(Blogger’s note: As promised in today’s Extra, where I ran excerpts from my question and answer sessions with NASA budget analyst and author Richard C. Cook (see previous blog entry), here is the complete interview.)

Q. How old are you? Where are you from originally?

A. I am 64 years old. I was born in Montana, grew up in Michigan, where my dad worked for Dow Chemical, and spent my high school and college years in Williamsburg, VA, where I attended the College of William and Mary. I was named to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated from there with honors in 1970. I went to work for the U.S. Civil Service Commission in 1970 and spent most of the next 37 years working in Washington, D.C.

Q. What brought you to Roanoke?

A. I retired from the federal government in 2007, when I published my book “Challenger Revealed,” my memoir of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. My wife Karen and I decided it was time to get away from the congestion of the D.C. area. We both love the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I know the area well, since two of my kids went to Virginia Tech. We settled in Roanoke and have been quite happy here.

Q. What do you plan to talk about in “From Challenger to Extraterrestrials”? What will the presentation consist of? What do you hope people will take away from it?

A. Since I retired, I have worked as a professional writer, publishing “Challenger Revealed,” followed by a book on the financial crisis entitled, “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform,” plus over 60 articles in magazines, newspapers, and on the internet. I am also a teacher of meditation. My presentation, “From Challenger to Extraterrestrials” will track my intellectual odyssey from being a whistleblower involved in a world-class tragedy to research into the incredibly fascinating and important topic of UFOs and extraterrestrials. There have been, in fact, massive UFO/ET contacts in the last several decades, which coincide with our becoming a spacefaring people, one which also has the ability to destroy its planetary home with weapons of mass destruction. The vast majority of UFO/ET contacts have been with the military forces of various nations, particularly the U.S. Because these contacts have been treated with such secrecy, the public has been left out. In fact, we have been conditioned to believe we are crazy to believe in such things. At my talk on March 29, I will spend two hours providing detailed information about UFO/ET phenomena from well-documented sources, including former NASA astronauts, that will show anyone attending that the world we live in is far different from what we are conditioned to see. I want people to understand that humanity in our day and age is part of an epochal raising of human consciousness of which the space program was a major catalyst. I can guarantee that anyone who attends will hear things he/she has likely never heard before. At the same time, we need to keep our heads and not be carried away by the huge amount of misinformation out there. I hope to provide attendees with some tools and criteria for sifting the true from the false.

Q. Why do you think life is probable on other planets?

A. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has over 200 billion stars. Within the larger Universe, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. As we are better able to see into the Universe, many star systems are emerging with planets similar to ours. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has begun to report numerous planetary bodies in other solar systems that could support life like ours. This includes at least 46 star systems within 50 light-years of earth, what you might call our galactic “neighborhood.” Zeta 1&2 Reticuli are sun-like stars only 38 light-years away. Common sense would indicate that there is no reason we should be alone and unique in this immensity. Even the Vatican has announced its readiness to greet extraterrestrials as “brothers in God,” and whether they should be offered the rite of Christian baptism is being seriously discussed.

Q. You’re known as a whistle-blower at NASA following the Challenger disaster. Has that followed you or created challenges for you in your life post-NASA?  

A. I was a very successful young analyst when I went to work for NASA in 1985 as the lead resource analyst for the space shuttle external tank, solid rocket boosters, and Centaur upper stage. Previously I had done policy level work for the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Carter White House. At NASA, I immediately began to hear about the dangers of the solid rocket booster O-ring joints and wrote memos and reports about it. After the disaster, I stepped forward and became the first NASA official to admit publicly we had known about this problem for years. Once I testified I never returned and was lucky to land a job in a rather obscure corner of the U.S. Treasury Department, where I worked for 21 years. But I learned a great deal about the U.S. financial system, so much so that when I retired I became one of those writers who was warning that the entire system was about to experience a major crash. Well, those people who listened to me saved a lot of money by pulling out of the stock market. So overall, you could say that being a whistleblower brought my government career to a screeching halt, but given what I learned by having that experience and in my subsequent career made me realize that all that happens is for the best. I have no regrets and am a happy and productive person today. And I am still grateful to my colleagues at Treasury who protected me from being fired from the government altogether back when the heat was on.

Q. Do you still receive feedback from readers of your book, Challenger Revealed?

A. Through my books, my articles, my public speaking, my media appearances, and my website, www.richardccook.com, I have met or communicated with thousands of people around the world who share my interests and concerns about the world in which we live. This has included mentoring some very creative young people, and meeting some real geniuses whose ideas could revolutionize life on earth in a very positive way. I feel like a citizen not only of the planet but of the cosmos. This could only have happened through the experiences I have had and my efforts to communicate these experiences to the public.

Q. What do you think of what’s happening right now with the space shuttle program? Do you have any ideas what direction NASA should go?

A. This is a very important and pertinent question. The space shuttle program will cease to exist after 2011. The 134^th and final mission will be flown in April. The space shuttle was the most complex machine ever built, but it was also very dangerous, with two orbiters being lost along with their crews in catastrophic accidents. The follow-on program to the space shuttle was to involve a return to the capsule technology of Apollo days, except it was much more ambitious. It was called Constellation. The NASA administrator called it “Apollo on steroids.”  The goal was to use the vehicle, called Orion, to travel to the International Space Station (ISS), as the shuttle did, but then set out to revisit the moon, establish a permanent moon base, then eventually embark from there to Mars. But the program was running into the usual delays and cost overruns for which NASA is famous, and the Obama administration amazed everyone by terminating it, though a modified Orion may be built solely to service the ISS. A huge number of jobs will be lost when the shuttle program ends, and the manned space flight community has been very upset that what they devoted their lives to has such a bleak future. On the other hand, NASA will be able to devote more of its resources to unmanned exploration of space and to the tracking of climate change and other earth changes about which we know so little. The solar system at present is undergoing great and, to many scientists, alarming transformations. The sun is putting out immense amounts of electromagnetic energy, and what we call “global warming” on earth is being reflected in similar events on other planets. Something big seems to be in the works involving cosmic forces on a gigantic scale. NASA is studying these things, and is keeping a close watch on solar activity, even as it continues to explore the Universe beyond our solar system for signs of life similar to our own. (By the way, NASA has been searching for extraterrestrial life since its inception and, according to some sources, has found it in abundance.) It could be argued that NASA has represented more than any other agency the hopes, dreams, and future of mankind, though it has not always done such a great job. In this, the infancy of the space age, NASA has plenty to do.