Herb Baker — retired NASA manager, 42-year agency veteran, and author of the memoir From Apollo to Artemis: Stories From My 50 Years With NASA — joins Tammy and Tim for the return of Roundabout: Creative Chaos after a six-and-a-half-year hiatus, and the timing couldn't be more fitting.
Baker spent his entire career at Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, and NASA Headquarters, finishing as Manager of the Operations Support Office at JSC — a role that put him in direct support of the Astronaut Office, Mission Control, NASA Aircraft Operations, and astronaut training. Long before that, as a teenager growing up just miles from the Manned Spacecraft Center, Baker worked for ABC Television as a film courier during the Apollo missions, running 16mm footage from Houston to Intercontinental Airport twice a day so the networks could broadcast it in New York. He did that for Apollo 11, 12, 13, and 15. His mother, meanwhile, was the NASA seamstress photographed at the sewing machine stitching the parasol that replaced Skylab's lost micrometeoroid heat shield — a story Baker tells with pride. Since retiring in 2017, he has served as an Officer on the Board of Directors of the NASA Alumni League–JSC and volunteers with STEM-engagement organizations, including the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and Space Center Houston. He is also an alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin and has appeared in 22 theatre productions.
The conversation covers an enormous amount of ground: what it was like to be a 17-year-old film runner during Apollo 11, the Challenger and Columbia disasters and NASA's annual day of remembrance, the Artemis II heat shield concerns and how NASA managed the risk, the woodpecker attack on a Space Shuttle external tank, Baker's decision to self-publish using Scrivener and Kindle Direct Publishing, why a conversation with Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise helped him choose independence over a hybrid publisher, his unexpected return to community theatre after decades away — including landing the lead role in Miracle on 34th Street — and what he's working on next, including a second book drawing on his own experience surviving squamous cell carcinoma.
Mentioned in this episode:
- From Apollo to Artemis
- Herb Baker's website
- Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
- Apollo 11 Trailer
- For All Mankind (soundtrack by Brian Eno)
Category: Science & Nature > Physics & Cosmology
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