oswald (07:11.406)
Well, you know, the whole deal is the mission. And I was fortunate all throughout my three phases of my career. the Navy and then NASA slash reserves. And then I worked for Boeing for 10 years. And in every one of those jobs, we had a mission. We even called them missions, the STS-42 mission.

And it was the same deal when I was working for Boeing, which was great. I mean, we had a bunch of customers, over 50, mostly government customers, and they all had missions. And so the guys that were working for me that supported all of them just adopted their missions. And I was lucky enough to kind of adopt them all. So the whole mission thing is important. And you know,

The thing about the military service is that you’re really only as good as the unit that you’re in. so as opposed to sometimes in academia, folks intentionally don’t cooperate with others because they’re worried about upstanding with data or whatever. Somebody else might write the paper first.

And that’s not the way it is in the military. Everybody is trying to make everybody else successful. And if you take that mindset into space missions, it fits perfectly. So we had a number, all of the pilot astronauts were military trained test pilots because back when they selected the first group, the original seven,

The people at NASA brought a plan to Eisenhower and said they were going to select all these scientists guys. And Eisenhower looked at them and said, no, you’re going to go select them from our two military test pilot schools and that’s who our astronauts are going to be. So NASA never changed that for the pilots. They finally selected mission specialists that were specialized in

Steve Oswald (09:34.804)
one of the sciences, whether it’s medicine or geology or astrophysics or whatever it is that you need at the time, depending on what missions are coming up. But they selected the first mission specialist, scientist, astronauts toward the end of the Apollo program. And one of them flew in Apollo with John Young on STS, around Apollo 17, Harrison Schmidt, walked on the moon and later become a

became a congressman or senator, I can’t remember which. But he was the beginning of the whole mission specialist deal. And there actually more mission specialists, astronauts flying shuttle, back when I was flying, than there were pilots.

Doug Dvorak (10:18.727)
Interesting. Steve, what does the STS acronym stand for?

Steve Oswald (10:21.944)
Space Transportation System.

Doug Dvorak (10:25.065)
So here you are, you’re M1, you’re on the bench respectfully, then you’re called up. Can you describe your first day of astronaut training and what surprised you most?

Steve Oswald (10:40.398)
You know, it wasn’t like you jumped in and started training right away. You know, went to the, when you started on the Monday morning, every morning they had a, every Monday morning they had an all astronauts meeting and then they brought our class in and there were 13 of us in our class and they just introduced us. And then, you know, you were just trying to figure out, you know, where’s the coffee mess, where’s the bathroom.

So it was a kind of a non-event on day one. And then it just became a lot like every other aviation training thing that you went to. You just started hitting the books about the systems of the aircraft or space ship that you were getting ready to fly. And a lot of that was self-governed. You were just expected to be prepared.

when you jumped into these various trainers that they had. And it wasn’t like they were trying to set you up to fail. They wanted everybody to succeed. So they could dial it up, dial it back, depending on how things were going.

Doug Dvorak (11:59.04)
So you flew three shuttle missions. What was the most intense or defining moment during those missions?

Steve Oswald (12:07.266)
You know, the first ascent really gets your attention because, you know, those two solid rocket motors on either side of the tank, first of all, you light up the three space shuttle main engines in the back of the orbiter about six and a quarter seconds prior to liftoff. And that gives you time to look at the engines and make sure that they’re running properly. And the whole vehicle just…

twang is over, they call it the twang, and at six and a quarter seconds it comes back into vertical and then they light the boosters and the boosters go from zero thrust to just right around three million pounds of thrust in about a half a second. It’s three million each. So it lifts off in a big hurry. It closed the tower which is about 250 feet.

high doing about 120 knots in the vertical. So it’s cooking. And it’s a really rough ride for the first two minutes because the boosters, all the shock waves from the boosters, but, and it’s so different than second stage after the boosters leave, which is just smooth as glass all the rest of the way uphill. So it’s pretty neat. You the uphill ride’s great.

Doug Dvorak (13:29.695)
Steve, so what are the biggest misconceptions people have about being in space?

