I paged through the book, stopping on a star with a circle around it written in pencil next to a paragraph where Benjamin writes about the philosophy of spaceflight, citing french scientist turned philosopher, Gaston Bachelard.

“Intent on pinning down the psychic tic that leads us to look toward the vast heavens for personal meaning, Bachelard suggested that there exists a correspondence between external immensity and inner intensity. When someone meditates on the infinite universe, he argued, something of its grandeur is conferred on him or her, and he or she experiences an expansion of being. In this quasi-religious state, the mind, freed from its own kind of gravity, is able to experience a new purity. Probing deep space thus becomes akin to searching for one’s soul.”

Ahh. So that’s why I like stars.

It’s ALLLL making sense now.

In related news, I’m eternally thankful for making notes in books I know I’ll keep for years and years for just this reason.

(Transcript from JSC “Be Inspired” speech given on June 7th, 2011)

First, a really brief intro on me, how I got here and why I want to talk about the question why.

I grew up in a town in the suburbs of Chicago called Westmont. That was my house for 20 years. I had a basketball hoop and a pool and no brothers or sisters to steal my toys. My first pet was a goldfish, named Speedy. (This is not an actual photo, just a representation). These are my parents. They bought me the goldfish. And, ya know, also raised me. I grew up wanting to be a paleontologist first—which might have been the first sign I was going to be a true nerd one day, I had this HUGE dinosaur thing—then I wanted to be a professional fisherman, then an NFL running back, then an architect, then for about 3 days a wrestler / rock star / snake charmer… probably a good thing that was a phase… and then I wanted to be an astronaut and that one kinda stuck for awhile.

I graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison, came to NASA in 2003 as a co-op, hired a few weeks after the Columbia accident, spent two semesters abroad—one in Ireland and one in Russia, studying and sampling the cultures and cuisine and spirits of the world, traveled overland 14,000 miles across Asia for 3 months from Moscow to Singapore after moving out of an apartment in Moscow that I shared with two Russian scientists, two former stray cats and a wall of exotic reptiles from Moscow State University.

Then in 2007 I came to work full-time in the Shuttle Crew Escape team as a Crew Survivability engineer. We’re responsible for the orange advanced crew escape suits that crews wear during launch and reentry in the shuttle and all emergency survival equipment for Shuttle, ISS, and other programs.

So that’s me.

I came to one of these talks a couple months ago and it was Steven talking about his family as his inspiration and particularly the story of his son who’s battled through more in a lifetime than I can even imagine, that was convincing enough for me to ask if, first, if they had any openings for future talks (which they did—maybe unfortunately for you!) and, second, if speakers here had to have any sort of official inspirational credibility or prerequisite (which they don’t—and that might also be unfortunate for you), so that’s why they let me talk today.

Plus, with all the changes happening in the space program today, you could say there have been plenty of reasons to be discouraged or cynical about our future in space. So for the next 45 minutes or so, please indulge me while I paint a slightly rosier picture of the future for you.

And if you get bored of me talking, just keep looking at the pictures. I know it’s hard for me to pay attention to anybody for an hour anymore so I threw together all these pictures here to give you something else to look at instead of my face—so, you’re welcome.

I don’t have a long background of overcoming major, life-threatening adversity or rising from a disadvantaged household to unexpected success. I mean the biggest hardships I’ve faced in my childhood have been on the order of the realization that goldfish don’t come back to life when they float upside down in their bowls and ya know, a little later on, that hair doesn’t grow back when it falls off your head. I’ve had an awesome life—I’m an only child so I got all the Christmas presents. That was cool. I’m from a nice middle class suburb of Chicago so my parents were well off enough to raise me in relative safety and happiness, even if it felt a bit like growing up in a bubble or bumper car village when I got old enough to realize it. For all intensive purposes, comparatively, my life’s been a cakewalk.

