When you think of NASA, you probably think of all the scientists and engineers and astronauts that have made history throughout the 66 years that the space agency has been in existence. But did you know that over 25% of the roles at NASA are actually not STEM-related jobs? What's that like? What's their story? We're about to find out. [Music] Welcome to T-Minus Deep Space from N2K Networks. I'm Maria Varmausus. [Music] Growing up in Houston, Herb Baker has spent most of his life involved with NASA. He didn't go to school to study science, engineering, or math. He studied to become a civil servant and ended up working on procurement and contracting for NASA. Herbs sharing his experience and his new memoir from Apollo to Artemis, stories from my 50 years with NASA, available now in all good bookstores. My name is Herb Baker, and I worked at NASA for 42 years, recently retired in 2017. But even before that, I just, just pure luck, I happened to be living near where they opened the Man's Spacecraft Center, which is today the Johnson Space Center, just a few miles from my home. And so I was 12 years old, and all of the first, I think they had selected the first three astronaut groups by the time I was in the seventh grade. So I go back to, you know, being part of the NASA community as far back as being 12 years old in 1964. And so still today, in fact, now today, I'm still involved to a great extent with NASA. I'm on the NASA Alumni League Board of Directors. So anyway, yeah, NASA is my life. I have a pretty wide social media. And that's because there's so many people literally across the world who are interested in NASA. I mean, you know, Poland and Australia and Brazil and I could go on and on and on. So anyway, I say that to make the point that people literally not just in the US for the last five or six years have been telling me, because I, because I post a lot of stories on my social media about NASA. And I love that. I love that. And some of the things I've got to do and some of the people I've got to meet over the last actually 60 years now, going back to 1964. There must be not an obviously didn't keep count 30 or 40 people who said, you know, you need to write a book. You need to write a book. And I'm thinking, yeah, right. Who's ever going to want to read a book, you know, written by me, you know, there's all kinds of astronauts and flight directors and NASA administrators and everybody that are written books. But anyway, the pandemic happened and I thought, well, I've got some free time now. And so then I started thinking, you know, and I didn't do this to for money or to become a famous author or anything like that. I started thinking, you know, my family would like to hear because they, you know, you had to have a badge to get on site at NASA and they, you know, couldn't visit me at work really and didn't know that much about what I was doing. And I thought, well, yeah, you know, maybe I'll give this writing thing a shot. So anyway, to wrap it all up, that's that that's kind of who I am. And I'm really happy to be here chatting with you today. Oh, I appreciate it. And the name of your book is. Oh, yes. So it's the title of the book is from Apollo to Artemis Stories from My 50 Years with NASA. And again, you know, if I go back to, like I said, to 1964 when I was 12 years old and I played on the seventh grade football team with Frank Borman, son. Fred and Scott Carpenter, son Jay. So that was 60 years ago. And again, it was obviously still involved today. I'm out at the Johnson Space Center probably at least at least once a week or so. So anyway, yeah, my book was just published and it's available on congratulations. Thank you. Paperback and ebook. And it's also actually available on other sites like Barnes and Noble. Although I just checked today. They don't have it in stock yet. Because it's so recently published. Yeah. It's a brand new baby. Yeah. Well, first congratulations. That writing a book is huge. And your life is so intertwined with the history of Johnson Space Center and so many of the names that we so many of us know. I imagine just someone were to say, just ask you a question about anything. You would have a whole bunch of related stories. I can just scratching that surface. Yeah. And lucky for me when I decided one thing that helped me convince myself to write the book was and I'll go ahead and tell you this part of my life story. So I was after going to junior high and high school was actually still in high school. I was it was the summer between my junior and seniors of high school July 1969 when Apollo 11 was launched. And I got a job. It's a long story. I won't bore you with. I was a senior high school student. I overheard some of my co-workers talking about this PACE, P-A-C-E, Professional and Administrative Career Exam. PACE, P-A-C-E, Professional and Administrative Career Exam. They're saying amongst themselves, "Well, you know, if you take this test and you do well, you could get promoted to a professional job." You could get promoted to a professional job. But at the same time, they're talking about how hard they've heard it is. You take the test and they give you a