Chris Hadfield

Access.

There are amazing times in history, Whitney, where we collectively as a species invent something new that opens up whole new opportunities for humanity.

Think about, you know, when we first harnessed fire or when someone built the first raft to cross, I don't know, the Red Sea or when we started mining.

domesticating horses and allowed ourselves to travel quickly.

Or when the first train was invented, you know, late 1700s, early 1800s.

And then the airplane and the car, all of those things changed not only how we could move around, but then where we could go to.

And spaceflight has been around now for 60 years, but we're in a revolution right now of reusable spaceship design, which is drastically dropping the cost, which then increases the access for everybody.

And right now, it's possible to just buy a ticket and go to space for the price of a luxury car.

And luxury cars are expensive.

but there are a lot of people buying luxury cars too.

So it's just a kind of a revolutionary time in starting to leave earth in amongst all the scientific and explorative stuff going on.

And I find it all really inspiring and exciting and also kind of delightful based on what I've done my whole life.

When I was born, and I'm by no means the oldest man in the world, no one had gone to space.

Like when I was just learning to walk, that's when Yuri Gagarin and then a month later Al Shepard and then everybody that followed started going to space.

So it's still incredibly new in the human experience.

And I think the evolution makes complete sense, where initially it was just barely possible.

And we took an enormous risk to try and, just like we often do with a new capability, like the first people to Antarctica, a large percentage of them died, just trying to prove whether Shackleton managed to keep his whole crew alive, barely, but just trying to push them

really the envelope of human experience.

And that's where we were when I was growing up.

And then we evolved from the Apollo program with Apollo 13 and all those near misses to the shuttle program, which we regularize it a lot.