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[music playing] There is an experience astronauts talk about when they burst through our paper-thin atmosphere, leave Earth behind, and enter the blackness of space.

It happens when they look back and see our planets, their home, everybody's home, hanging in the void.

Many astronauts leave Earth as Americans, Russians, Chinese, but they come back as conservationists, environmentalists, philanthropists, and humanists.

It seems the experience of leaving Earth is transformative.

It's called the overview effect, and Frank White coined it in his book by the same name in 1987.

We are off to meet entrepreneurs, educators, scientists, and explorers that believe leaving Earth may be the best way to save it.

[music playing] The overview effect, it turns out, is not only possible by going into space.

We met two people who had the same experience by going in instead of up.

Jane and Taber are the founders of Space Perspectives.

They met in the '90s in Biosphere 2.

Biosphere 2 was an experiment to replicate a self-sustaining habitat in an enclosed environment.

It was not exactly a success, but that experience inspired them and taught them just how critical it is to preserve biosphere one, planet Earth.

Their goal now, to expose as many people as possible to the overview effect to initiate real change.

Their plan, democratize space travel via high-altitude balloons.

Their campus, still under construction, is located not far from Kennedy Space Center, where they will start launching their high-tech balloons and capsules filled with eight space tourists into the black as early as next year.

I'm already on the wait list.

Craig, not so much.

Congratulations on Space Perspectives, you guys.

It wasn't a couple of years ago that we first met.

Now, you've got this kind of thing.

A space balloon factory.

Right.

700-foot long.

The balloon lays out on the world's largest table?

Yeah.

Think of sort of a beach ball, it has gores to it.

So we lay out one gore on top of a gore, sort of like this really complicated origami fold.

Seal it all up with load members and valves and avionics and all those good things.

Then the box gets taken out to the launch line.

The balloon gets unfolded out on the launch line.

We fill just the tippy tip of the balloon with hydrogen gas.

And so you get a 700-foot train down to the capsule.

Then as the balloon ascends and the air pressure gets less and less, that gas expands and expands.

And when we're at 100,000 feet, it's a big ball.

This is really the same basic principle as balloons that flew in the 1700s.

Right.

It's old technology.

This is how people first saw the curvature of the Earth.

Over the centuries, the technology has matured.

Materials have matured.

And now, we're able to take people on an operational basis to the edge of space using, fundamentally, the same basic idea.

How hard is this to pull off?

What makes it hard isn't so much each piece of technology.

It's making all of that technology work together in routine operation.

So doing a one-off thing, like when we took Alan Eustace to the edge of space and he skydived supersonicly back down, that was essentially three flights in three weeks.

And then we were done.

But what we're talking about is a routine operation, where we fly every week.

And we grow on that, and we expand to where we're doing hundreds of flights a month.

So this canister, this tin can that you guys are going to take into-- Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Wait a minute.

The capsule is a pressurized structure.

And inside is essentially a normal atmosphere that we control, and we keep cool, and everyone's safe inside.

And as we did mockups, and we had trials with people in the capsule, it became really clear that it's as much a social interaction.

So we've designed our space lounge with a bar.

An alcohol bar.

All real spaceships have a bar.

Most flight into space happens very quickly.

We're going to space at the roaring pace of 12 miles an hour.

We're literally going up bicycling speed.

But what that allows is this incredibly smooth flight for two hours, gets you up to above the Earth's atmosphere.

We'll be up there for a couple of hours, come back down.

When you talk to astronauts about their experience in space, it isn't just a pretty view, right?

I mean, this is something that affects them deeply.

Right.

Jane had to run to a meeting, but Taber continued the tour and expanded on their historical and technological legacy.

This lounge was the Eastern Airlines lounge that serviced the Space Coast.

So all the astronauts that came for Gemini and Apollo and Mercury all went through this lounge.

And so this is our sort of homage to the people without which we would not be here.

We met back up with Jane towards the end of the day and discussed why this endeavor is so important to them.

There is obviously a heavy, heavy environmental component to what we all do.

We have almost an emissions-free vehicle.

And then the rest of the company operations we offset.

So we are, and of course, we do our best to have as minimal a carbon footprint as possible.

So we are essentially a carbon-neutral company.

So there's eight passengers plus a pilot.

And if we all got to take one person with us on the balloon-- Yeah.

--have you already thought about who that one person would be?

You guys?

We're each other, right?

So joking apart, this is actually in the DNA of the company.

I mean, we want to take people of a very diverse backgrounds, artists, scientists, who can experience this in different ways and then communicate that in different ways.

What's really fascinating is when you hear about astronauts that have been to space, it doesn't just change the way they think and their perspective, it actually changes behavior.

They come back and get more involved in social environmental causes when they return compared to when they left.

