WEBVTT

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A lot of people don't understand that the Space Station and what we're doing with it is really going to help

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us go beyond low Earth orbit. And it's a connection that a lot of people don't appreciate.

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If you're going to go beyond low Earth orbit to the moon or a six-month journey to Mars,

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you have to have systems in your spacecraft that you know will run continuously for long periods of time,

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you're going to have the right life support systems, you've got to have the right electrical systems, propulsion systems.

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Everything has to work properly because when you do a mission to Mars there's no going back if something's

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wrong, you can't just get down to Earth and fix it.

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The Space Station is going to teach us how to do that. It's teaching us what kind of technologies you need to

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operate and maintain a spacecraft in the hostile environment of space for long periods of time as you would

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have to do if you were doing a deep space interplanetary mission.

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That's one thing. There's the human element, too: Space Station's teaching us what is required of us as

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humans to live and function in space. It's teaching us what is the consequence of living in space on us as human beings,

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and it's teaching us how to mitigate some of them, the deleterious effects, of spaceflight.

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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.

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