This is the morning and I'm Steve Schmidt and this afternoon I'm pleased to bring a conversation with you to a conversation with Terry Verst.

Terry Verts is a candidate for the United States Senate from the great state of Texas.

He's a retired Air Force colonel, a veteran NASA astronaut and the retired commander of the International Space Station

running as a Democrat in Texas. Tell me about the model of the space shuttle over your shoulder.

You did not command a space shuttle mission,

but you were the pilot of the space shuttle?

That's right.

This is Endeavor, and it's got the, you probably can't see it.

It's got the signatures of all my crewmates on there.

They're starting to fade.

But I flew, I was a F-16 pilot and test pilot,

and I flew on STS-130 as Endeavor's pilot.

It was the last assembly flight at the International Space Station.

So we finished building the ISS, and it was awesome.

It was the honor of lifetime.

I installed a module called the cupola, which is this big seven-windowed module,

and also Node 3, which is a living module.

So the cupola is every astronaut's favorite place on the ISS.

We're going to get into that.

But what was it like to fly to space shuttle? And what does it mean to fly the space shuttle?

So were your, were your hands on the on the stick from space flying it all the way back down to to when it landed?

Yeah, that was the best part of having the privilege of flying on the space shuttle is you could actually fly it.

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