A lot of people don't understand that the Space Station and what we're doing with it is really going to help
us go beyond low Earth orbit. And it's a connection that a lot of people don't appreciate.
If you're going to go beyond low Earth orbit to the moon or a six-month journey to Mars,
you have to have systems in your spacecraft that you know will run continuously for long periods of time,
you're going to have the right life support systems, you've got to have the right electrical systems, propulsion systems.
Everything has to work properly because when you do a mission to Mars there's no going back if something's
wrong, you can't just get down to Earth and fix it.
The Space Station is going to teach us how to do that. It's teaching us what kind of technologies you need to
operate and maintain a spacecraft in the hostile environment of space for long periods of time as you would
have to do if you were doing a deep space interplanetary mission.
That's one thing. There's the human element, too: Space Station's teaching us what is required of us as
humans to live and function in space. It's teaching us what is the consequence of living in space on us as human beings,
and it's teaching us how to mitigate some of them, the deleterious effects, of spaceflight.
We need to have answers to all of those questions if we're going to go on beyond low Earth orbit to the moon or to Mars.