We wanted to know more about how and why they discovered this passion for spaceflight.

Where better than happy hour at Space Bar, a great spot to watch a rocket launch or have a drink, preferably both.

I am interested in a lot more than this the whole thing begin because, again, you guys have done a great many things.

I think the real sort of inspiration was really the Biosphere 2 project.

I wanted to go inside Biosphere 2 because I thought it was the closest thing I was ever going to get to going to Mars.

And the crazy thing is I discovered Earth.

And when we talked about that experience with astronauts, it was like this aha moment.

So we were inspired to sort of say, how do we deliver that experience?

That experience changed us.

It's clearly changed astronauts.

Global challenges really require a global perspective.

So as we take more and more people to space, more and more people are going to have that perspective.

And it will have a societal impact.

The fact is that we've had actionable data about global climate change since the late '80s.

Yeah.

Right, so data isn't the problem.

It's perspective, understanding that our atmosphere is only 20 miles up, right?

Blows my mind every time you say that.

Most people drive farther to work than it would be to drive to the edge of space.

It's that thin.

It's a travel show that we do.

It's always, who do you bring with you?

Where do you go?

What do you do?

That all has something to do with what you end up with as far as a change afterwards.

And this is like a platform, a canvas that can be a great many things because the way you guys constructed it.

Wherever you travel, it tends to change your perspective.

And suddenly, you see your culture in a different way from a different lens, through a different lens.

You have this idea that is much larger than yourselves.

And to me, that's what's exciting about it.

You actually can make a huge impact in this world.

Well, cheers.

Cheers to you guys.

Cheers.

Cheers to your guys' success.

Cheers to the overview effect-- Awesome.

--and Space Perspective.

Another way to shift perspective is education.

And Janet Ivey knows something about that.

Creator and CEO of Janet's Planet and the current president of Explore Mars, she is an award-winning educator and self-appointed shepherdess of the next generation of space explorers.

It's a little bit of a windy road.

Nobody's ever going to ask me for the business plan of how Janet's Planet came to be.

I didn't even really know what I was going to do, except I knew I wanted to do something sciencey in space because I had a fifth grade teacher, Miss Ernestine Yarbrough, a big shout out to her for making me love the solar system.

And I looked around and thought, who else is doing science?

Well, there was Bill Nye the Science Guy and Beakman's World.

But there weren't any females as host of the show.

Or if there was a female in the show, they were kind of the daffy, huh, how does that work?

And I was like, no.

And over the last 20 years, it's kind of morphed from being just interstitials on public television to half hours that we've done on various streaming and content aggregation sites too.

People know about it all over the world.

It's a little bit crazy.

Space travel has always captured the imaginations of kids.

But the role that you provide, I think, connects them to space through education.

What I love to tell kids-- and this is where I think it's so exciting because looking out there and realizing that the chances of you being you being is 1 in 400 quadrillion and that we are related to each other biologically, to the Earth, chemically, and to the universe, atomically.

Whew, are you feeling grand?

You ought to because Carl Sagan says that we are star stuff.

And you start telling that to a kid, and once they get excited about what they are and how they're interconnected to all of it, it becomes sort of the gateway, if you will, to science and technology engineering and math.

So the fabric of Janet, what wins out?

Oh, I'm an entire galaxy of things.

That's what I tell kids all the time.

We're not monolithic.

So I see myself as sort of this wacky gal who loves the process of inspiring kids, and really, students all over.

And if that trickles over to adults, I'm even more happy because creating a world where there is actual science literacy where science isn't a dirty word or distrusted, that's the real goal.

Yeah.

Is it democratized?

That's what we're working on.

I mean, just Friday I was zooming with over 650 kids in Hawaii.

And we had astronaut Don Thomas join us.

And this is a Title I school that we know for a fact that some of the teachers are actually living in their cars.

But if we can crack the door open, it tends to sometimes be the one school district, the one classroom, the one kid, but you don't stop.

And the one kid, I mean, really, the one kid could assume that they study hard enough, have enough interest, have enough drive, they could get there.

What happens when you travel to space?

I don't know yet.

I am a second-round citizen astronaut candidate for Space for Humanity.

And so I'm crossing my fingers I'll get to go.

And Leland Melvin tells a story that he had never really felt connected to the whole of everybody until Commander Peggy Whitson says, come on, Leland.

We're going to go over here and have dinner tonight with the Russians on board the Space Station.

And he said he looked around, and it's like all of a sudden, it's like the family of humanity there.

One of the things I love about you, Janet, is that you're part of a community who are trying to use space as a way to come together and talk about all kinds of issues.

And maybe I'm entirely naive, but maybe space is that path to peace.

