Eric Stackpole

I love satellites and ham radio.

And then in college started a satellite building team.

And I got a job at NASA working on small spacecraft.

Then that got me into grad school.

And I was realizing that people would spend their whole lives sometimes, you know, their entire career working on a space mission that would just get canceled or the rocket would blow up, you know, and that would be it.

Meanwhile, other people in my grad lab were working on these ROVs, and they were doing multiple missions a year.

That kind of just sparked this interest.

And I had this vision of this vehicle with its lights shining forward, descending from blue into dark blue and into black, and that feeling of kind of almost trepidation going into the unknown.

And yeah, it just started kind of going up from there.

Yeah, I think for me, it makes me kind of zoom out when we do science to the big picture.

Why are we even doing it in the first place?

You know, there's certainly things like, you know, if you're trying to research, you know, medicine or something to come up with a new drug to help a disease that has a very utilitarian purpose.

But I think exploration in the broadest sense is a tool that allows us to contextualize why we are on planet Earth and who we are here.

What is the context of being alive on planet Earth?

And getting to see what it's like to be a sperm whale diving into the deep sea is something that our technology has enabled us to do.

We could build this tag and do all that.

And we can learn all these things about their eating habits and where they hunt and what they hunt, which is maybe useful for preservation.

But I think that the biggest thing is like,

wow, we are experiencing planet Earth in a way that's profound.

In the same way that we can go outside and see trees growing from the ground or look at the night sky and with the help of the telescope now understand what that means.