You're like the female version of Top Gun and the female version of like Elon Musk and SpaceX. You're like literally the coolest woman. The launch was just... just happened. Artemis 2, they just came back safely. How does it feel to be a part of this history? Groundbreaking history.
Huge. For the world, right? And you were part of that. It was our engineers who had made the recommendation saying we need a backup just in case the toilet breaks. They did that. One of our employees was the Nutella. She sourced the Nutella so that she could get that up. We want everyone to succeed.
It isn't NASA or SpaceX or whoever because it's all about space and you know, rising tide lifts all ships.
What was your biggest mistake that you felt like you've learned from?
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Want to be empowered? Let's go. Subscribe for more and get this book now. Hello and welcome to Empower TV. My name is Lorna Greiling and in studio today I have Carol Craig. She's the CEO of Craig Technologies and Sidus Space. And Carol, you're like the female version of Top Gun. Can I say that?
And the female version of like Elon Musk and SpaceX. You're like literally the coolest woman. I want to say in America, on the earth, and definitely in Brevard County. Welcome. Welcome.
Very much. I'm excited to be here. I appreciate that. I don't know that I'm that cool, but maybe I'm a little bit of all those kind of things. And in Brevard County, I guess you know, smaller I can be cool here, so. You're very cool. Yeah, this is super exciting.
I appreciate it. So thank you. Absolutely. It's been a struggle, right? Because I mean you've got so much going on right now. The launch was just... just happened. Artemis 2, they just came back safely. How does it feel to be a part of this history?
Right, world history for sure. It's pretty amazing, but I have to say the one piece is it's exciting like you but what you mentioned is they came back safely. So my husband and I both have background naval aviators and my husband in particular flew F-14s and F-18s. So he knows Tonto and Eek which are the two Reed Wiseman and Victor. And so and we one of my real best friend really close friends is also very close friends with Victor and his family. So that's the part where you're holding your breath. I mean it's cool to be a part of it and we've been a part of kind of the Artemis story from the time that the shuttle, you know, kind of that when that transitioned away. We've been a part of it, but it's really the human piece of like just say a lot of prayers and say I want this to work.
Yeah, it's very personal. And when it's successful that means all space companies are successful because there's some people we're talking about, you know, want to make sure we want everyone to succeed.
It isn't NASA or SpaceX or whoever because it's all about space and you know, rising tide lifts all ships.
Yeah, it's the world. I mean it is groundbreaking history for the world, right? It's crazy. And you were part of that. So explain to us what exactly did your company do to, you know, in this space mission? What did you guys provide?
Well, we've been doing this for so long to be honest we had to stop and go, wait, what have we done with this? And when we started to look back we're like, wow, we've been a part of just about everything and for a long time. So in order for Artemis 2 to happen, Artemis 1 had to happen and for that to happen you had to kind of do rebuild the infrastructure over at Kennedy Space Center. So we were a part of that contract which was called the engineering services contract. And so I think at one point I had about 150 people who work for Craig Technologies, my first company. I have the two companies as you mentioned.
And they were all supporting the engineering services contract. So they're building up the infrastructure for the next generation, you know, for the Artemis 1 and 2. So a lot went into that and then the company you mentioned Sidus Space, that was a kind of a spin-off from Craig Tech and we were building space hardware. So a lot of what we did was it was a number of different customers, but for Artemis 2 and we were supporting the Orion. We've done that. We supported like some testing cards, some ground unit stuff. There's a whole bunch of things we did. We even had what we call frangible bolts which were actually on the rocket.
Quick disconnects which are the things that, you know, when it takes off they have to disconnect and there was a I remember there was like an issue with one of them and I kept asking my guys, is that ours? Was that ours? And they're like, no, no, ours are smaller. Wasn't ours. I'm like, okay, because I do not want to be the one that causes any issues. So we did that and then over the last I mean again, this has been well over a decade. Craig Tech has also supported on the people side. We have a number of employees that are in the I'm what's called it's an I'm not contract. It's the mission operations center in Houston. So no kidding, they are the guys on console, guys and gals that are working with the astronauts everything that they're doing. They're supporting them every bit of the mission.