So when I started thinking about what I could possibly say to a roomful of people who came here because you’re looking for a break in the day or maybe you saw one of those 17,000 fliers on a door with my mug on them (thanks for that, by the way)—I realized everybody has a story of inspiration that got you here. That’s what’s awesome about this little lecture series. I think it’s crazy we don’t talk enough about inspiration here. We all should be talking about this. Spaceflight might be one of the most inspirational things mankind has ever thought or dreamed about, much less had the audacity to even attempt to achieve.

So we should all be talking about inspiration. What I want to talk to you about, and what really inspires me when I thought long enough on it, are three things:

1) Everything starts with the WHY.
2) At NASA we do everything BIG.
3) Our purpose here is to inspire people to ask WHY and think BIG.

I’ll start with a story about BIG. Then I’ll get to the WHY. And then I’ll put them together and we’ll see how all that sounds. Cool? Alright.

About a month ago I was sitting at my desk feeling really stuck. For some reason I couldn’t think. I was just stuck. I had all these never-ending to-do lists covering maybe three solid pages and even more notes on things to do and tasks to check off captured in emails and word docs and sticky notes all over the place… And I was half-thinking about what I wanted to say here today but not really, only partially focusing on it, procrastinating really. I thought ohhhh inspiration?! That was easy, that could wait. For more urgent, important things. You know, like webtads. And keeping track of passwords. And making new passwords. And making sure my email inbox doesn’t explode with password notices.

(If I can change one thing at NASA I might ask that we just have one ultimate password. If we lose it, oh well, I’ll take the risk).

Anyway, I had to get out of my desk. I had to move around. So I walked. And out there the ponds are nice and there’s little baby ducks which are cute and big mama ducks which are- not so cute- probably the ugliest ducks I’ve ever seen actually—is it normal for ducks to look that way? I don’t know. Anyway, I’m walking past the ducks, past the ponds and I start going out towards the front gate to a big long white building that, if you’ve been here longer than a few years, maybe, just maybe, you remember there being something pretty cool inside… If you got here more recently maybe you think that building is a stable for longhorn cattle, I don’t know. It says longhorn agricultural park on the fence outside it so I wouldn’t be surprised…

When I got here at JSC that building wasn’t there. And thank God it wasn’t. One of the highlights of my day was to drive in the main gate- and I used to live on the exact opposite side from the main gate so I’d have to go out of my way to do this but I’d do it because I’d get the biggest jolt of inspiration I’d ever experienced to start a work day- at least before 8am and before my first cup of coffee- the SATURN V rocket. The one that took us—not 12 Americans we’d never met—I mean US—to the moon. There was nothing better than seeing that rocket on my way in- didn’t matter what mood I was in, what I ate that morning, (or what I drank the night before)- I started every day saying “alright baby, here we go!” And I was filled with pride. And I was reminded to take on the impossible because damnit if they could do it back then, you’re damn right we can still do it today.

I know the rocket is protected now and I know that more ambitious plans to display it were met with answers the same way my mom probably answered me when I was 4 and I’d be at the toy store and I’d pick out like 12 matchbox cars that I wanted to buy and she’d say, “son I’m sorry you can only have 5″ and then she’d probably buy me 8 anyway
because I’d throw a tantrum or something and she’d feel bad. So, unfortunately, the display of the Saturn V was one of those unlucky 4 matchbox cars that didn’t quite make the cut- maybe the often forgotten purple Porsche boxter (I’m sure I already had the red and the black ones anyway)- maybe not something that could be justified among all the other budget areas screaming for attention, and relevancy but still… Heartbreaking.

And so the seeds of growing accustomed to budget cuts were planted in me at a young age. And of course I learned that if I really wanted 8 cars I should ask for at least 12 and throw in some I really didn’t want like a minivan or a corolla or a Buick or something lame like that. Thinking about that, my mom had to pick up on that, right? Mothers are so much smarter than kids know. (Thanks ma- you’re the best.)

Well I went out to the Saturn V building for some inspiration. I actually do this every so often now. And you know anybody can go out there. It’s open to everybody. Or at least nobody’s stopped me yet…

I go there sometimes to listen to the kids on the tours as they walk through or sometimes it’s to hear the dumb things their parents say (I can’t help it, and it’s not to be mean, just in the spirit of amusement). Sometimes I go to get away from an annoying coworker (…
Is that you guys? Don’t worry, umm- its not you) and sometimes I go because I need to think but the real reason I go is to just to look at a really, really BIG rocket.

