Colonel Mike Mullane flew three Space Shuttle missions as a Mission Specialist and is a retired US Air Force weapon systems operator, flying 134 combat missions in Vietnam. 

He wrote the award-winning children's book Liftoff and the outrageously amusing and often times tragic “Riding Rockets”. 

He is a speaker on leadership, teamwork, and safety. He uses his experiences to explain the "normalisation of deviance," the tendency to take shortcuts and accept lower standards under pressure. 

Listen to Gareth’s interview with Mike, on the best and sadly some of the tragic elements of being a Space Shuttle astronaut.