And then the other side, the other contract we have, we have a number of people. They're the ones that are actually supporting what is called human health performance and they're supporting the astronauts everywhere from having somebody who is kind of like the den mother here at KSC before the astronauts go up to engineers who worked on the toilets. Toilet that broke by the way.
It was our engineers who had made the recommendation saying we need a backup just in case the toilet breaks. They did that. They've been a part of just about everything. Food service. One of our employees was the Nutella. She sourced the Nutella so that she could get that up in order with the So it's a variety. Again, we've got about 100 I think around 150 employees out of Houston doing those missions. So I could go on and on, you know, with that.
I love it. Yeah, I can see how excited you are about it.
That's amazing. Like I said, we kind of forgot. I mean it's like not that we forgot, but you just and I've been doing this for, you know, two and a half plus decades kind of thing and you go, hey, I'm just just about people we got cool stuff and then all of a sudden started going, oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. We've been involved in everything.
What keeps you so excited? Because I mean two and a half decades, that... and now it sounds exciting because this is kind of, you know, this is huge and the whole little county here is like we're all out of our skins of excitement because this is, you know, so much part of us and yeah, but two and a half decades of grinding, of pain, of tears, of sleepless nights.
You get it. That's exactly what it is. Yes. Yes. And I'm that not serial, I guess sort of serial entrepreneur, but it's like just when things are like, okay, it's cool. All of a sudden I'm like, oh, I want to do something else. It's like I'm just not content. And I got to keep doing things and so that's why I had started Sidus Space, the spin-off from Craig Technology wanting to do something different and that, you know, was a whole another set of challenges, but I don't know what keeps me going. I realize I have more runway behind me than I do in front of me, but I also have a lot of energy left and I like what I'm doing and it changes.
Talk about Brevard County. It was a ghost town back in 2012 when shuttle, you know, was ramped down and it's like a hurricane. There's no one. And that's kind of scary for people. We were lucky to be there as a company. We could kind of step in the gap. Try to support NASA, do some kind of more commercial related things and then pretty soon you saw the county kind of building back up again. The good part that came out of that I think is that now Brevard County is very diverse. It isn't just the space program. You know, you look at our port. I'm a little biased because I'm a port commissioner now, but you look at the port what they're doing. You look at aviation Melbourne. You've got a lot of defense companies. It's just it's a different landscape than it was, you know, prior when we had the shuttle program. Thankfully.
You're right. Right. Smart people realized that. That's the best part. They were like, you know what? They saw the mistake and now it's very diverse.
Expand and it worked out well. EDC, the economic development, that's Lynda Weatherman. We had Space Florida, Frank DiBello, all those guys. They really saw it and they recognized that we need to do something and they did it in this time frame before we got to where we are right now. Right? So it was done ahead of time which is a beautiful thing. Might have been accidental, but who knows. Yeah.
So I mean, now when you look up at the night sky and you see the satellites roam the earth built by your company, do you ever think back to that moment when you first start believing that a girl from Florida could completely impact space industry?
Like I don't even know if that when that happened or if it happened to be honest. I just kind of I just kept doing and I think if you stop and reflect too much you might go, oh, am I doing is this going to work? Yeah. The satellites was a tough decision too because growing Craig Tech as a government contractor services pretty straightforward. So you've got a lot of great people, smart people working on different contracts. We did some other, you know, engineering services internally, some other things like that. It's pretty straightforward. When you make the decision to start kind of investing in CapEx and saying I'm going to build stuff, it's a whole different financial model and it does not always go as planned. And so I had a vision, but I wasn't quite sure what it was. And then commercial space is taking off and I'm like I saw these guys raising so much money. I'm like, why can't I do that? So how can I what can I do? So I took what we our experience, what we'd done and said, okay, maybe we can build satellites. So it was just kind of this, well, maybe we can do this. Let's think about this. Started to get there, but there still was a point where I'm like, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make this work. You know, because it was fighting against a whole bunch of things. It was the space industry, a lot of the companies going public that were raising big amounts of money and not delivering. It was you know, war, it was geopolitical, it was just a lot of stuff.