I mean, it’s HUGE. It’s insanely huge. It’s longer than a football field (I love how we use a football field to compare distances to big things by the way—we do that all the time in describing how big the ISS is too)… 363 feet. That’s 60 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty. 6.7 million pounds. That’s 13 times heavier than the Statue of Liberty. (I just learned that from Wikipedia this morning). 960,000 gallons of fuel—or enough fuel if it were gas in your car to get you around the world 400 times.

It’s huge and in America, we love huge. I guess you could say even more so in Texas. Big things are inspiring because they make us think BIG. Bigger than we are. They make us feel connected to the vastness of the universe, they are our attempt to re-create and honor that vastness here on Earth. And we’ve been doing it over the course of our whole civilization. Pyramids, cathedrals, bridges, monuments, skyscrapers… they’re awesome because they represent man’s attempt to think BIG—bigger than himself. And I think that’s something we need to remember when we try to do the same here at NASA.

So that’s my first point about BIG.

I walked around the whole building, read all the signs for the ten thousandth time, and then just sat down and stared at the thing. And when I let my mind wonder about this big rocket for a while, besides just being awesome because it’s insanely huge, I always come down to the question: WHY.

Why do I really show up for work everyday?
Why are we doing this?
Why can’t we do this again?
Why doesn’t everybody get excited about this stuff the way I do?

And on that day I was also thinking—why did I move across the country to a city with 100% humidity in the summer when I can already outsweat like 99% of the population… during the winter?

And so literally I wrote that joke on my iPhone sitting on a bench next to the rocket and just as I typed that, there was this Australian news team doing a story and they were filming this news girl talking about the first stage engines and it went something like (imagine I have an Aussie accent, I’m not going to try it because I’m horrible and this is being recorded) “we’re here at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and above me are the five F-1 rocket engines of the Saturn V rocket which were used to propel the rocket to 6000 mph in 2 1/2 minutes. Today is a warm muggy day in Houston, let’s check out the weather across the country. In Canberra it’s 22 degrees, partly cloudy, thunderstorms continue in Melbourne, high of 17 with overnight lows around 12 degrees; it’s sunny and a perfect day for the beach in Sydney…”

It was ridiculous. How many places on earth are there where an Australian news team will give the weather from inside a big white tent on the other side of the planet? I sat there for 45 minutes (Ok, it was actually like 2 hours but don’t tell my boss) and I heard 4 languages. And I’m not counting Australian as a language, though they did mention some words I’d never heard of before.

I sat there and I watched a father take a picture of his little girl holding into the railing and he asked her to give an “astronaut salute” and her little hand went up to her head and that might have been one of the more adorable things I’ve seen in awhile. Cuter than the ducks for sure.

I sat there typing out these notes on inspiration and I kept coming back to the question why. Why if we’re doing something so inspiring is it so hard to say sometimes what it is that inspires us? Why do I get the privilege to sit and stare at this rocket while so many are out of work, out of home, out of luck. Why does the little 4-year-old girl salute in front of something that was built 40 years before she was born?

I’m inspired by the question: WHY.

See, I think we’re onto something with the question WHY.

And the letter.

I’m part of Generation Y. Along with probably half of this room.

Some people call me a WI-se guy… I guess?

I think there’s a theme around the question WHY that’s shaping up in the world today. It’s been building for hundreds, thousands of years maybe. But I feel we could be on the brink of an entirely new realm of human consciousness, and I feel it’s coming, as if the last 200 years or so since the industrial revolution have been like this epic week-long binge of invention, innovation, discovery, achievement—where technology changed everything about our lives, the way we think, the way we communicate, the way our society is organized, the very way we experience everything in life, and we’re starting to wake up from this crazy bender and along with this terrible head-splitting hangover that makes us question our place, what we’ve been up to all this time, how we woke up on the dining room table covered in taco bell wrappers——we’re waking up! And we’re starting to dig a little deeper, reaching past that leftover cold pizza to see what else we’ve got in the fridge.