Steve Oswald (13:36.352)
You know, I don’t know.

Doug Dvorak (13:37.971)
And just for context, I’m going up into the stratosphere, 150,000 feet. I’m not breaking through the Karman line. Can you just for our Mission Possible podcast walk us through the Karman line once you punch through that and what sort of happens and what are those misconceptions?

Steve Oswald (13:56.888)
Well, you I don’t know that there, you can look at all the photographs that you want and movies of being on orbit, but you you get there and you’re actually still in the ascent phase, but you’re really coming downhill because the orbiter at that point is just looking for a speed. And that speed will put you at the altitude that you want a quarter of a rev away.

And so, and that speed’s cooking pretty good, right around 17,500 miles an hour, which is over the ground about five miles a second. So, you know, one of the first things, impressions that you get is just how fast you’re moving because you’re still relatively low compared to your orbital altitude might be 190 to 225 miles. But at main engine cutoff, you’re

much, lower than that. So the relative speed is way higher. And then the Earth is just beautiful looking down on it. And one of the things that captures most people, and it’s kind of an obvious thing when you think back on it, but most of us of my ilk grew up looking at globes and maps.

that had different colored countries and geopolitical boundaries drawn on it. And of course you don’t see any of that. You just are moving.

Doug Dvorak (15:34.303)
That’s a very telling and interesting observation. Never would have thought of that. Sorry to interrupt you, go on.

Steve Oswald (15:39.936)
Yeah, no worries. So when you’re on orbit, I mean, it’s just you’re above the atmosphere and the atmosphere is just a thin blue line around the limb of the Earth. yeah, and then the oceans just turn into beaches, which turn into deserts or forests or mountains or whatever. And the other thing that kind of struck me as being a little sad,

We have this planet, and I’m gonna sound like some really literal person and I’m not, but we have this planet that’s one of a kind in the universe that we know of. The chances are pretty good there’s something else out there that’s kinda like it, but it sure is all we’ve got right now. And we can’t figure out how to get along. We managed to figure out how to put our nationalistic desires above…

you know, interests of the rest of humanity. that’s, that’s, that’s a little sad. And, you know, when you’re going, going around the earth 16 times a day,

Doug Dvorak (16:49.695)
16 times a day at what speed?

Steve Oswald (16:52.91)
17,500 miles an hour. So yeah, so you’re cooking and you get to see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day. They’re just way faster than the ones that you get on the earth. So, yeah, it’s quite the view up there.

Doug Dvorak (17:11.871)
Hey Steve, when you went up were you pre or post the shuttle explosion? I can’t recall the name of the shuttle.

Steve Oswald (17:20.672)
The first one we lost was Challenger. so I had been there, we started in August of 85, and we lost Challenger in January of 86. And I was down at the Cape, that was my first job assignment. So I was down there to watch the launch, first launch I’d ever seen, at least down there in person.

And I was up on the roof of the launch control center with the wives and the kids of the crew. And then it just turned out to be a really long day. So then we had, we were supposed to fly. My class was supposed to fly within a couple of years of getting selected. And it turned out it was more like six, six and a half, depending on where you were in line, because it took roughly two and a half years to get flying again after Challenger.

I got to do a lot of work with the people from the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Morton Thiokol people that built the boosters. And losing the Challenger was due to a leak in one of the seals between the four segments of the, yeah. So that was the big O-ring story. And flying on a cold day, and I mean, there were a number of things that you look back on now and think, how did we manage to miss all that?

Doug Dvorak (18:39.071)
The O-Rings, right?

Steve Oswald (18:51.118)
But anyway, I got to spend the next couple of years working with those guys, which was professionally very rewarding. Wish I hadn’t had to do it, but it is what it is, right?

Doug Dvorak (19:03.849)
So you were there to watch the Challenger launch with the family, it explodes. What a tragedy. Then your missions were post that event. Did that rent any space in your head when you were strapped in, in the shuttle before liftoff?