score in six different categories or aptitudes or knowledge or something. So that if you do well enough on the test, they'll know kind of what you're good at, which job to potentially offer you. They feel free to, yes. But at the same time, they're saying it's so hard that if you score below 70, a scale of 100 is perfect. If you score below 70, they just don't give you a score. I guess they don't want to embarrass you with a 45 or something like that. Oh, gosh. And so again, I'm going into this thinking, "Wow, that sounds really hard." But I thought, "Well, what do I have to lose?" At that point, I'm getting, within six months or a year of graduating, I figure out, I won't have a problem getting a job and some company, private industry, corporate job, with a business degree from University of Texas. But I thought, "Well, maybe I'll take that test anyway, just to see what happens." So I signed up for the test. And when you register for the exam, filling it out with pencil and paper, of course, back in those days, you can indicate which cities that have government agencies in them that you'd be willing to work at. Of course, I put Houston because I live there. Not even thinking that NASA was a government agency. I mean, you know, I don't, when I don't think of NASA as a child, I don't, I never really think of being the government. But so anyway, I'll tell you, I'll get to the punchline. I did a test and I had four 100s and two 98s. My goodness. So I made almost a perfect, you know, I'm thinking, "Well, they sent me the wrong letter. This can't be my score." And I got an even bigger surprise, you know, a couple of weeks later, when NASA contacted me and said, "Hey, would you like to come interview for a job in our business office at the Johnson Space Center?" And I thought, "Oh, yeah. Can I be there tomorrow?" And I had never, never dreamed that they would ask me to come, you know, work for them. So anyway, 42 years later, you know, I can't imagine having had a better job. I mean, NASA was such an amazing place to work. You know, I sometimes think, "You know, I wouldn't have really, but I think I might have done this job for free." I mean, it was interesting, exciting and challenging, up to the very last day I was there. We'll be right back. You are not the first person I've talked to who said something like that, which is such a... really, that's about their jobs. So what a wonderful reflection, what a gift, honestly. And I think it's very interesting that you mentioned that we often don't think of NASA as part of the government, but it is, and I know you know that. But it is interesting that for a lot of us, it's not the first thing we think of. That is so interesting. So you have a... In addition to your book, you have a blog on Medium. I know we'll link this in the show notes, but every one of the posts has sort of a story behind it where I would never even known that was a story. So I was just looking at here's why only two trees have colored lights in NASA's astronaut memorial grove during the holiday. I would never... I didn't know there was a memorial grove. I didn't know that only two trees have colored lights. I certainly don't know the reason why. It's things like that where it's... you have to be there and really in that ecosystem to have that institutional knowledge, which is I'm so fascinated by that. Can you tell me the reason why that was specific to Amnesty? Yes, I can. And actually, the reason you and a lot of other people don't know is it's on site, behind the fence, and so the public can't have access. You can... although you can see it. It's right next to the main drag, NASA Parkway, they call it. And so if you're driving down NASA Parkway, once right through the middle of the JSE community there, you can see the grove from the road. And so during the holidays, again, around all of the trees in the memorial grove that are dedicated to... There's no one buried there, but trees that are dedicated to fallen astronauts. Frequent appreciation. They wrap all of the trees with white lights, until recently, except one. And because Pete Conrad, who was the commander of Apollo 12, the third guy to walk on the moon, and I've got a story about him too, he once said, "Well, if it can't be good, be colorful." And he was both. And so when they dedicated the tree to him, they decided to put red lights around his tree, and all the others are white. And so it wasn't unusual for someone to ask me when they found out I worked for NASA, during the holidays, they said, "Why is there one red tree there?" And I would explain to them, it's to celebrate Pete Conrad. Well, so several years later, when they dedicated the tree to Apollo 12, Lunar Marginal pilot Alan Bean, who was Conrad's best friend, there's a great story of... It's too long to tell here, but they decided to make history also colorful. So Conrad's tree still has red lights, but Alan Bean's, because he was an artist, and he was great with color. He has, you know, red, green, blue, yellow lights around his trees. So today, when you drive by doing holidays, you see two trees with lights on it. I love that. I did not know that. And this is your