We’re waking up and it has a lot to do with the question WHY.

So, to start understanding why space, let’s start even more generically—why anything?

Why’d you get out of bed today?

Why are you in this job you have?

Why are you passionate about whatever it is you’re passionate about?

(Maybe you’re asking ‘why didn’t I get up to leave when you had the chance?’ Well it’s too late! We locked the doors.)

It’s important because WHY is THE MOST fundamental question there is. Nothing cuts deeper.

My high school football coach had a great way of getting me to cut through distractions to focus on what was truly important. I played free safety and so I was responsible for covering a wide range of the field and whenever I’d get out of position, he’d blow his whistle and come running over from the sideline and he—he was this great big guy and he’d tower over me—he’d grab my facemask and look down and he’d yell “FITZPATRICK! YOU’RE RUNNING AROUND LIKE A BLIND DOG IN A MEAT HOUSE SON!!!”

And well it took me awhile to figure out what he meant by that but eventually I got it—if you try to be everywhere at the same time, you’ll wind up not really being anywhere at the right time to be in position to make a play.

So the wisdom of my high school football coach has taught me—I think we need to focus on being in the right place at the right time instead of trying to take on anything and everything all at once.

Here’s another story about how I know WHY is important. It’s more of an allegory really. A friend of mine climbed a mountain in Tibet once. call him… Steve. Steve had a lot of questions about life and what he should be doing with it. He was heading to a palace on top of a mountain to see the wisest man in the world. It was during a blizzard. And on his back he carried a donkey. The donkey’s name was… Charlie Brown. He carried Charlie Brown on his back because after 10,000 feet Charlie Brown couldn’t carry Steve anymore—it was probably sooner than that actually, Steve’s kinda a big guy—and he felt horrible because he didn’t want to leave Charlie Brown to die but he had to keep going because well they were on their way to see the wisest person in the world and this was a once in a lifetime opportunity so they walked straight up another 10,000 feet—straight up a glacier and along the way the heavens pelted them with snow and freezing rain and Steve’s legs burned in agony and his lungs screamed for air but he kept going, kept pushing, kept up the faith that his toils would be worth it, that his pain would be made righteous, that the journey might even inspire others to follow in his path and just when he thought he couldn’t make it another step… the sun appeared and a ray of light illuminated a winding path to a golden house atop a jagged peak where the wisest man in the world stood watching Steve and Charlie Brown sweat and bleed and cry together just to reach his fabled doorstep—and he looks down and he says to Steve—you know what he says to him?

He says, “WHY… the hell did you walk up here? I’ve got a cell phone. Call me next time.”

The question WHY. Coulda saved Steve a lot of hassle.

So that’s how I know. Why. Remember it.

And if you don’t remember WHY, I hope you’ll at least remember the story of Charlie Brown, the donkey who needed to be carried up a Tibetan mountain.

So. Why that story? I bring that up because it feels a lot like how I think a lot of people feel about work sometimes. Right? It’s ok, we’re engineers. Mostly. We see a challenge and we jump at it. We charge up icy, glacial mountainsides, sometimes feeling like we’re carrying a bunch of dead weight—maybe, ya know, a donkey here or there (some might have another name for these people but I won’t go there)—putting all of our efforts into this cause with this vague but passionate motivation to get there—and not always really understanding why we’re told to charge up mountainsides when we’ve got this feeling that there’s got to be a better way to be doing this, that there’s got to be a more meaningful, fulfilling outcome to all the sweat and tears and frustrations we live through everyday.

I think a lot of good can come from stopping for a minute to truly ask ourselves the question WHY.

Because WHY is the most fundamental question there is in the human story. (Maybe the donkey story, too, I don’t know.)

Nothing cuts deeper.

Everyone seems to have his or her own version of WHY.

Nothing could be more personal.

