A Year in Space

Sometimes people ask, "Why were you interested in becoming "an astronaut now, because I thought NASA closed?" (lilting music) A lot of people really had that perception when the space shuttle retired, that we weren't even flying in space anymore. There are only about 45 active astronauts right now, and so it's still a little bit crazy for me to believe that I'm actually one of them. But my heart was really in the biological sciences. So that's what really led me to my other career, my previous career as a scientist. (camera shutter clicking) For my PhD I studied the physiology of organisms in extreme environments. (camera shutter clicking) So I became interested in an animal called the bar-headed goose. I raised 12 goslings. This is the species of goose that migrates twice a year over the tallest mountains of the planet. And in doing so, they experience oxygen levels that are only about a half of what we experience here at sea level. How do they really power that when there isn't that much oxygen to extract from the air up there? There are a lot of parallels to the work I did as a physiologist that hopefully I'll be able to start contributing to the human space flight program as well.