Swimming upstream and it's not... So that is So you're swimming upstream. That is true.
A lot of different ways, right? Yeah, and I've kind of been the female in the guy's world a lot.
You have? Holy smokes. But it never gets easier and you'd think at some point you might get a little respect, but it's kind of And not that they don't respect, but it gets after a while. Like, come on.
Mhm. But I have to do to prove myself, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, like if you look back at my track record, I've survived.
And yeah. And so we launched and we launched our satellites and we launched and everyone is at a kind of a different level. Like, it's not perfect just like anything space when you do in space, it's not going to be perfect. But it worked. It wasn't a brick. You know, we when we launch something, we're like, oh, darn, we lost that one. A bunch of companies did that.
Yes. Yeah. But what going back to your question about looking up and thinking about it, it's especially especially, I guess, impactful when I think about the three satellites that we put up there we've named after women.
Oh, I love that. Yeah, and it's So I know about Lizzie. Which So Lizzie sat is me. I'm adopted. And I'm Cuban. My biological name is Elizabeth Sanchez.
And so when we were looking at building these satellites, I was like, I want something named after me. Because Craig Technologies, that's my husband's last name, Craig, right? I had a software company called GCC, my daughter Jillian Catherine Craig. I have a foundation for my son Danny Craig Foundation. I'm like, I want something after me. So told my engineers, I want to name it the Lizzie sat. And they're like, I love it. Oh, yeah. They're like, that's a really stupid name. I'm like, you And then I realized I'm like, you know what? My company, I get to decide. I get to name that. So yeah, so we're going to call Lizzie sat. And it turned out they love it and it turned out great. So but then as we were launching these Lizzie sats, I had seen where a couple companies had kind of had themes around their satellites. And I'm like, well, I want to do a theme and I want to do it around women and I want to do it around the women that don't get recognized necessarily. So we call it Unsung Sheroes.
And the first one was named after my mother. Who was alive at the time when we were building it, but just before we launched it, she passed away in hospital error. I think she would have had a few more years, but she was 92. She would be She'd tell me to shut up and color. Like, I'm 92, it's okay. But the first one is named after her and just even as a trailblazing woman and she passed away at 92, had master's degrees, she worked at Caterpillar back in, you know, the '60s. She had just done all these things that, you know, women didn't do back then.
Second one is named after a young lady in this community, Lauren Boss, who went to our church, a major amazing role model and she passed away from sudden cardiac arrest at 21.
Yeah. And so it was one of those and it's So now they're supporting the Who We Play For organization, which gives and makes sure that all young athletes and non-athletes at young ages get tested for cardiac type of potential issues and things like that. And then the third one is named after a woman out of Ireland. My husband and I were traveling overseas and we'd gone to this place called Gravediggers. And we'd walked in and we started talking to the owner there and there's this lady, I think she's 80 years old and her name's Eileen and we just started having a conversation with her and he was telling us that she again, 80 years old, so you can picture Ireland and what she had gone through, everything Ireland's gone through and that she'd really survived even like spousal abuse and some other things like that, but she lived across the street. Every day she gets up, she comes over, she opens up the pub, cleans it and then she sits down and has a Guinness.
And I was like, I'm going to launch a satellite name it after you. We hadn't even launched anything yet. I met her before I launched the others. I'm like, I'm going to name it after you. And so it's Eileen Bernadette Berry and I said, it's the global everywoman. Because people don't know their stories.