The question WHY, at its root, is deeply personal, and the WHY you choose says a lot about you—your character, your convictions, your discipline, your philosophy, your passions, hopes, suffering, doubt, triumphs and failures, dreams and defeats.

When NASA was founded, we had our WHY, our one piece of meat, a clear goal in human spaceflight—to beat the Soviets to the moon. But today the world is different. I think sometimes we might get stuck reminiscing about the good ol days of Apollo, when life was carefree and happy and angels strummed magical harps sitting atop feathery gumdrop clouds and congress slipped golden blank checks under lolly-pop doors and we ate and drank to our hearts content in the name of WINNING and AMERICA and DEMOCRACY.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for the accomplishments of Apollo and the brave men and women who proved to the world that impossible was nothing. But I want to go farther. I want future generations to reminisce about us. I think it has everything to do with the question WHY.

I say it feels like we’re waking up to this question because I go to these aerospace conferences and I talk to people passing by in the hallways here about how NASA needs to figure out its WHY and it feels like everyone agrees that it’s an important question and we all have different answers, great answers… yet we still don’t seem to have it figured out yet.

It’s important here and now because in space exploration today, we seem to have a ton of WHYs.

To search for life in the universe.
To ensure the survival of our species.
To create a better quality of life here on Earth.
To inspire kids to study math and science.
To bring countries together for peaceful purposes.
To open up the frontier of space so all can experience it.
To build a new sphere of economic growth.
To boldly go where no one has gone before.
(Thank you Star Trek for ruining that one).

What is that? That’s like 8 right there and who knows how many I left out. There are so many WHYs and they’re are all amazing, noble efforts… and great pieces of the answer to the question WHY. But at least to me, they don’t do it for me. Not completely. Not as an ultimate WHY. Not as a WHY I’m prepared to devote my life’s passion to anyway. The problem for me is that there isn’t just one. There should be one but there’s not. There are several and because there are several, potentially equally merit-worthy answers, we’re unfocused, adrift, lost in clashing typhoons of purpose. We need one simple, ultimate answer.

And I think there’s an even deeper one underlying all of those great answers.

I think the real reason we explore has to do with the very question WHY in the first place. But we’ll get back to that one in just a minute.

I’m going to give you my personal take on the question WHY and I’ll tell you upfront maybe it’s a little unconventional and idealistic and probably not at all helpful in terms of coming up with a practical space policy with concrete objectives and sustainable budget plans.

Still, this part for me comes before all that.

I’ll start with the practical, the more conventional WHYs that are pieces of the puzzle that help build the value proposition of space and then I’ll get into my less talked about, more unconventional WHY that I think underlies all of that.

To think about the practical value proposition, let’s start with the counter argument. WHY NOT EXPLORE?

Why wouldn’t you explore space?
It’s too expensive.
It’s too risky.
It’s too technically challenging.
We have problems on Earth where the money could be spent better.
It isn’t sustainable.
The ends don’t justify the means.
Or as my coworker would say, the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze.

Well, I recently watched a YouTube video from an Internet vlogger named Hank Green—a lot of you have probably seen this already—but let’s see if I can play this because he says it way better than I can.

At NASA we’re in the business of increasing the AWESOME. For some, that’s enough right there. But let’s dig a little deeper.

For that fraction of a penny, what else do you get?

BENEFITS. You get cell phones and laptop computers (some of these indirectly, yes) and Tang and Velcro and temper-pedic mattresses and all kinds of other cool stuff. You get amazing pictures of our planet and even more amazing pictures of these beautiful galaxies 14-gazillion light-years away and word that the rover on Mars found evidence of water and scientists think that’s cool so it must be important and then you get all these pop cultural references like “well if we can land a man on the moon, surely we can bake this cake, Sally” and “to INFINITY, and BEYOND!” and all the great nerdy Sci Fi films inspired by exploration—the Star Warses and Space Odysseys and Avatars—daring adventures of exotic worlds seemingly not at all like yours.

You get cancer research and bone density research and human physiology research and you learn about all these quirky things that happen to life when you take away that thing called gravity.

