00:17Flying in space, the biggest difference is that you're suddenly, magically, weightless.
00:23So it's like someone just gave you a superpower. Someone tapped you on the head and said,
00:28fly, and now you can fly. And so the first reaction on all the crews that I've been on is
00:34laughter.
00:35Because if you shut off gravity right now, you'd burst out laughing. It's just so different and
00:40wonderful. But then you float to the window. And that combination of the magic of weightlessness
00:47and a brand new, amazingly informative and beautiful perspective of the world,
00:52it is an intoxicatingly great experience to fly in space.
00:55The view, it actually makes you forget the body. You just become this set of eyes staring out at
01:01creation as it actually is. And it's kind of amazing. If you think about it in history,
01:05two of the most amazing things we've made are lenses to see the really small and lenses to see the
01:10really big. And you can now go to space and see, you know, the entire planet I got to see
01:15in one
01:16gaze without an instrument to look out and see it as it is. The view is really what creates the
01:21lasting feelings to look out the window and see the commonality of the human experience,
01:28this sudden, unmistakable realization that we all want the same thing. We're all fighting the same
01:36battles. We we want joy and laughter and grace and a little nicer world for our children. And to see
01:43the
01:44entire population of the world every single day is immensely unifying and also hugely optimism building.
01:56I'm a huge fan of the right stuff because the story is amazing. The book is amazing. Tom Wolfe made
02:03a great contribution to literature. But the movie they made after that, I felt I lived so many of those.
02:09My wife and I moved into Edwards Air Force Base and had that exact scene when you turn on the
02:13bathtub
02:14and what came out was didn't want you to you didn't want to put your body in that. But that
02:18just the
02:18connection how I felt so far from that, but then also in the moment so connected to it that that
02:23was
02:24to me one of those that I think really got it right. I think my favorite of all is 2001
02:29A Space Odyssey,
02:31just because it blew my mind when I was nine years old or eight years old. And every time I
02:36watch it,
02:37it's still, I still don't know what that movie is about. But the lovely artwork of Arthur C. Clarke
02:42and Stanley Kubrick working together to just push the very edges of what we could even try and comprehend.
02:48That's what exploration is all about. And I just love the artistic way that that movie was put together.
02:59Humans do best when there's competition. That's why we have the Olympics. If we didn't have the
03:04Olympics, you know, the edge of human performance would never be pushed, would never be understood,
03:10and it wouldn't inspire people. And it's just how we are by nature. We're imperfect though,
03:18but we're also still here after whatever half a million years of homo sapiens being alive. And it's
03:24always been flawed and we do things badly. But we have also built the pyramids and Stonehenge and the Sistine
03:31chapel and magnificence of art and music around ourselves. And a lot of that just comes from the
03:39flawed nature of who we are. I think an aspect of human space exploration that will continue to be
03:44a reality for America and our partners is that it will be an international partnership. There's a whole
03:50other aspect of this competition that I really love, though, purely love. It is the collaboration between
03:56the public sector and the private sector. And so we actually have competition amongst companies,
04:01intuitive machines. Everybody knows SpaceX and Blue Origin, but there's companies like Relativity and
04:05Intuitive Machines that are making contributions that are going to help us not only get to the moon,
04:10but to stay there sustainably and responsibly. And so I think that competitive nature, it also
04:15highlights the collaborative nature. And I think because we are weaving it all together,
04:20it gives me a lot of hope about the future. Space exploration.