Steve Oswald (19:25.282)
You know, Doug, I mean, it’s not a whole lot different than getting in an airplane on a ship and taxing to the catapult when the day before somebody going on that same catapult had gone in the water. So, you you get, you don’t get used to it, but you get to where you can kind of live with the risk.

You know, it’s one of those things where you gotta do the math in your head. And is the mission worth the risk? And to me, it always was. And it doesn’t get any easier if you dwell on it.

Doug Dvorak (20:10.367)
So you’re sitting, you’re strapped in the cockpit of the shuttle. Every decision matters. How do astronauts or specifically you train for such big, high stakes decision making?

Steve Oswald (20:22.306)
You know, you don’t make a lot of solo decisions. You know, on the flight deck, there are four of you. The core crew is the commander in the left seat, pilot in the right seat, and the flight engineer or the MS-2 sitting in the center seat. And the MS-1 is sitting over behind the pilot. And everybody’s going through that. And if things go nominally,

There’s really not a whole lot to do that you hadn’t done hundreds of times before in one simulator or another. When things go off nominally, that’s when everybody gets, you get a consensus. And there was a saying that a good friend of mine, the same guy that called me about the NASA job, he said,

There is not anything that the pilot can’t do to make it worse with a single switch throw.

So if I was going to go through a switch having to do with electrical power or main engines or whatever, I wasn’t going to go through any switches unless everybody agreed that was the one to throw.

Doug Dvorak (22:06.569)
You talked about the communication, the teamwork of the astronauts in the shuttle. How important is that communication between the astronauts in the shuttle up in space and mission control?

Steve Oswald (22:24.728)
Yeah, it’s very important. And the guys on the ground can A, save your butt and B, make things a lot easier for you. A lot of times they have a lot more information than you do. So we relied on the folks on the ground and, you know, unlike the folks that flew in Mercury and Gemini and Apollo, we had pretty much continuous

communications because we had these satellites overhead and we could get continuous comms through those as opposed to leaving the Kennedy area and then having to pick up a ground station out of Bermuda or wherever. And there were ground stations all around the planet, but there were considerable times during any orbit that you weren’t gonna be able to talk to the ground. And that just went away when they got the

the TDRS system put on orbit. TDRS is Tracking and Data Relay Satellite. And it’s a magnificent constellation. And it’s still up there, and it’s still working with space stations using it today.

Doug Dvorak (23:39.312)
So, you know, there’s a small body of individuals, groups that, you I’ll call them flat earthers or, you know, that thought the whole Neil Armstrong, the whole NASA effort was a ruse and a hoax. You want to unpack a little bit of that? Give me your, your install, your impressions, because you’ve actually been to space on a space shuttle.

Steve Oswald (24:06.69)
Yeah, I just, I don’t know what these guys are smoking, but you know, there are, there’s one way to keep a secret amongst three people, and that’s if two of them are dead. And if you have hundreds of people on a movie set in New Mexico to fake the moon landing, how long do you think that would have taken to get out?

I mean, it’s harder to keep the secret than it is to just go to the moon.

Doug Dvorak (24:39.433)
That’s an interesting perspective. I never thought of it. Go ahead.

Steve Oswald (24:43.502)
No, I’m done. I don’t think that those conversations warrant a whole lot of discussion.

Doug Dvorak (24:46.985)
That’s a great.

I agree. So, you know, the shuttle program ends, NASA’s budget is cut drastically, Musk and SpaceX come into play. You want to talk a little bit about, you know, sort of the future of space flight and what your opinion is of SpaceX and, you know, Blue Horizon or Blue Origin with Bezos. Any thoughts on?

privatization of space travel and what these guys are doing.

Steve Oswald (25:27.098)
Yeah, sure. Let me go back for just a second. Because you mentioned Armstrong. And I had the privilege of getting to talk with him for like two hours. Just informally while we were waiting for an event to get kicked off that he was emceeing. And he was the most unassuming, humble,

Doug Dvorak (25:39.977)
Really?

