To the moon and beyond: Astronauts Chris Hadfield and Victor Glover on why the 'New Space race matters

Flying in space, the biggest difference is that you're suddenly magically weightless. So it's like someone just gave you a superpower. Someone tapped you on the head and said, fly, and now you can fly. And so the first reaction on all the crews that I've been on is laughter. If you shut off gravity right now, you'd burst out laughing. It's just so different and wonderful. But then you float to the window, and that combination of the magic of weightlessness and a brand new, amazingly informative and beautiful perspective of the world. It is an intoxicatingly great experience to fly in space. The view, it actually makes you forget the body. You just become this set of eyes staring out at creation as it actually is, and it's kind of amazing. If you think about it, in history, two of the most amazing things we've made are lenses to see the really small and lenses to see the really big. And you can now go to space and see, you know, the entire planet I got to see in one gaze without an instrument to look out and see it as it is the view is really what creates the lasting feelings to look out the window and see the commonality of the human experience this sudden unmistakable realization that we all want the same thing we're all fighting the same battles we we want joy and laughter and grace and a little nicer world for our children and And to see the entire population of the world every single day is immensely unifying and also hugely optimism building. I'm a huge fan of the right stuff because the story is amazing. The book is amazing. Tom Wolfe made a great contribution to literature. But the movie they made after that, I felt I lived so many of those. My wife and I moved into Edwards Air Force Base and had that exact scene when you turn on the bathtub and what came out was didn't want you to you didn't want to put your body in that. But just the connection, how I felt so far from that, but then also in the moment so connected to it, that was, to me, one of those that I think really got it right. I think my favorite of all is 2001, A Space Odyssey, just because it blew my mind when I was 9 years old or 8 years old. And every time I watch it, I still don't know what that movie's about, but the lovely artwork of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick working together to just push the very edges of what we could even try and comprehend. That's what exploration is all about. And I just love the artistic way that that movie was put together. Humans do best when there's competition. That's why we have the Olympics. If we didn't have the Olympics, you know, the edge of human performance would never be pushed, would never be understood, and it wouldn't inspire people. And it's just how we are by nature. We're imperfect, though. But we're also still here after, whatever, half a million years of Homo sapiens being alive and it's always been flawed and we do things badly but we have also built the pyramids and Stonehenge and the Sistine Chapel and magnificence of art and music around ourselves and a lot of that just comes from the flawed nature of who we are. I think an aspect of human space exploration that will continue to be a reality for America and our partners is that it will be an international partnership. There's a a whole other aspect of this competition that I really love, though purely love. It is the collaboration between the public sector and the private sector. And so we actually have competition amongst companies, Intuitive Machines. Everybody knows SpaceX and Blue Origin, but there's companies like Relativity and Intuitive Machines that are making contributions that are going to help us not only get to the moon, but to stay there sustainably and responsibly. And so I think that competitive nature, it also highlights the collaborative nature. And I think because we are weaving it all together, it gives me a lot of hope about the future. Space exploration.