Yes. And if you did, you'd give more respect than they deserve.
Everybody has a story, right? Everyone has a story. And that's why I love what I do because I get to share those stories and leave That's what I say, you know, we leave a legacy of hope because every single story that is told can literally save or change someone's life profoundly. Like you just hear that one nugget that sets you up for a new path or success or that it can help you overcome something that you thought was completely doable and yeah, I've had great emails from people saying that I wanted to take my own life, I this and that and watching an episode and, you know, got them through another day, got them through another day and, you know, countless stories like that and yeah.
That's a very good point, yeah. Yeah. Just a little nugget helps. Just that little bit. So was there ever a time that you thought that, you know, this was impossible, that you were doubting yourself and what did you do with that?
Oh, yeah. I mean, I've been doing this for 20 There's always times, right? So in I mean, obviously in the beginning when I was growing the company, I'm thinking, am I really going to be able to make this happen? And what I I grew Craig Technologies without investors. So it's always worrying about money, always trying to figure out where's that coming from. So I'm leveraging a lot. I'm pretty creative. So I And I'm an engineer, so I can solve problems. But yeah, there were many times and then even as I was trying to grow what is now Sidus, I'm sort of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. So I'm leveraging Craig Technologies and, you know, there's a point where you can only take so much money out of one company or turn your attention towards something else where that company you could impact that company. And so there was a point where I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to survive this.
And then it came out of it. You make some tough decisions. You know, there were one of the things I had to say, okay, the vision I had up here is now the down here. Okay. And it means I've got to not reinvent, but maybe downsize, think about a different type of scale, do something differently. And then I'll reset and go again. And that's what I did with what we called it Craig Technologies Aerospace Solutions and it's now Sidus. So I did with that. So I sort of I would say right-sized. And focused a little more on specific kind of area and what I wanted to do. And then it was like, okay, we reset. Now let's try to grow this thing again. And then of course I take it public and all that stuff kind of happened and a lot of companies public They didn't make it. And a lot of them went out of business, space companies. A lot of them had burned out a lot of cash. But I just kept surviving and you know, it's like failure's not an option. I'm an engineer, a problem-solver. There is always a solution. May not be the solution. It's like when you pray, you know, God may not give you the answer you're looking for. It may not be the solution you want, but there is always a solution. And so that's kind of where I just went I have to make it happen.
And just not giving up, right? I think that's what I hear from your story. It's just never giving up, like not taking no for an answer. And just keep trying. Just keep refocus and because I think a lot of people have, like you said, they have a vision here and now they're here and the disappointment is just so big that it just completely like floods their brain and they're just unable to refocus and restart, right? At a lower I wouldn't say lower level, but yeah, sure, right?
Yeah, yeah, it derails you. What's important though, I think, is the support system that surrounds you. I'm really blessed to have a husband who's been amazing. I have a child with a disability in addition to a lot of stuff that we've gone through and he's there. He's always there for me. So I'm very very much in awe of individuals, especially women business owners who don't necessarily have that. Whether they're young or they're divorced or whatever it might be. I was very blessed there. I was also blessed to have friends who have seen me go through the last 10, 12 years where I've been kind of augering in, how I describe it, and they were there to listen, to encourage and you know, and it's that one You said a nugget. That's something can just say one thing. Or I'll do a podcast or I'll, you know, do a talk or something and just going through my story makes me go, oh, yeah, I can do this. You know, it's like sometimes when I do things like this, it's more for me.
Okay, why am I doubting myself?
Yes. I'm still standing just like Billy Joel says or whatever that song is, but yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I like Well, it's good for me to hear that you sometimes doubt yourself as well because, you know, from the outside we look at people and we look at what they're accomplishing and what they've done and you think they're like some kind of powerhouse or some superhuman force, but we're not. Like, you're a human, everybody is a human. We all go through the same kind of emotions and you just have to choose what emotions, what thoughts, what are you entertaining, you know, like you were saying like giving up is not an option, taking no for an answer is not an option. Like when you take those off the table completely, you got to find a solution, right? Did you learn that with your son? Because I know you guys went through huge I wouldn't say trauma, but an ordeal, right?