Steve Oswald (25:57.006)
incredibly smart guy that I’ve ever been around. losing him was just borderline national tragedy. But you lose them all eventually. So, SpaceX, I think SpaceX has done an incredible job of doing what they said they were going to do for NASA, which was to deliver stuff.

provisions and people later to space station. And what NASA was trying to do with SpaceX and Boeing both was to unload the large part of the NASA budget that was dedicated to operating government-owned vehicles, space shuttle, and buy the services from these two companies.

And that’s worked out well with SpaceX, not so well with Boeing. And I have no idea what the NASA budget’s gonna look like. I don’t think anybody does. Because the Trump administration can throw out there that they wanna cancel this, this and that. But the Congress gets a vote. And all those jobs for those two or three programs, they’re looking at cutting.

They’re in somebody’s congressional district. So I don’t think it’s worth, at least right this minute, you know, jumping up and down. I think you just kind of let it play out and see where the gyps fall.

Doug Dvorak (27:39.552)
Yeah. So, you you were a Navy pilot. You knew a lot of pilots. You were a commander and piloted, you know, the space shuttles. There’s a company called Andral out in California and the Department of Defense hired them to develop a autonomous jet. Any thoughts on AI and, you know, pilotless fighter jets, not drones? This is a full jet.

that is going to be controlled with AI. Any thoughts or you want to unpack that a little bit for our audience?

Steve Oswald (28:15.374)
I think that there is going to be a place for having unpiloted vehicles that can assist. You know, there’s three things that drones or unmanned vehicles or whatever are good for, and they’re good for missions that are

dull, dangerous, and one other thing, and I forget what it is, I’m getting old. So if it’s boring, like you’re flying around in a Global Hawk, or a manned version of a Global Hawk, why would you want to do that for 20 hours? And so Global Hawk has been taking those photos, unmanned vehicle forever, at least.

a decade and a half. And so I think then, and the Navy’s got, the most boring mission ever flew out the ship was a tanker mission, where you go up there and your job is just to give gas to other guys so that they can go do the fun stuff while you orbit around the ship. So given that mission to an unmanned vehicle is great. So, so I think dirty, dull and dangerous. That’s what it was.

Doug Dvorak (29:46.463)
Dirty, dull, and dangerous. Interesting.

Steve Oswald (29:46.734)
So I think there’s a place for for unmanned vehicles, you know, how AI plays into all of this stuff. I think there’s about three people on the planet that really understand AI. Obviously exaggerating. I most of us read about it and go, hmm, I don’t know if I’m excited about this or afraid of it. So I think.

I think the time will come when AI plays an appropriate role in all these mission sets, but I think the jury’s still out on what it’s going to be.

Doug Dvorak (30:23.167)
Steve, what was the toughest professional challenge you faced as an astronaut?

Steve Oswald (30:31.042)
Hmm

I don’t know, I suppose the most complex, challenging one was commanding a shuttle mission and getting the crew together. Although they were an amazing group of professionals, so it wasn’t exactly hard. But we were flying at that point the longest mission that shuttle had ever flown, it a 17-day mission. So there were some things.

about that mission that were kind of unique and challenging. But at the end of the day was great mission, lot of fun, good folks. So all good.

Doug Dvorak (31:17.343)
Great. How did you mentally prepare for isolation and the pressure of space flight?

Steve Oswald (31:25.836)
You know, I didn’t ever give a whole lot of thought to it. You know, I lived on a ship for two and a half years. Spent eight days underwater in the submarine. Well, not underwater the whole time, but when I was a midshipman, I got to go aboard a sub. You know, all these different environments are just different environments, and it’s kinda, kinda something else on the same theme. I think that,

especially Navy of the military guys, probably the Navy guys come as well prepared as anybody and certainly better prepared than folks that come out of academia for doing space missions just because of what they’ve done in their career prior to that.

Doug Dvorak (32:16.905)
Steve, you spoke a little bit about viewing the Earth from space, but how did viewing Earth from space change your perspective on humanity and our planet? You spoke a little bit about that, no maps, no colors when you looked at a globe. Any other deep thoughts or impressions relative to seeing Earth from space you’d like to share with our audience?

