Well, the commercial space is a natural flow for going into a frontier environment like
this, and you can see analogies of the United States getting settled with a combination
of boy government programs and governemnt-sponsored commercial programs, and I think we're going
to see the same thing going into space.
It's an important aspect of opening the frontier so that more than just a few government-born
programs can operate in this environment.
Well, I like to look at just exploration: Why is exploration important?
It's hard to justify on any single thing, but you look historically at those countries
that explored, and I like to use the transoceanic explorations of the 17th century as an example
that the countries that explored were the ones that basically wrote the history of that
era of time, and they're the ones that had the highest standard of living.
They're the ones that advanced the art and the sciences.
Their society flourished, and, you can't say, well it's because they did oceanic exploration,
but it's part of their exploration, so I see exploration as a metric for how viable your
society is, and when you stop exploring, there's like a certain entity inside your country
that dies, and you just sort of start to atrophy, and when you continue to explore, you have
a certain richness, a certain demeanor about your society that says this is a thriving
place.
Well, I think a part of any explorer, and you saw this 100 years ago when the arctic
and antarctic were starting to be explored: What explorers do is they go off some place
and they come back and tell stories.
They spread their experience to those that didn't have the good fortune to go, and we're
doing the same thing in the venue of space, and we're using what is available to us now.
if Shakelton was able to tweet, I'm sure he would have been tweeting during his expeditions
to Antartica, and on station we have limited time and limited bandwidth, and we have help
from people on the ground who will take the information that we give them and will in
turn get it out through the appropriate channels.
I wanted to make the equivalent of a potted plant in the corner, and our space craft is
designed for animals, for human beings, and plants don't necessarily thrive in that environment
really simple that you just have the equivalent of a green plant growing in the corner, and
it took me awhile to figure that out, and then I thought, well let me write about that,
because the technology associated with it is not necessarily straight forward, and I
thought I could make it like a gardening instruction manual, which maybe 5 people might be interested
in reading, or then the idea came to me, why don't I animate it like one of Kipling's Jungle
Books, like if a lion and a tiger can sit there and talk to each other, why can't a
zucchini talk?
I decided I would write the story of how you raise plants in space through the eyes of
a zucchini.
I would go back to space in a nanosecond.
That's what I do for a living, and give me another couple of days to get my feet on the
ground, and I'm ready to go again, and in terms of immigrating from earth, I'd be willing
to immigrate into space, leaving space, so long as, one, we had the technology to survive.
One way missions where you go to Mars and die, that's not in the cars.
If you went to Mars like people went to Europe to the new world, that would be something
I would do.
I would load my family up on the next rocket, and we would immigrate into space.