Astronaut from Mesquite to be on next Space Shuttle flight

The future of human space exploration for me, is the thing that we have to continue doing. If we don’t go out to the edges of the frontiers, as we have always done as a human species, then we’re basically just starting to slowly compress and eventually, as a society, we’ll die. So as we continue to go to the frontiers, we’re going to be learning things that we don’t know we don’t know, which is one of the most important things any scientist will tell you. A lot of times it’s not the “Eureka!” moment that you have when you’re going to the frontiers, it’s the “Gee, that’s funny...” And then, several years later, you realize that’s a fundamental change to something that we do here on the ground. As we go farther and farther out we get a chance to, in the case of the moon, see what our earliest Earth looked like. The moon’s basically a frozen body that stopped at about three billion years. So we can look at what the chemistry of the Earth might have looked like, which we can’t see here. And in the case of Mars, just getting there will be a challenge enough from the engineering standpoint. But once we’re there it has all the components that look like it could support life in its earliest forms. We can’t see that here on Earth, either, and so it may again be the museum piece that tells us everything about how we are, who we are, how we began, how our, how our environment began, and what it could have looked like in its earliest form. And of course any historian will tell you, you really can’t know who you are or where you’re going until you know where you’ve been. So all of that plays together to give us the role for what we hope to do in the future.