Steve Oswald (32:43.862)
No, you know, other than that, when I’m one of my missions, and I forget which one now, there was a lot of weapons flying around in the Eastern Med, Serbia, et cetera. And, you know, you’d fly over that and you’d look down, and it really didn’t look any different than anywhere else, right? Except that you knew there were folks that were trying to do each other harm.

including some of our folks. So, you know, I guess that’s about it.

Everybody I think that goes to space comes back a bigger environmentalist than they were before because they get to see this very fragile ecosystem that we inhabit in a different way than most folks ever get a chance see it. That doesn’t mean that I’m, you know, a green guy at all costs. I think that you can acknowledge that

Human activity over the last 100 plus years has done, definitely done some damage to the ecosystem. And we gotta try to fix what we can, but not fix it so drastically that we 100,000 people out of work. So I tend to be politically moderate. I think that most of the moderate, most of the answers that make sense, whether they have to do with climate change or…

or just about anything else, the positions that are moderate ones make sense, which drives people on both ends of the spectrum.

Doug Dvorak (34:35.379)
So Steve, what do you think is the most important lesson space exploration offers to future generations?

Steve Oswald (34:47.394)
You know, it could be…

that people from different countries can get along even when they are get along and work together well. Even when two of the countries involved are at odds about just about everything. That would be Russia and the US. And then you have, you know, the European Union. There are at least a dozen countries represented, people that have flown.

on station, the Japanese of course. And I think that that space station, if you could look at it with the success that they’ve had over the last couple decades in working together internationally, that may be one of the more important lessons that comes out, even more important than the technical data that they generated up there.

Doug Dvorak (35:48.266)
So a fair amount of my audience on the Mission Possible podcast are young people. What advice would you give to young people dreaming of becoming astronauts or exploring new frontiers?

Steve Oswald (36:11.406)
Well, almost all astronauts are technically trained. they’re engineers, they are medical doctors, astrophysicists. So they have a technical degree. Many of them have PhDs. And the thing that I tell young folks is to not worry so much about

you know, what do I need to do to get to become an astronaut? The better question to ask is what interests me and what do I want to do for the rest of my life if the astronaut thing doesn’t work out? And so if someone is incredibly interested in medicine and wants to dedicate their life to be an M.D., then they’re probably going to be a pretty good M.D.

And so then, if they apply to the astronaut office and they’ve got an incredible record as an MD, they just might get selected as an astronaut. But you know, the odds of being selected as an astronaut, mean, if they pick a dozen people, they select those folks from among eight or 10,000 applicants.

Doug Dvorak (37:39.241)
Really?

Steve Oswald (37:40.462)
So these, odds are not good. The odds are way better for pilots because of that Eisenhower thing, because you have to go through the military test pilot school, right? So if you’re going to pick five pilots, there might be 200 that apply or maybe more like a hundred maybe. But if you’re a mission specialist and they’re going to pick 10 mission specialists, there’s a bunch of folks, very qualified folks that apply for that. So.

Again, I think that you pick something that you’re passionate about, you go out, you do a good job at it. If you get a chance to apply to the astronaut program, great. If it works out, great. And if it doesn’t, you’re working on something you love to do.

Doug Dvorak (38:26.641)
Excellent. So Steve, you’ve worked in government, military, and corporate roles. What core leadership lessons do you carry across these worlds?

Steve Oswald (38:34.99)
You know, I think the thing that’s important to remember, you always hear people talking about management,

That’s not what leadership’s about. You manage stuff, you manage money, you lead people. And the more senior you get in whatever organization, the more important it is that you recognize the importance of the human aspect of whatever the mission is. And once you get to where you’ve got several thousand people working for you,

You can’t manage down the way you used to. You can’t lead the way you used to. So, and it’s true whether you’re in government, the military, or in business. And recognizing talent to whom you can assign pieces of work, some big piece of work, and encourage them to recognize talent below them.

