Gregory Johnson0:18
You know, that's a really great question. I watched the Apollo walk on the moon. I was a young teen, emphasized young if you will, and my parents got together and it was black and white TV and we watched that. I went outside in Seattle, it happened to be a nice night in Seattle which is not a given, and looked at the moon and wondered what it would be like to walk on the moon. So it really started with the Apollo era for sure.
So there's a couple parts of doing that. One, it's being part of that team. We went on STS-125 to the Hubble Space Telescope, the last mission to service the telescope. At this point, NASA had put about 10 billion dollars into this telescope, so if we went up there and ruined the telescope, we would have all had new call signs. So there's two things about it that were why I wanted to be on that mission. One is it was the highest risk we've ever launched a mission at, and the reason is it's a hundred miles higher than the space station, so it's about 350 miles up. Space station's about 250. And we were fixing a telescope that was about 20% of its capability due to failures, and we were trying to renovate it and get it to look at the universe. So there was a good humanitarian payback for the entire world. People around the globe look at Hubble images, and we were on a very aggressive mission to fix it. To cut down on the risk, we had a second space shuttle on a launch pad ready to come and save us with the crew. So it was a very high pressure mission because there was a good reason to do it, but it was also a dangerous mission.
The parts about space flight I really liked was looking out the window, there's no question. You didn't get a lot of time for that. We were working, we had about five hours of sleep at night for 13 days, so you only got a chance to look out the window glancing. But seeing the earth from afar, seeing the Amazon River and seeing the Nile, and seeing the hotels in UAE, it was unbelievable views. I tell people I wish I had a better feel for geography because you would have to look on a moving map to say where you were looking down. One of our crewmates, he could recognize Mount Everest. I wouldn't be able to pick Mount Everest out in the mountains. But unbelievable seeing the earth, and then unbelievable seeing outer space, ten times more stars than you can see from the ground. I had a chance to see a constellation you could only see in the southern hemisphere, but from space you can see all the constellations. It's called the Southern Cross, and you could see it from space. Then when I visited New Zealand, I got a chance to see it from the ground, so it was really cool.
Yeah, so I think there's an aspect of exploration that I really believe in. I think we need to continue to do that. I mean, it's the same thing with Spain and Columbus, looking hundreds of years in advance at what's out there. So I think there's that natural desire to explore. And then there are other planets called exoplanets. There's at least half a dozen that have an Earth habitability index of around 0.9, meaning best we can tell from 20 light years away, they are places you possibly could live. So I think there's a reason to go out and explore those, but I also believe there's a reason to have colonies in space that orbit the earth, for example. So I think all those are really good reasons to go. And to go even as close as Alpha Centauri, which is around four and a half light years away, you're going to have to be able to go fast, really fast.
So my expectation is, I think if you look at what we're doing, we're a really small institute at the moment. We have an advisory board, a governance board, a board of directors. I'm a board of director member. We're going to have to inspire the next generation to get involved in interstellar space to be able to break through either a wormhole or a space warp time to be able to go faster than the speed of light, not locally but in a wave. And so we're going to have to inspire a bunch of people to get involved in STEM education. I think my biggest joy will be to see that we can inspire more kids to get into interstellar, to get into space in general. So if we could do that, I think our mission is accomplished.