blog, and I'm sure your book, which I cannot wait to read, is full of information like that, where again, you had to be a part of that world for this, but, Herbie, your career, you did so... You yourself did so many things. You were part of so many things. I mean, it's not easy to summarize 42 years of service, but I'm going to ask you to try, if you could. Yeah, so I'll go through it quickly. So when I first started, this is... started in 1975, but spent a couple of years just kind of, they intentionally rotated me around to different... So again, I'm in the business office. I basically managed... I award and manage... administer contracts. Because NASA spends... or back then, I think they still do... almost 90% of their budget on contractors. They didn't build the shuttle or the Apollo, the lunar module or the command module. They had a contractor do it. A lot of people don't understand that. That's right. So billion-dollar contracts that we're working on. And so anyway, get a taste of the whole center. And finally, in 1977, they assigned me to working on the EMU, or Extravehicular Mobility Unit, which is a fancy name for a spacesuit. After the Apollo program, we were building... We were having a contractor design and build new spacesuits for the shuttle program. And so I was a young guy involved in working on administering that contract. And in 1979, this was two years before the first shuttle flight, STS-1, they moved me to the shuttle orbiter procurement section. So I was buying... not by myself, it was a large... a large... well, age of 10 of us, we were buying the space shuttle orbiter vehicles. Literally. You know, they were about $2 billion each. And so we were managing the contract with Rockwell to build the space shuttle orbiter vehicles. And I did that for a few years. And then I got... so now it's the earliest, you know, the space station is a gleam in some people's eyes. And so I ended up going to NASA headquarters for a year in 1985. This is, what, 13 years before we finally finished building the space station to work on the space station project. And then I came back after that special one year assignment and working in the space station office at JSC. And then the... the Challenger accident happened and some things got changed around and I needed to go back to headquarters. And so they sent me to KSC for a year to... to be the... the contracting officer to select an award contract to an engineering support contract to support the space station program office. And that's the story about how I got to know and become friends with Fred Hayes, the Apollo 13 lunar module pilot, because he... he had retired from NASA and gone to work for Grumman who built the lunar modules. And so when we awarded this contract a billion-dollar, 10-year space station program support contract to Grumman, they won the competition. He... Fred Hayes was selected to be the new president of this Grumman division that would, you know, run... run that work. And so... so he ended up signing Fred Hayes signed the contract for Grumman and I signed it for NASA and we worked together for about a year or so. And then I ended up moving back to downtown NASA headquarters. The space station program office was in northern Virginia. And so I did... I actually spent 10 years in NASA, living in northern Virginia myself. Spent 10 years at NASA headquarters. And then moved back to JSC and... when I moved back into JSC I was in the space station business office and it turned out that the woman who had joined JSC after I... while I was gone, Lucy Kranz, I had no... I didn't know who she was. Turns out she's... I... Lucy Yates. I'm sorry, I gave away the bus line. So I'm working for her for a couple of months and I go into her office and one day and her door opens and Jean Kranz walks out and I go, "Wait a minute. You're... you're Jean Kranz's daughter? [laughter] Why didn't anyone tell me?" And so it turns out I found out that you know, she intentionally didn't want to have everyone know that, "Oh yeah, I'm this NASA legend's daughter." So... so anyway, I did that for a while and then I moved back to the shuttle orbiter or the space shuttle program and I was working there during the Columbia accident and then I ended up working on Orion for a while, which is, you know, the vehicle that they're using, Therodamus and... and then... and then after 30-something years of working on the shuttle program, the station program, the Orion program, they moved me again to a different business office supporting flight operations, which they thought, "Oh, this is... this is going to be a change," but I loved it because that was supporting mission control, you know, flight operations, the astronaut office, astronaut training, and so the last eight years or so in my life were actually much of it was spent giving tours because I knew so much and had so much experience in history giving tours of the neutral buoyancy lab, which is a big swimming pool that they... astronauts train in for spacewalks and space vehicle mock-up facility where they had mock-ups of the shuttle and the station and where the astronauts trained for when they were inside, you know, not