Exploration involves risk and that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

Flying across the Pacific Ocean in space happens pretty quick, but man that is a gigantic ocean.

And you look down and there's from space and there's nothing but water in all directions.

And I would often think about what was it like to be on a ship or you didn't know you're just going on a parallel and you run into Australia.

Captain Cook or those guys so I would think about them from the you know 22 degree comfort of my space station and thank man that was those are some pretty brave guys to do that.

It's so easy to get bogged down and daily stress and I got emails and there's traffic and blah, blah, blah.

And I can just like close my eyes and realize that there's the most unbelievable sunset that you can't even imagine happening right now.

Just you know right on the other side of the earth and this amazing Milky Way is out there and so that kind of puts the mundane in perspective.

Not to say that you know things are meaningless here we're just a speck in the giant universe but to say that there really is a bigger picture you know more meaningful things and not to get too stressed out about the daily life.

Life in the 50s and 60s is different than you know life in the 90s and 2000s and we weren't developing a new fighter jet every year to nowadays the airplanes take decades and billions of dollars.

But the whole concept of you're going to go do something that hasn't been done or we're still doing that I mean even today with new airplanes or new bombs or missiles or whatever you're testing on a fighter is still there.

It is better to not be idle that's when people go to Antarctica or on a sub or something that's when you kind of go crazy if you don't have any work to do.

But that's not a problem on the space station at least and on that segment on the modules that we have there's more than enough work for those three people you know every day keeping busy.

But the psychological aspect is super important in fact and I had been in space for a couple months in this nice comfortable sterile like I said 22 degree 15% humidity environment so we said let's make it rain stations full laptops we put this at rain MP3 file but the sounds of earth were something that I missed.

When we were in space I remember with my crew there were six of us we're having dinner together one night I said guys there's over six billion people on earth and there's six of us here we're like one and a billion lucky not that we're good or whatever we just are pretty lucky to be up here.

But my personal story I tell people don't tell themselves no so I always knew I wanted to be an astronaut my as a teenager my room was full of airplane pictures and space pictures and but I didn't think it was possible because no one actually gets to be an astronaut.

That's a crazy dream but I figured out what you needed to do.

There's something that I've heard called the overview effect people like yourself that has spent so much time watching the earth rotate.

Do you feel like it's changed you as a person?

So it has you know there's a couple of great effects from that overview effect my crewmate Samantha put it this way that you get to see earth as a spaceship flying through the universe.

It's like when you're here born and raised on earth you just this is home this and everything else is out there but when you're out there you can look back and see that the earth is a spaceship and and the words that she used are we need to be crewmates not just passengers which I think is a great description of it when I landed for my first space flight.

I landed got reunited with my family did medical tests and I went back to my room and I was like alone and so just like any business traveler you go to your room you turn on TV so I turn on the TV and I just landed on the space shuttle a couple hours ago.

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