Mark Kelly

And those were our friends.

Three of my classmates died on Columbia, my astronaut classmates.

I'm also the person that happened to recover their bodies in East Texas.

So yeah, you think a lot about it, but you also, you have to do your job.

And the space shuttle is a very

It is a very crew-intensive vehicle, so you got a lot to do.

No, no, you can for brief periods of time, but usually you're pretty hard at work.

Yeah.

Like going down to the surface of the moon and establishing a presence there.

Hey, you know, some people will make the argument that we can pull like, you know, tritium off the additive lunar regular, uh, which is, you know, helium three, um,

isotope of helium that would be used in fusion power plants if we get to fusion power, right?

Yeah, I've been saying that.

Yeah, I mean, I guess that could be a thing in the future.

You know, I think, you know, it's more about like establishing a presence, developing technology that will allow us to go to Mars someday.

We'll learn more about

the moon by being there.

Um, you can learn some of this with robotics and it certainly is, is cheaper, but I think there is a, you know, fundamental thing about all this, about, you know, sending people that there is, there is value in doing that.

Hey, you know, it depends on how we do it.

Right.

You know, and, and certainly we, I'm going to, I'm going to make a, make a kind of an offhand comment here in a second.