This is John Batz a conversation with Dino de Lorette.

No.

No.

This is John Batcher, conversation with Professor Dante Loretta for the very successful

mission of Osiris Rex, the probe of an asteroid, Bennu, and the return with a sample.

However, the story is really about going through hoops and over hurdles and surviving the many years it takes to develop a program

for exploration of the solar system at NASA.

And Dante gives us a very good view of the discouragement, the

encouragement, the doubts. Keep going. Here is Dante to describe one of their

successes followed by a reversal.

The book is The asteroid Hunter, a scientist journey to the dawn of our solar system.

More of this tonight.

Yeah, that was our confirmation review review and that's a really important

gate so when you get selected which is what happened in 2011 NASA gives you a few

million dollars to develop your design what they call to the preliminary

design where it looks credible and you can really estimate what it's going to

cost and the confirmation review is where they say okay we understand your

costs and we're going to guarantee this level of support at

hundreds of millions of dollars in value.

And yeah, so that's where you, it's make or break.

You can be canceled at that point and we were worried about that

first of all because we had some technical challenges but also there's politics going

...