It's at least our hope where we want it to be as diverse and inclusive and representative as possible.

And there's some really great folks thinking about how to do that.

And we look forward to all the stories that we hear when you finally get to go to space.

Oh, believe me, everybody will hear it.

If I get up into my 70s, 80s, and I get a chance to go to Mars, I'm going to kiss everybody goodbye.

I mean, where's your grandma?

On Mars.

I mean, there's not a better story than that, is it?

There really isn't.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Thanks.

Cheers to that.

Next stop, space.

If Janet's going to get to Mars, it will be thanks to the Artemis program.

We traveled across the intercoastal to Kennedy Space Center to meet with members of the NASA team that will send the first woman and the first person of color to the moon and establish the infrastructure for going to the rest of the solar system.

Outside the VAB, or Vehicle Assembly Building, we met with associate technical director at KSC, Jennifer Kunz, a 30-year veteran at NASA, to get some background on this bustling spaceport.

This is an Apollo-era building that we've repurposed two times.

So from the Apollo, Saturn days to the Space Shuttle and then now to the Artemis program.

So in there, we bring each of the individual elements.

We stack the boosters.

We stack the stages.

We stack the spacecraft before we roll out to this launch pad.

Tell us what your role is then?

I mean, what's your responsibility within NASA?

So I have the pleasure of being the associate director for technical at the Kennedy Space Center.

I would tell you, best job ever.

So I get to engage in all the programs, the Artemis program, Commercial Crew Program, Launch Services Program as well as engineering and safety and mission assurance.

But really, it's such a busy time right now.

We do a lot of everything.

The life cycle of NASA, I mean, it felt like its heydays early on, then to the shuttle programs.

Then when that stopped, it felt like a bit of a lull.

But right now, it feels like this thing is just starting to take off.

Yeah, Kennedy Space Center is the multi-user spaceport for our nation.

I've been here for over 31 years.

And I grew up in the Space Shuttle program, Space Station program, and then I worked in the Artemis program before the job I'm in today.

And when you think back to the Space Shuttle, and we launch between five and eight times a year.

Last year, we launched 31 times from the Kennedy Space Center and the Air Force side.

This year, we have 65 launches on the manifest.

That's incredible.

We're going to be planning for 100 launches.

And really, a lot of vision from the leaders here at KSC to say, how do we make this accessible to commercial customers and partners who want to come here?

And that was a big change.

I mean, you have to change your legal, procurement, business processes, engineering, labs.

The result is 65 launches.

How does the public in general just help you?

How do we cheer you on?

Support space.

Support your STEM programs in your schools.

Support the kids who are the ones who sometimes get left behind because you need diversity of thought.

You need diversity of experiences.

I hired in 31 years ago.

And there were not a lot of senior leaders that are female out here.

And now, I work for the first female center director at the Kennedy Space Center.

The person who's going to launch this big rocket behind me is the first female launch director.

I think it's our duty to get out and tell girls that you can do anything that you want to do.

So work hard, and it's OK to be the smartest person in the class.

Go for that.

I love that.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

We were then escorted into the VAB to meet with Christine St. Germain.

She's a NASA test director for the Artemis mission and will support test launch and recovery.

I think this has got to be the wow moment, right?

I know.

This is the wow moment.

It can come around that corner.

Yep, they come around, and it's like-- And you get a chance to see.

--oh, wow.

Christine give us a sense of what exactly is this?

So the Artemis rocket is essentially what we call a heavy-lift vehicle.

A deep space rocket, it has the capability of going further than any of the previous launch vehicles that we have had.

The current program manifest, the plan is, right, we're moon to Mars and beyond.

So Artemis I is uncrewed.

We send the capsule around the moon.

We bring it back.

We recover it.

We make sure that all of the data from any of the systems inside, that the heat shield that's responsible for protecting the crew on re-entry, that all of that is good.

And then for Artemis II, we put crew in.

So they will orbit, and then they come back.

We recover them.

And then Artemis III, we would be landing on the moon.

And that requires additional components.

We also have to have what they're calling the Gateway, which is essentially a space station.

And then we also need a lander.

So what would happen is the capsule would dock with the Gateway.

And then the lander would undock from the Gateway, go to the moon's surface, and then that's how it comes back up to the Gateway, and then the capsule would then return to Earth.

Wow.

How tall is it?

It is the tallest that we have ever done.

We actually had to remind the program that does the actual rocket that we have a height limit for the building.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Because they were like, OK, well, we want to just add this.

And we're like, you can't.

We're out.

We're maxed out.

And they're like, what do you mean we're maxed out?

You have built the largest thing possible.

There's no more room.

Right now, we're, let's say, no more than a couple of months away from this thing being launched.

Yeah.

