He is one of the most decorated astrophysicists ever, has launched more than a dozen satellites, led the team that sent the Hubble Space Telescope into space and is the recipient of Nasa's Outstanding Leadership Medal.
Yet, when Dr Charles Pellerin sat in conversation with T&T Guardian recently, he promptly cited Carl Jung's personality development theory, his own views on leadership, the organisational blame game and what he views as a cycle of human civilisation that seems set for "a disruptive event sooner rather than later."
He is also not a great believer in some of the fanciful futuristic technology predictions currently making the rounds and in fact believes some modern innovations are already reaching their plateaus. "Most people, particularly in the West, tend to think in terms of extrapolation," he said. "But you cannot predict the future from a linear extrapolation based on what happens today.
The technologies do not extrapolate upwards forever," Pellerin said. "They tend to level off."
The same, he said, applies to human societies which he argues "tend to drive and collapse on a time scale of a few hundred years."
At the current rate, he argued, "the more likely phenomenon for humans is we are consuming everything on the planet at an incredible rate (and) we are going to have a disruptive event...sooner rather than later, because we cannot consume at this rate forever.
Everything here is from oil," he said. "Now half of the world's oil is gone."
At the personal level, the highly-decorated scientist resists the compelling conclusion that he has made an intellectual jump from faithful cleavage to the applied sciences in favour of the somewhat less empirical social sciences, instead suggesting that human endeavour involves as many social as there are technical/scientific challenges.
It's not an easy argument to follow, especially in the face of a mile-a-minute conversation with unfamiliar quantum physics references thrown in for good measure.
For instance, Pellerin believes that explanations for many "social mysteries" can be better understood by making use of "simple scientific metaphors." He said he is also of the view that "social context" ought to be considered an important part of understanding what drives behaviour.
All of this probably started when, after 20 years of research and planning, the first attempt at launching the Hubble Space Telescope ended in failure in 1990 and presented the possibility of an early end to Pellerin's career in the space industry. At issue was a faulty main mirror. It took three years and a different view of the world to have the optics corrected and Pellerin convinced that he should pursue other professional options.
At the time, he was Director of Astrophysics at Nasa and riding high. Twenty years before, he had been the recipient of a Nasa/Goddard Space Center patent-related award for a Two-axis Fluxgate Magnetometer. A magnetometer measures magnetic capacity and the direction of a magnetic field at a given point in space.
When Pellerin joined the Hubble Telescope project it had already been more than a decade in the making and in the end cost, in today's currency, up to US$5 billion.
Following the failure of the first launch, Pellerin recalled a stormy meeting with Congressman Barbara Mikulski who had previously provided political support for the telescope project. During the encounter, Mikulski vowed not to provide future support for the mission. Pellerin claims he persisted, albeit secretly, leading to the technical corrections that kept the telescope project alive and viable for possibly another 30-40 years.
Ironically, Mikulski's connection with the space sector led in 2012 to the naming of an exploding star Supernova Mikulski. It would quite possibly have been Pellerin's private name for her long before then.
What did his experience in the space programme bring to his views of the world? Such a question attracts answers to why the scientist's current work is currently as a leadership coach and lecturer. He moved from publishing in physics and astrophysical journals to authoring a book on "critical soft skills for scientists, engineers and project teams" titled: How Nasa Builds Teams.
It's by no means an easy narrative to follow. Somewhere between the Hubble failure–that eventually turned to success–there was a resignation, a divorce, time spent as an business lecturer and the realisation that making the connection between technical and social failures held the key to many challenges he recognised during his career as a scientist.
"When the blame game starts," he said, "the accused is not likely to tell you what else might be wrong about the situation for fear they will remain under siege."
Such lessons, Pellerin argued, provide a solid basis for approaching leadership challenges in other areas of professional and private pursuit. One of the things he feels strongly about is the fact that cultural antecedents are very often responsible for ostensibly unrelated technical shortcomings.
He cited as an example a number of aviation incidents by one Asian airliner which he attributed to the fact that even when co-pilots recognised the shortcomings of their captains, they hesitated to point them out, given the relationship between those in authority and their juniors in such cultures.
These days, he spends as much time on the sea as he does on aircraft jetting him around the globe as an astrophysics consultant to several governments. In fact, he is a regular on the Caribbean sailing circuit, though his visit to Port-of-Spain in April was his first time this far south.
His views on US politics and the forthcoming elections? "When social context deteriorates we get a little crazy and we put in people who blame someone else," he quipped dryly and off he went to another assignment as scientist/philosopher and lecturer extraordinaire.