Space Exploration

Humans in space

We always wanted to find out what's out there. We want to be able to, you know, expand out horizons and I think that that truly is built into the human spirit, we are always wondering "What's next?" "How much farther can we go?" - The Mercury astronauts when they get introduced they immediately callus as sort of a hero. The press conference that NASA had goes crazy and the astronauts becomeinstant celebrities. They sort a look like knights in armor, in some ways, going out there to defend the honor of The United States.

3...2...1...Lift off. - Roger, lift off and the clock has started. The feeling of that moment of exhilaration exhilaration because, of course, they'd been training for few years and in fact I was more than ready for the lift off to occur and was quite delighted inthe fact that it did occur. It occurred so smoothly. Capsules  turning around. Oh that tremendous view. - We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. - It's outward bound.

People have a human feeling I think for wanting to go outward bound and it's in us. You know, to go, to see, to touch, to understand what's there. The ignition sequence start. It finally come ,  the day, the moment. The trajectory had been wrong. They had targeted into that in hospitable place. Then, they had to fly over this area at a high forward velocity. Then, pitch up to slow down, so it would kill that forward velocity and then start down like a helicopter. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. ". The landing tome was a great celebration we had won the race, thenation was almost euphoric.  The knowledge that we gain about the origin and the evolution of the moon is one of these days, gonnahelp us right here on Earth. Course its only one area, but I believe it's an important area and I guess I'm bettin a lot on it.

NASA has been absolutely critical to improving the knowledgeof all human kind. Twelve humans walked onthe surface of the moon, which is a stunning achievement, and Americans are still the only country ever to have done that. We're going to go back to the moon and we're gonna take what we learned there and we're gonna go to mars. To get to Mars,it's about a six month journey. And as an operator, I would be really really happy if we could test out our operations and our equipment in our backyard. The moon's only three days away. The moon is the next step. So the Space Station is more than a million pounds, it's as big as two football fields. You are not going to bring that up in one single lift. So, we had to bring upthe Space Station in parts and assemble it. The Space Shuttle was instrumental into bringing up, at least the American side of that. It was more than forty missions over about thirteen years to assemble all of those parts of the Space Station.

And so human space flightis really interesting because we do adapt reallyquickly to the environment. How quickly, it feltnatural to float around. How quickly, it felt normal to look out the window and see the earth go by. - Human being are built to be able to adapt to weightlessness andthat allows us to go do that exploration and so we have improved the exercise equipment,we improved the diet, the vitamins. It mean we would come back so strong, that physically one will actually be stronger than when he left,
As the results show when the physical fitness test  is done when astronauts got back. It gives me great hope that, you know, if we have similar type of equipment on our long duration space vehicles, we're going to show up on Mars and be ready to work the minute we get there.

Orion, our state of the art space craft, is designed to take crews into deep space, and then once their work is done, safely bring them back home. Sometimes folks ask , you know, what do you think the next sixty years has in store? I don't know all of the destinations that we will visit, the mysteries we will solve, the places that we will leave footprints, again. - And we want to see what's out there, we want to see how it works, we want to go explore. There's always this desire to learn more, to satisfy that inquisitive nature. Let's go do it.