Yeah, yeah. With my son, so the short story is Navy medicine misdiagnosed him. They told us that he had brain damage, a third of his brain was missing and would likely not live. Well, it turns out that wasn't true. Luckily I had requested an MRI before I left the Navy hospital and then even after that, the doctors lied to us about it. But through with divine intervention and some nurses who were our friends who actually kind of snuck us the results of the MRI, we found out that he didn't have brain damage. So it was that point of like, okay, and he does have a rare genetic disorder, but I was like, okay, brain damage or genetic disorder? I wasn't sure I was going to fix brain damage. God might have had to intervene on that one. But the genetic disorder, I'm like, oh, I can educate myself.
And for sure that has to be where I went, all right, you know, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me kind of a thing. I'm like, I get it, learn from my mistakes of not, you know, trusting myself because I remember looking at my son when he was born, this is when they said he brain damaged, and I kept telling the doctors, I'm like, I can see it in his eyes. He's looking at me, and they're just like, oh, you're just, you know, new mom, you don't know. I'm like, I could there's nothing I can tell. And I didn't trust myself to push through that. He had a do not resuscitate on him when we put him in a home for disabled infants, and it should never have gotten to that point. I should have been like, no, no, I'm positive. But anyway, that changes you, and you make sure that, yeah, I'm not going to give up ever again. And it's has not been without challenges.
Yeah. But Danny's killing it. I mean, his disorder is pretty complex, but he graduated with a degree from University of North Florida, and for the most part, most of the kids with his disorder don't graduate mainstream high school, let alone go on to college.
Wow. You know, and so, you know, he's 24, and he's living in an apartment that's down the street from us. So, he's not completely independent, but that's okay.
Hey, that's phenomenal. It's considering, like you were saying, like everybody else, right?
Right. You know, Danny and I had the same gym trainer, John.
Yeah. I didn't know that, actually.
Yeah. Yes. That's where Dan is so sad because he's been out because of the hospital stuff that he wants to work out with you John, Big John.
Big John, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And John took care of my daughter as well when she came out of the hospital.
Ah. Yeah, he's just an angel. I love him to death.
Yeah. Well, he went through passionate about what he does.
He's so into it. It's just he's so good. Medical issues as well.
Yeah, recently. Yeah, and Dan's kind of been talking to him, and he's encouraging Dan, come on, you can come back from this and stuff. So, yeah, we'll get him in the gym again, so.
Yeah, he's phenomenal. So, I mean, who's your biggest cheerleader on this project, you know, on your life journey, and on your businesses? Would you say it's your husband, your mom, your kids, like or just everybody in general?
I think it's everyone. I mean, obviously my husband, or he wouldn't stick around, man. He'd have been like, long time ago, be like, all right, go on your own. But all my friends, too. You know, I've got a local guy who's real good friend. I met him and made him my patent lawyer, and I swear he is one of my biggest cheerleaders. I mean, he believes in me so hard and so much, and so that's, you know, that's a friend. My kids, and there's no question. They might roll their eyes at me, but they still believe in me. And my mom, for sure. She definitely was always believed. She had said that when I was younger, you know, you can do anything, you can be anything.
She also said, make sure to keep your ego in check and be humble.
Good advice. Those are the two things, like humility and that lack of an ego really important. But no, I think I've got a lot of cheer. There are some people who are maybe not cheerleaders. That's the one thing that when I was starting to really grow and kind of get more well known in the community, I don't have thick skin. I should, but I don't. And so, I took it to heart every time someone said something negative about me. And I'm like, why would they do that? And I have a friend, local guy here who said, Carol, they all want the glory, but they don't want your story.
