This is John Batcheler, conversation with Dante Loretta, the author of the new book, The Asteroid

Hunters.

This is Mission Osiris Rags to the asteroid Bennu, sample return, from the beginning to the end. Dante is a

terrific autobiography and what we're learning is what it's like to propose to

NASA and go through all of the hoops in order to

launch a mission and take the risk of everything falling apart at any moment

including at the moment of triumph is Dante Loretta on the risk and how the risk

includes the mortality of people around you and how you build in a way to go forward despite losses.

More of this later tonight.

Thank you.

Well, a lot of what you do with these missions is mitigate risk because you're constantly

thinking about all the things that might go wrong of which there are numerous and

how do you make sure you're resilient against those failures. Belt and suspenders is the philosophy. You usually have

two paths to anything that's critical for the program. And when Mike was in the hospital, he had been ill for

a while,

over a year.

And so it wasn't that unusual,

but this was a particularly dire surgery

that he was going into.

And the survival rate, which I researched, was very low and I was heartbroken as soon as I saw that and I wanted to know what was the plan how were we going to go forward without him on the program? He was our leader. He was the visionary. He was my mentor, my friend, and our rock, really. He always provided that grounding for us to keep moving forward. Whenever I doubted Mike was the one that lifted me up and said we can keep doing this. We can keep going forward. Don't give up.

And so I said Mike, this is a red risk. Red risks are the most serious challenges missions face. Usually it's a

flag up to headquarters that you can't solve this problem alone. You're going to need more time,

...