 
DR. GARRETT REISMAN: The thing that was probably
the most impactful and surprising to me was
when I looked at the horizon of the Earth
and I saw how thin the atmosphere was.
That was actually really scary.
It was shocking.
When you look at the atmosphere from Earth
orbit it looks incredibly fragile.
It's this little tiny thin blue line that
separates the sunlit Earth from the black
void of space.
And compared to the diameter of the Earth
it's tiny.
I mean, you could hold up your pinky and block
the whole thing out very easily.
It looks terribly fragile.
It looks like a gust of wind could come by
and just strip the thing away.
The next time, in fact, if you're home right
now at your computer please open up a browser,
put this on pause, open up a browser and just
Google 'Earth from space' and then go to the
images.
And just look at any picture we took of the
horizon of the Earth from space and you'll
see that thin blue line.
Look for yourself at just how think that is.
When you compare the thickness of the atmosphere
to the diameter of the Earth it's like the
same dimension or fraction or ratio I should
say as the shell on an egg or the skin on
an apple.
It's incredibly thin and that gives you a
real visceral impression of just how fragile
this planet is.
And by the way, this happened to me.
I had this experience and then about a week
later I was looking out the window and I was
looking down at the Earth and I saw what you
see most of the time which is the ocean.
When you look at the ocean I thought to myself
well gee, how think is that?
I could see the atmosphere.
I could see how thin that is.
What about the ocean?
How deep is it?
And the answer is that the ocean is ten times
less deep than the atmosphere is high.
The atmosphere, we draw an arbitrary line
at 100 kilometers.
We call that the Karman line and we say okay,
that's where the atmosphere ends and that's
where space begins.
And that's kind of, again that's kind of made
up, but it's about where, the blue line you
see in those photographs is probably about
80 kilometers, but let's say about 100 kilometers.
That's a nice round number.
That's about 300,000 feet.
The deepest part of the ocean like the Marianas
Trench, Challenger Deep.
The very deepest part that's about 35,000
feet deep.
So that's ten times thinner than the atmosphere.
So when you see that tiny thin blue line and
when you look at those photographs think for
a moment that the ocean is ten times thinner
than that.
And then think about the fact as I talked
about before about how this planet is perfect
for us, how it provides everything we need.
All the food we need, all the air we need
to breathe, the water we need to drink.
It's where all of our friends and family live.
It's where all the animals are, and the plants,
and rainbows, and mountain ranges, and whales
in the ocean.
All that stuff that makes this our home, it's
somewhere between the bottom of the ocean
and the top of the atmosphere.
And that's tiny.
It's so tiny.
What we have is a giant planet and sure, if
you look out the window of the Space Shuttle,
the Space Station it covers your whole view.
It's monstrous this planet, but the part that
matters to us is this tiny little bit.
Just a tiny sliver on top.
It's like we have a massive planet that's
a big, giant dead rock with an incredibly
precious surface coating.
CHRIS HADFIELD: As astronauts we train more
than anybody knows.
I had photographers train me.
Hasselblad cameras with 70 millimeter film,
and Aeroflex cameras, and I became an IMAX
cameraman and helped make two IMAX movies,
and Linhof cameras, and the whole gamut of
complex photography with all of those photographers
talking about not just portraiture and not
just inside, but how to take a good picture
of the world and what parts of the world we
haven't seen yet.
Some places have a lot of cloud cover and
maybe one day you'll get a great picture of
the Panama Canal or a part of the Amazon that's
never been photographed because it's always
so cloudy.
So you are hyper prepared to be one of the
world's photographers up there.
You're really trying to make sure that you're
technically competent with the camera, but
you're also artistically capable of understanding
how to compose a picture, how to frame it
properly, how to recognize something that's
worth taking a picture of.
And you don't always get it right.
I mean the National Geographic photographers
they take thousands of pictures for every
one that makes it into the magazine.
Same for us, but the world is a very generous
photography subject and you have the best
tripod in existence, so it's a great place
to take pictures.
RON GARAN: So I've been very fortunate.
I've had a lot of perspective shifting experiences.
I lived on the bottom of the ocean for three
weeks in Aquarius, the only undersea laboratory.
I flew once on the U.S. Space Shuttle on a
two-week construction mission aboard the International
Space Station, and I spent about half a year,
half of 2011, living and working onboard the
International Space Station after launching
from Kazakhstan on a Russian rocket with a
couple of Russian crewmates.
When it was time to depart the Space Station
and return home my Russian crewmates and I
climbed into our Soyuz spacecraft, the same
one we launched from five-and-a-half months
earlier.
We wiggled into our seats.
We had our spacesuits on.
We strapped ourselves in.
It's really tight.
It's like three guys in the trunk of a car.
Our knees are in our chest.
We undock from the Space Station and I had
a window.
I was sitting in the right seat.
I had a window right by my head and I strained
as best I could to see the Space Station as
we were departing it because I knew quite
likely that would be the last time I ever
saw this magnificent sight.
After we undocked we did a couple of laps
around the planet, and as we passed the south
tip of South America we fishtailed our spacecraft
around to point the engines backwards.
I remember when we did this I saw this crescent
moon go by the window.
It was just absolutely breathtaking.
We fired our engines just a little bit at
precisely the right moment to have us enter
the upper atmosphere.
