- He was stranded on Mars.
But then he gets out of his Mars car and he starts digging.
And I realized exactly what he's digging for,
and the tears start flowing down my cheeks,
and I'm trying hard to suppress a sob,
because I know I'm the only one in the theater
crying at this part of the movie.
(audience laughing)
I'm just wiping away tears.
That's my spacecraft.
(audience laughing)
You see, I'm one of the 200 or so people
on this planet that put that spacecraft, Mars Pathfinder,
up there for Matt Damon on find her.
(audience cheering and clapping)
I'm really proud of some software we wrote
that helped perfect the navigation system
for the spacecraft,
because you know what they call a spacecraft
without perfect navigation?
Space-crap.
(audience laughing)
Anyway, another hat I got to wear was writing uplink code,
and so my name was in every transmission
that went from Earth to Mars for the entire mission,
hundreds and thousands of messages.
So when the martians finally do come to Earth,
they're gonna be looking for me.
(audience laughing and clapping)
But the hat that remained elusive that I really wanted
was to be on the launch team.
And so this was about 20 people
who would go live and work at the Kennedy Space Center
and put the spacecraft together for the final time,
and get her ready for launch.
Do testing and stuff.
So one day my coworker Ron, the Unix System Administrator,
he lamented to me that he was on the list,
but he didn't want to go,
'cause his wife was gonna have a baby,
and it was terrible timing, and it was all wrong for him,
and saw my opportunity, and I said, I'll do it!
You could train me how to be the Unix System Administrator.
How hard could it be?
(audience laughing)
And I'll go in your place.
And he actually liked the idea,
and we got management to buy in,
and the next thing I know, I'm at Cape Kennedy,
unpacking computers, laying cable under the floor,
and formatting Unix machines,
(audience laughing and cheering)
as if I knew what I was doing.
On the night of the launch, I was about 20 minutes late
getting to our outpost building,
because my buddy Becky and I had stopped
to take a selfie with the rocket,
(audience laughing)
we were ahead of our time on selfies!
(audience laughing)
And when I get there, everybody's looking at me
like I'm late or something, and giving me the stink-eye,
and I'm all, what's wrong?
We had no connection.
We were dead in the water, no communications whatsoever.
We could scrub the launch,
and this was a job for the Unix System Administrator.
- [Audience] Ohhhhh!
- So I panicked a little, and talk about imposter syndrome,
I literally was not a Unix System Administrator,
but I dug deep, and I thought back to my training with Ron,
and the first thing he told me was
"You gotta check the cable."
So I checked the back of every computer,
I checked every line, I checked every piece of equipment,
and finally made my way over to the Cisco Router,
where sure enough, a cable had come loose.
And I jiggled that baby back in, and we were back online!
(audience clapping and cheering)
And I was a hero, as the Unix System Administrator.
(audience laughing)
So we went on to have a great launch, a great flight,
amazing operations on the surface of Mars.
Pathfinder lived up to her name,
and she found path for planetary travel
that hadn't been done before,
(audience clapping)
and she just blazed this trail to Mars,
and all the subsequent Mars missions
have built up her legacy, and have leveraged her success,
including future missions that will put people on Mars.
I learned so many amazing lessons
in those three and half years.
I learned to not worry about doubters.
To take on big challenges.
I learned to take risks and do things
even if I don't know what I'm doing,
and I learned to always check the cables.
(audience laughing and clapping)