Friends,
The response to yesterday’s excerpt from my Beyond with Nila interview with Cmdr. Ted Muga and Nelisse Muga was, quite frankly, astonishing. I had not anticipated the level of interest it would generate after all these years, and I’m delighted that so many of you found the conversation worthwhile.
I did, however, speak a little too soon—and rather naively—when I offered to send the full two-hour interviews to anyone who requested them. The original audio files are simply too large to distribute individually, especially given the number of requests I received. So I have decided on a better solution: I shall begin uploading the full interviews to YouTube, where anyone interested can listen to them at their leisure. I’ll share the links as they become available.
Meanwhile, continuing this brief excursion into the archives of _Beyond with Nila_, today I offer another fifteen-minute excerpt from a conversation recorded years ago—this time with my friend *Dwain Deets*, a physicist and aerospace engineer who served as Director of Research Engineering and Aerospace Projects at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California.
For those unfamiliar with Dryden, the name deserves a little context.
Alongside Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert, Dryden occupies hallowed ground in experimental aviation. Its legacy spans from the Bell X-1 and Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier, through the Mach 6 X-15 and the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, to the Space Shuttle and advanced aircraft such as the SR-71 Blackbird. NASA itself has described Dryden as the world’s premier flight research center.
This was the rarefied technical world in which Dwain spent his professional life—and eventually rose to senior leadership. He wasn’t merely an engineer examining aircraft on paper; his career was immersed in an institution whose very purpose was to subject theory to the unforgiving arbiter of actual flight. At Dryden, elegant calculations eventually had to confront a rather inconvenient question: _Will the damned thing actually fly?_
That background is what made my conversation with Dwain about 9/11 particularly compelling. Like yesterday’s guest, Cmdr. Ted Muga, Dwain approached the questions not as a casual observer but with habits of thought developed over a lifetime in aerospace research: examine the data, understand the physical system, test assumptions, and ask whether the proposed explanation fits the evidence.
So today, another fifteen minutes from the old Beyond with Nila dossier: Dwain Deets.
Tomorrow, however, I shall climb down from my technical horse. For my final archival conversation before the release of _The Man Who Challenged Empire_, I’ll leave the physicists, engineers and test pilots behind and approach 9/11 from an altogether different direction—through the eyes of someone whose professional world was not the laboratory or cockpit, but the passenger cabin.
And what she had to say about that morning led to one of the longest—and most extraordinary—interviews I ever conducted.
More tomorrow. For now, here’s former NASA Director Deets…