You can build a really successful organization, but it’s all about the people at the end of the day.

Doug Dvorak (39:56.104)
Excellent. So last question, almost last question. What does the phrase mission possible mean to you after all you’ve accomplished?

Steve Oswald (40:05.774)
had never given it a lot of thought. I know a lot more about Mission Impossible just from the movies, but I think it’s a clever moniker for your podcast because it’s good to talk about things that are possible as opposed to those that aren’t. And I think that if a kid from Bellingham

can get into the Naval Academy, get his wings, go to the fleet, end up going to test pilot school and stumble into the astronaut office. If that can happen, then anything’s possible.

Doug Dvorak (40:53.279)
Excellent. So Steve, as you know, I’m a speaker and trainer and I was speaking to a group of naval support team members who supported individuals, know, servicemen from the Navy with finding gainful employment and other related issues. And one, I ended my, I end all my talks with the man and they were.

arena by Teddy Roosevelt. I did not know and this gentleman came up he said and I think this is correct I’d like you to confirm it that every graduate or attendee of the Naval Academy has to memorize that. Is that true?

Steve Oswald (41:36.11)
You know, I don’t remember that. There were plenty of things we needed to memorize. I don’t remember that the man in the arena was one of those things, but I graduated from there over 50 years ago. So it could be that they changed what it is that those folks are being forced to memorize now. I can remember that it needed to know…

the number of days till the Army Navy game, till Christmas vacation to whatever, and you needed to understand who the, you needed to memorize who the officers of the watch were, and you needed to know the next two meal menus, which meant you needed to, you needed to memorize three, because as soon as the next meal was done, you needed to know the next two. So there was plenty of stuff to memorize, but yeah.

Doug Dvorak (42:32.767)
Excellent. Now Steve is my favorite part of the podcast called rapid fire questions countdown to touchdown. I’m gonna ask you 10 questions and give me one or two word response. You ready?

Shuttle, launch, or landing, which gave you more adrenaline.

Steve Oswald (43:07.894)
Launch.

Doug Dvorak (43:09.043)
Favorite space food.

Steve Oswald (43:12.384)
irradiated beef steak wrapped in a tortilla.

Doug Dvorak (43:18.351)
One item you always brought into space besides essentials.

Steve Oswald (43:26.862)
I guess I always took my wedding ring.

Doug Dvorak (43:31.773)
Most beautiful place on earth from space.

Steve Oswald (43:35.726)
Bellingham, Washington.

Doug Dvorak (43:37.897)
Moon or Mars, where should we go next?

Steve Oswald (43:40.386)
Moon first, Mars second.

Doug Dvorak (43:42.217)
Favorite sci-fi movie or space film?

Steve Oswald (43:46.266)
It’s gotta be the Martian. Other than the part where she rescued him out there by him cutting his space suit for propulsion, it was all pretty much doable.

Doug Dvorak (43:48.626)
Excellent.

Doug Dvorak (44:00.413)
most difficult training drill you went through.

Steve Oswald (44:08.226)
would be in the Navy and it had to do with learning how to not be a POW.

Doug Dvorak (44:15.199)
coolest piece of tech on the shuttle.

Steve Oswald (44:18.286)
It didn’t have to be the laptops we brought aboard because the main computers in the orbiter when I was flying them were only half a megabyte of memory.

Doug Dvorak (44:33.129)
Favorite leadership quote or motto?

Steve Oswald (44:36.662)
I like the whole man in the arena thing.

Doug Dvorak (44:39.793)
Excellent. What’s next on your personal mission? Possible list.

Steve Oswald (44:45.4)
Now, I to figure out how to make this camper that we just got work better than it did the last time.

Doug Dvorak (44:52.575)
Excellent. Excellent. Well, my guest has been astronaut, Navy pilot and shuttle commander, Steve “Oz” Oswald. Steve, it’s been a high honor and privilege. Thank you for your time and thank you Mission Podcast community. Check us out on missionpossible.biz. Like us, view us and share us. Carpe diem.