doing spacewalks outside, and mission control. And so, you know, I... probably my favorite was when I would show people the historic Apollo mission control room, which NASA used until, like, 1992 or something like that, you know, but... and so I got goose bumps every time I went into that room. I must have gone in there 20 or 30 times and always got goose bumps. And so now, you know, about, I don't know, it's probably been six or eight years ago, they decided to refurbish it and put it back because it was getting, you know, I mean, it's a historic landmark. And, you know, so many people in there touching it and doing things and I thought, no, this is too... -Getting the picture taken, yes. -Yeah, and they said, no, we can't do this. And so they refurbished it and and, you know, they put... you know, made it look like if you walked in back in one of the days in 1969, that's what it looked like in RC Cola can and Astres and, you know... -The nicotine smelled. -The monitor on and it's amazing. But you can't go in there anymore. I mean, you don't have to be, you know, the president to be allowed in that room now, but so anyway, yeah, that's... And so that's the job I had when I retired. -Yeah. So one of the many, many things I love about hearing your story and when I was reading about it too is in my discussions with people who are in various parts of the space industry, whether, you know, government, military, commercial, we often say, you know, space is for everybody. We need people of all different skill sets working in the space industry and you are such an embodiment of that. I just want to make sure that we drive that home for people because you have had an incredible career. You are still doing amazing things and, you know, you're not an engineer doing engineer things. It's not mandatory to have an amazing career. -That's right though. You know, I think so. So I spent my entire career working with engineers and scientists and doctors and astronauts and so I think just by, you know, osmosis, I had to learn some things because we were buying space vehicles and, you know, providing engineering support and so we had to kind of at least have a pretty decent idea of what it was they needed so we were certain to actually buy the right thing for them. But yeah, that's true. And actually I've done some, I've been asked to talk to groups about that very thing sometimes is to, "Hey, STEM," and I actually spend most of my time now volunteering for organizations that support STEM education. You know, the Alumni League, the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, Space Center Houston and a few others and so even though I wasn't a STEM person, I certainly absolutely understand how important they are but at the same time, like you just said, you know, about 40% of the NASA workforces, business, contracts, finance, HR, you know, legal lawyers, so there's yeah, there's a good chuck of people that have careers at NASA that are not engineers or scientists. Yeah, which, and it's never to knock people who are doing this, the science and engineering, certainly those folks are very important too. But as I'm a communications person, so I'm always like, "Yes, why?" And so today NASA has a huge social media group. Oh, don't I know it? Which did not exist when I started. Yes, oh yeah. Yeah, their media team is outstanding and huge, like they're just doing a lot of different teams doing a lot of different work. I started my career I just want to tell you on a personal, I started my career, my very first job out of college was actually working for a magazine, covering supply chain and procurement. So when I talk in a year, it's like, "Woo, taking me back!" Way back there. But I know how you all do a lot of unsung glory. There's a lot of work in the procurement world that is so important that people just do not know about. So I'm just like, "Wow, this is taking me back, way back!" But it is a very important business function and it is often misunderstood. But it is also very important. So I just want to put that out there. But yeah, I so appreciate that as I said earlier, we could easily talk for, I could listen to you for hours genuinely because you have so many good stories and you're so generous in telling them. I want to just emphasize I want people to read your book from Apollo to Artemis, stories from my 50 years with NASA. Herb, I would love to speak to you again for the show because I just, I have so many more questions. But it's been such a delight speaking with you and I really hope we can speak again soon because you're amazing. So thank you so much for talking to me. Yes, no, thank you. Thank you for inviting me. And yes, absolutely. I have never turned down a request for an interview or a speech or a podcast. So whenever you're ready, just just let me know. [Music] That's it for T-minus Deep Space brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. Let's know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. T-minus Deep Space is produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria of our Mazes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. [Music] [Music] (gentle music)