I mean, we've got to certainly be within that window.

Yes.

Then the next one where it's crewed, are we a year away from that potentially or multiple years away?

As of right now, because work on that has already started, the actual core stage is already in work, right?

The booster components are already in work, or we already have those.

So a lot of that stuff, it's just a matter of we need garage space.

So by the time we clear this out, when their hardware's ready, we bring it in, and we start integrating the next vehicle.

So we're within the current plan for launching Artemis II next year.

Are we in competition with anyone for this whole thing?

Is it a space race?

We have so many international partners and so many private partners.

And we have the international partnerships.

For example, you can see up top there where it says the ESA.

Yeah.

It's the European Space Agency.

OK, right.

So they've provided that component for us.

There's a lot of inspiration between the different groups.

Everybody kind of wants to have a chance to say, hey, I'm part of this.

Is this pretty high pressure for you?

It's not really high pressure.

Maybe it's just my personality type.

But I mean, we've been working on it.

We have a process.

We've tested.

It's really just more of a-- we're like, OK, come on, but let's do it, you know?

So we're really just excited.

Let's light this rocket.

Let's light this rocket.

That same enthusiasm and cool for the mission was matched by Mark Wiese, a project manager on the Gateway space station that is key to the moon and beyond.

So we're standing on the floor of the Space Station Processing Facility.

It's actually one of the newer buildings at Kennedy Space Center, built in the '90s to house all the pieces that built up the International Space Station on orbit.

That, today, takes up the size of a football field.

It's got the habitable volume of a five-bedroom house.

Right.

So this was the place where all those pieces came, got hooked up mechanically or electrically, checked out, and then were transferred to the Space Shuttle to get brought up on orbit and then assembled on orbit.

So what is your responsibility inside of NASA?

So I'm the project manager for deep space logistics, which is a piece of the Gateway, which is our new orbiting platform for Artemis that will take what we've learned from the Space Station and bring it to cislunar space.

So it will orbit the moon and be that aggregation point for all the other pieces we're going to bring up there to allow us to explore the surface.

And it's really critical to have something like that for us to go to Mars because it's going to be a nine-month journey to get there.

We're going to be on the surface for a year, another nine months back.

We need a home base, something that we can send supplies to, that we can send return items from, and really have a good way of living and expanding our civilization to another area.

Why is it so important to go to Mars?

I've got young kids.

And you look at the sparkle in their eye of exploring something that's unknown.

Every time we push beyond our limits, we learn something, right?

And maybe there's something about Mars that'll teach us more about our planet so we can keep taking care of it because it's a gem.

I know this is not your purview, but how important is the Artemis launch?

This first Artemis mission represents the test of our new spaceship to transport crew to deep space.

The shuttle program retired.

We invested in this new Artemis technology, and we invested in commercial companies to launch commercial astronauts from US soil back to the International Space Station.

So Artemis I is that first critical piece so industry can come behind us.

And then, again, we can go reach another layer further and go to Mars.

Now, you've been involved with NASA for quite a while.

Is there anything that's impossible?

No.

Nothing.

[music playing] It all comes down to us being able to communicate with each other.

Sometimes, sure, things seem insurmountable, but it's always possible.

It might just take more money, more time, but it's possible.

Sometimes, you have to leave your home to understand it.

The overview effect has impacted precious few people, but educators, entrepreneurs, and space explorers are working hard to change that.

We can't know how space travel will change a world over the next decades, centuries.

But it's clear that it is a pivotal moment in the history of our species, and it will take teamwork, communication, ingenuity, and compassion for our fellow man to reach the stars and protect our home.

[music playing] There's so much more to explore, and we want you to join us on The Good Road.

For more in-depth content, meet us on the internet at thegoodroad.tv.

Hear more great stories, connect to organizations, and make sure you download our podcast, Philanthropology.

Funding for The Good Road has been provided by-- Every road is a good road when you're behind the wheel of a Toyota electrified vehicle, from the hybrid Sienna and plug-in hybrid RAV4 Prime to the fuel cell Mirai and all-electric bZ4X.

And with available all-wheel drive on select models, they're designed to go the distance, whether you're driving to work, school, or down the Pacific Coast Highway.

Proud sponsor of The Good Road.

Toyota, let's go places.

Technology changes the world, but not on its own.

Hardware needs heart.

Software needs soul.

When we match compute power to instinct and acceleration to imagination, tomorrow comes alive.

For us, it's not what we achieve alone, but sharing a vision to solve the world's most important challenges.

Because together, anything is possible.

AMD, together we advance.

And by Uncommon Giving, the generosity company.

At Plow & Hearth, we believe that the place you are can become the place you want to be.

Philanthropy Journal, stories about bold people changing the world.

[music playing]