And as we entered the upper atmosphere we
started to develop drag.
We had this fiery violent ride through the
atmosphere.
It was really amazing.
Once you got down to a lower altitude the
speed really becomes amazing.
I remember seeing oh, there goes Africa as
we whiz by the continent.
And the parachutes open, they throw us all
over the place.
Shortly thereafter we smashed into the ground.
We bounced, we flipped, we rolled over.
And when we rolled over we rolled on the right
side and now my window was pointing at the
ground.
I remember looking out of the window and seeing
a rock, a flower and a blade of grass.
And I remember thinking to myself distinctly
that I'm home.
And what was really amazing about that thought
was that I was in Kazakhstan.
And so for me at that moment my home was no
longer Houston, Texas where I live with my
family or Yonkers, New York where I was born
and grew up.
My home was Earth and it was really a perspective
shifting moment for me.
I think the big thing is to understand the
framework that we've built to view the world
in.
Now, we live as we all know in a very, very
complicated world.
There's so many horrors, there's terrorism,
there's poverty, there's almost a billion
people that don't have access to clean water.
There's so many ills that our global society
face, but our world also has compassion and
love and ingenuity and creativity and self-sacrifice.
And so it becomes very complicated and what
we tend to do, myself included, we tend to
build a more simplified framework through
which to view the world, through which to
view our global society.
And when we do that we tend to build cubbyholes
and put people and groups into certain cubbyholes.
It just makes it easier and more palpable
to understand the events, the current events
of the day.
But what that does is it also creates barriers
and walls.
We box ourselves into these cubbyholes which
at sometimes prevents us from dialogue, prevents
us from recognizing any merit in the position,
in another person's position, in another group's
position because we've written off whole groups
of people, whole countries, whole cultures
as not worth our time, not worth our, there's
no value in the problem solving process to
engage those people.
And I think once we realize that and we can
step outside of it.
And I don't just mean people and organizations.
There's political parties.
A good example is the political process in
the U.S. right now where we've become so divided
and to the point where one side will refuse
to recognize any merit whatsoever in the position
of the other side.
If they win, we lose.
If they gain, we lose.
And so I think that is a recipe for disaster.
It's a recipe for not being able to have progress.
It's a barrier to us being able to tackle
the big problems.
And so I think you don't have to go to space
to realize that.
You don't have to go to space to realize that
each and everyone of us is riding through
the universe together on this spaceship that
we call Earth.
That we're all interconnected, that we're
all in this together and that we're all family.
I think one of the big things that the world
perspective teaches us is there are no passengers
on spaceship Earth.
We're all crewmates.
And as crewmates we have a responsibility
to mind the ship and take care of our fellow
crewmates.
CHRIS HADFIELD: Flying in space is a huge
amount of work.
It's decades of work getting all of the university
degrees and life experience so that NASA will
even look at you when they're selecting astronauts.
In the last astronaut selection, 18,300 people
applied for 12 positions.
So how do you even get your foot in the door?
But if you've done enough things in your life
that you're competent enough that maybe they'll
look at you and then they phone you and say
we'd like you to be an astronaut.
Now suddenly you're starting a whole new phase
of life.
You come over this watershed and now there's
probably 10 or 15 years of work ahead of you
to get ready and be competent enough to be
trusted to fly a spaceship.
And then someday you get into a rocket and
it takes you above the atmosphere and the
engines shut off and you're there.
And you're doing all your work and flying
the rocket and docking with the space station,
but at the end of it what do you do with that
experience?
Now you've done all of these incredibly complex
and extremely dangerous things in order to
push back the edge of human capability and
of our understanding of the world itself.
But now what do you do with the sequence of
things that have turned you into who you are
and the things that have come in through your
eyeballs and you've tried to understand?
And I think part of the continuing responsibility
of being one of the world's astronauts is
not to keep it to yourself, but to try and
let as many people benefit from what you've
done.
Let people see the world through your eyes.
Try and understand the ideas behind it through
your words so that hopefully they can go far
further than you ever did or that I ever did.
LELAND MELVIN: Grace has a way of appreciating
the people that are around you, the things
that are around you and how you interact with
them in a way that's meaningful, that's purposeful,
that's intentional.
You live an intentional way.
You don't just hey, write someone off and
just keep moving.
Everyone has a purpose on this planet and
we can learn something from everyone.
I mean I learn something every day from my
dog.
I learn patience.
I learn things from people that I would never
have expected to learn something, the janitor
or whomever it is, and so moving through life
in this graceful way of embracing everything
around you.
Before I could read my mother read to me every
night two books.
""The Little Engine That Could.""
I think I can, I think I can.
And ""Curious George.""
Looking up curiosity.
And I'll never forget, I was this little kid
on the football team, the smallest kid probably.
I could run fast but no one ever expected
me to play in the NFL and I never imagined
to play in the NFL because I was just this
small little kid.
But having this never give up, I think I can,
I think I can mentality is a gritty way of
ensuring that you're going to reach the dreams
and goals that you have.
Sometimes people don't have expectations for
you because they see you are from a certain
neighborhood or a certain zip code or whatever
and you're looked at as this kid that well,
you're never going to be an astronaut because
you're from that zip code.
I think we need to make sure that we look
at every child as a potential president, astronaut,
whatever that thing is and we give them the
resources to be that.
