Episode 2: “Down to Earth - A Giant Astronomical Machine”

1. 0:19I thought I knew what the Earth was all about, just because I'd looked at it with pictures
2. 0:23and video and all these things.
3. 0:26And it's like seeing some travelogue in some exotic place on Earth and calling that your vacation, right?
4. 0:34We do not do that, as human beings.
5. 0:36We want to physically go to these places, because the experience is different,
6. 0:42and it's the same thing when you go into space and you look at Earth.
7. 0:47You know, intellectually, what Earth is like from space, because we've all seen the pictures, but it's not being there.
8. 0:56The human experience aspect of space doesn't come until you can relax a little bit.
9. 1:05Now, that happened, for me, when I was taking my space suit off
10. 1:11and I remember floating up to the flight deck, and you look at the overhead windows and Earth was there,
11. 1:20and it was such an intense blue.
12. 1:24We were somewhere over the ocean, and it was an intensity of color that no photography, no video,
13. 1:34no movie, no film can capture.
14. 1:37You can parse more and more details out.
15. 1:42When you first look at Earth, you may say, "Wow, that's a continent," and then you look
16. 1:49at it again the next day and say, "Wow, there are mountain ranges," and then you look
17. 1:52at it again the next day, and it's like, oh, I can see synclines and anticlines in the geologic structure, and oh,
18. 2:00there's the rain shadow effect, and on and on and on.
19. 2:03So, the more time you have to look at Earth over a long period of time, the more you can see.
20. 2:17So, there's more to see in space than just looking at Earth.
21. 2:21You look out at the cosmos, and there's many things in the cosmos that are noteworthy to gaze at,
22. 2:33for example, the Magellanic Clouds.
23. 2:36Those show up really bright and vivid because you don't have atmospheric scattering.
24. 2:42You can see Andromeda.
25. 2:44It's a little fuzzy spot.
26. 2:45On a really, really dark night with good vision you can faintly make out Andromeda, but in space, it just stands out,
27. 2:53because the contrast is so stark.
28. 2:56So, there's all kinds of other things to see.
29. 2:59There's the moon.
30. 3:00It goes through its phases.
31. 3:02The angle that the moon makes when it rises, relative to your spacecraft, changes with time.
32. 3:08It's almost like your spacecraft, itself, becomes a giant astronomical machine and it's, like, okay,
33. 3:15the moon was rising over here two weeks ago, and now it's rising over there, and why is that?
34. 3:22And then you think about the orbital dynamics, where we are in our solar system, this and that,
35. 3:26and then it all makes sense.
36. 3:28So, there's so much to observe, more so than just planet Earth.
37. 3:35I think it's important to share our experiences with all the people who, as of today, don't have a chance to go
38. 3:43into space, but the more people that we can get off of this planet to have these kind of experiences,
39. 3:51the more growth you will see in ideas, and the viability of your culture will increase.

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