It's an international space station. We have crew members from both the U.S. and Russia and now the United Kingdom with Tim Peake from the U.K... It's great to see that, on this space station, that we can work across cultures in a very cooperative way.
I think the International Space Station is providing a key bridge from us living on Earth to going somewhere into deep space.
While we've taken seeds into space, and astronauts on the International Space Station have eaten lettuce they've grown, we haven't produced fruit in space, so we can't pollinate something.
Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.
We've learned a lot by building the International Space Station, the good, the bad. But, the fact is is that working together as a team, unity aboard that space station, we can accomplish great things.
For the first time American astronauts on the International Space Station ate vegetables grown in space. In other words, even space is getting more rain than California.
One of the things that makes it so challenging is that we're constructing the Station hundreds of miles above the surface of the Earth and we're doing it one piece at a time For the International Space Station we do not have the privilege of assuming the Space Station is on the ground before we take it up one piece at a time. So we have to be very clever about the testing that we do and the training that we do to make sure that each mission is successful, and that each piece and each mission goes just as it's planned.
When Russians were having troubles, the Space Shuttle supported the Space Station Mir bringing up much needed supplies and replacements, critical spares, really. That they were able to keep their space station going for much longer than they would have without us. So, I think that shows the value of international cooperation.
NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station.
I think I need to continue to think and plan and marry all of the different things that we could do that make transportation in space from the earth to the space station, from the earth to the moon to space stations around the moon to visiting an asteroid.
Through these ongoing activities and possibly in the future, a Canadian will go live and work on the International Space Station and we will continue to make Canadians proud of our achievements in space.
We were trying to do as much science as we could because that was the main purpose of the international space station. But without the shuttle to bring up heavy laboratory equipment and bring back samples, we were limited by what we could do, but I was proud that we actually accomplished more science that was planned for the flight. And I got a chance to do two Russian spacewalks on that flight, I had become an expert in U.S. spacewalks and using U.S. suits and techniques, and this was a chance to put on a Russian Orlan suit and do two construction space flights outside of the space station.
By the way, Japan is also known to be actively engaged in manned space flights as part of the International Space Station.
The International Space Station is a phenomenal laboratory, an unparalleled test bed for new invention and discovery. Yet I often thought, while silently gazing out the window at Earth, that the actual legacy of humanity's attempts to step into space will be a better understanding of our current planet and how to take care of it.
Now with the international space station generating a bunch of video, and Space X and other companies pursuing private space flight, I think it's on all of our radars much more than it has been since the moonshots. The science of filmmaking is making these visions possible now.
After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline.