Retired astronaut Story Musgrave spoke to an audience of more than 100 military personnel and their families Friday in Kaye Auditorium at the Columbus Air Force Base.

Musgrove was part of a team put together by NASA to repair the Hubble Telescope in the 1990s. In all, he has been on six space shuttle missions and four space walks. He has spent 53 hours in space total and has logged 17,700 aircraft flight hours.

Musgrave’s presentation — “Excellence: The Path to Perfection” — only briefly touched on his time in space, focusing more on the importance of achieving excellence throughout a lifetime. Musgrave stressed to his audience that if they always strive to be the best they could and mixed their passion for aviation with a detail-oriented awareness of everything around them, they will be successful.

He talked about his life and his career, starting from his childhood on a farm in Massachusetts where he grew up working and fixing equipment. It was this knack for fixing things that got him a job working on airplanes when he joined the Marine Corps at the age of 17 in the 1950s. Within a few months, the 18-year-old private became crew chief, signing off airplanes for missions. He credits his childhood of fixing machines and his attention to detail for his promotion at such a young age.

At the time, there were fewer checklists and procedures that pilots had to go through before flying missions, which Musgrave said resulted in the loss of both airplanes and pilots. He said they lost four pilots in one month once.

“I only found out decades later what was going on,” he said. “You’ve got these people writing things about the ‘great ole days’ of where … the only instruction you had was from World War II pilots and anything went. These are the ‘great days’ of flying because anything goes. You can do whatever you want. Well, it’s not O.K., because they weren’t going to the funerals.”

That’s the reason procedures are important, Musgrave said. They keep pilots alive.

Musgrave stressed the importance of following procedures exactly throughout the rest of his presentation. He said that, along with his attention to detail and his willingness to learn anything anyone was willing to teach him with taking him from the Marine Corps to NASA. Along the way, he flew planes for both the Marines and the Air Force and became a part-time trauma surgeon, eventually gaining seven academic degrees. Everything he learned helped prepare him for the moment he read in Science Magazine that NASA was looking for scientists to send to space, he said.

“That job came along and saved me because it utilized everything I’d ever done in life,” he said. “Everything I’ve ever done in life, I can apply to that.”

He ended his presentation with photos of space, including pictures of what the Aurora looked like from space, which he had said in an interview before the presentation was one of his best memories from going into space.

“It’s not what you do,” he told his audience, “it’s that you achieve this level of perfection.”