On the first flight test of any spacecraft, you're going to find surprises.
Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same - it's not even close to the same.
The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
The most frequently asked question I hear first-time entrepreneurs ask is, 'How do I know when to launch my product?' The answer, more often than not, should be: 'Now!'
I thought it was going to take a lot more countdowns on the pad. We actually did scrub once, but I figured we'd scrub several times since it's a pretty complicated vehicle.
You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.
In 1985, the government decided to launch the first satellite. We had huge discussions then that nobody would need that kind of satellite or that it could fall from the sky.
Things are going very smoothly. As expected, there are some minor glitches, and the eight minutes that it took us to get to orbit, we trained months and months for, and didn't have to use any of that preparation, other than being aware and ready.
The mistake isn't releasing something bad. The mistake is to launch it and get PR people involved. You don't want people to start amping up expectations for an early version of your product. The best entrepreneurship happens in low-stakes environments where no one is paying attention, like Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard.
I just think that when you're coming out with a new product, you're gonna be criticized.
When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.
Astronauts are very professional and when they're preparing for launch, they prepare for it as the most serious endeavor of our lives.
I think a lot of people interested in space exploration tend to hear stories about the great missions, how they work technically, what we learned. But they don't really hear the story of what it takes to get a mission from scratch to the launch pad and into space.
Historically, the U.S.'s big launchers fly seldom enough that their costs are dominated by annual upkeep of facilities and staff, not by the actual cost of each launch. The expensive part is maintaining the launch capability, not actually conducting launches.
I was working as a flight director on the Gemini IX mission, and it seemed almost overnight I was picking up the responsibilities for the Apollo Program.
Our shuttle crew is four people, because we're going to transfer a crew up to station, so all the jobs are divided between four people rather than five or six people. So it's been busy.
Like yes, I was part of a launch of an entire cable television network and we all worked so hard getting prepared for it and rehearsed so many times.
The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer - which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff - pulled up to the launch pad.
As someone who flew two space capsules and twice landed in the ocean, I can attest from personal experience how much logistics work is needed to get you home.
So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.
As an astronaut, you have a very defined set of tasks to do. Those tasks may require you to work 60, 70 or 80 hours a week.
There had been a number of failures but we weren't going out to ride a failure. And we felt they'd corrected all the difficulties with the boosters before that time and the launch problems. And so we had a lot of confidence that there was going to be a successful mission. We weren't off on some suicide effort, certainly.
When we shipped 'Borderlands 2,' we didn't ship it with a plan of how the level cap was going to increase. We didn't have any software built or strategy in place.
When you have a deadline, or when you know that your equipment is about to go up in a rocket and you won't have another chance to fix it, your mind works in a way that it otherwise never would.
When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.
