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>> I thought I knew what the Earth was all about,
just because I'd looked at it with pictures
and video and all these things.
And it's like seeing some travelogue in some exotic place
on Earth and calling that your vacation, right?
We do not do that, as human beings.
We want to physically go to these places,
because the experience is different,
and it's the same thing when you go into space
and you look at Earth.
You know, intellectually, what Earth is like from space,
because we've all seen the pictures,
but it's not being there.
The human experience aspect of space doesn't come
until you can relax a little bit.
Now, that happened, for me, when I was taking my space suit off
and I remember floating up to the flight deck, and you look
at the overhead windows and Earth was there,
and it was such an intense blue.
We were somewhere over the ocean, and it was an intensity
of color that no photography, no video,
no movie, no film can capture.
You can parse more and more details out.
When you first look at Earth, you may say, "Wow,
that's a continent," and then you look
at it again the next day and say, "Wow,
there are mountain ranges," and then you look
at it again the next day, and it's like, oh,
I can see synclines and anticlines
in the geologic structure, and oh,
there's the rain shadow effect, and on and on and on.
So, the more time you have to look at Earth over a long period
of time, the more you can see.
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So, there's more to see in space than just looking at Earth.
You look out at the cosmos, and there's many things
in the cosmos that are noteworthy to gaze at,
for example, the Magellanic Clouds.
Those show up really bright and vivid
because you don't have atmospheric scattering.
You can see Andromeda.
It's a little fuzzy spot.
On a really, really dark night
with good vision you can faintly make out Andromeda,
but in space, it just stands out,
because the contrast is so stark.
So, there's all kinds of other things to see.
There's the moon.
It goes through its phases.
The angle that the moon makes when it rises,
relative to your spacecraft, changes with time.
It's almost like your spacecraft, itself,
becomes a giant astronomical machine and it's, like, okay,
the moon was rising over here two weeks ago,
and now it's rising over there, and why is that?
And then you think about the orbital dynamics, where we are
in our solar system, this and that,
and then it all makes sense.
So, there's so much to observe, more so than just planet Earth.
I think it's important to share our experiences
with all the people who, as of today, don't have a chance to go
into space, but the more people that we can get off
of this planet to have these kind of experiences,
the more growth you will see in ideas, and the viability
of your culture will increase.
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