These are great, even incredible, but this is where most people get stuck on answering the WHY. We get stuck because it isn’t these benefits that drive us. Not really anyway. We’re really driven by something that’s really not that easy to put into words. We get stuck because we’re forced to quantify long-range, big picture, intrinsic value into the language of an analytic, left-brained society more interested in spreadsheets than wonder. We’re forced to make economic arguments and scientific arguments and rationally-defensible arguments and somehow make those arguments seem like they’re the main reason we’re pushing for this thing called space exploration in the first place.

I believe that the grandiose meaning and purpose of space exploration—what it really means to INCREASE the AWESOME—can’t be contained by reducing our motivation to the analytic world of quantifiable benefits.

That’s because exploration is bigger than that. WAY bigger.

But how much bigger? How deep can we go?

As for ultimate purpose, we sometimes say “ensuring the survival of the species”. Ok. What does that mean? Can we do that another way? Maybe. Do we have to do it right now? Debatable. We might not think it’s debatable but the majority of the population will.

How do you quantify creating an infrastructure that will take hundreds of years to build in order to ensure the survival plan of the human race—to a congress that faces election cycles every two to six years, a presidential administration that changes every four and a public with hardly more than a few days’ worth of attention spans?

I just don’t think that’s really our ultimate purpose.

We say “discovering the universe”. Ok. Can we do that with robots? Sure. Telescopes? Yeah.

Is that inspiring to a 1st grader? To some extent… but not really. When I was in 1st grade I was inspired by space but I was also inspired by gooey things like smearing honey and ketchup on my face and thought I could turn into a dinosaur someday. If all NASA had was robots and telescopes, I wouldn’t have been inspired. There’s just too many gooey things to compete with in the world. And robots aren’t even close to a real life, grew up in a hometown just like you, human explorer, with a wife or a husband at home and two young kids and a heart that burns with a passion for challenging the unknown and serving a worthy cause in the face of incredible risks, unbelievable odds, magnificent adversity and a journey of hardship and suffering, yet also of hope, and deliverance.

We say “to inspire kids to dream and study math and science to make the world a better place”. Ok. But does the inspiration of children warrant lives lost, orphans made, heroes slain? Do we have to spend billions doing something so risky to inspire?

I’d say YES and we’re getting warmer here. And I think—or hope at least—that most of you here would too. But it isn’t just inspiration alone that drives us to do so.

This is where MONEY, BENEFITS and RISK come together in ways we can no longer measure in our analytic, left-brain dominated model of thinking.

What really drives us, and what really can’t be explained in quantifiable arguments—is what you might call the “soft” side of space exploration. It’s the heart of human nature. It’s the spirit of adventure. It is in the act of deciding to explore—the asking of the question WHY—that serves as the fundamental heart of human nature and the ultimate purpose behind our space endeavors.

I think we’re evolving. Humanity is evolving, I mean, in thought, in morals, in values, in purpose, in knowledge, consciousness and awareness. If you’re a cynic, maybe you think we’re de-evolving? I reject that one—you’re telling me we’re only here to rise and then fall away and you think somehow we’ve already passed that peak? Generations time and again keep thinking that their own generation is the peak, that their own ideas are the ultimate answers. We once thought that Earth is the center of the universe, then the sun, then our solar system, then—you know what? If history proves anything, it’s that—we’re always wrong.

So I believe we’re evolving and we’re doing so in a good direction. And NASA—I think NASA has the opportunity to be the symbolic frontline in humanity’s evolution—the mermaid (or merman I guess) carved into the bowsprit of this giant vessel that is our whole civilization—an agency charged with the formidable task of being one of humanity’s best ways of asking WHY, embodied by the physical progress of humans going farther into the universe than any other human has ever gone but serving a much higher symbolic purpose as the leader in this world of challenging expectations, overcoming adversity, achieving what others once thought impossible.

So, yeah, it may be a “soft taco” WHY compared to our usual “hard taco” WHY of practical benefits as far as rationale for having a space program goes. And some might be chomping at the bit to say: ‘you can’t have a reason without dollar signs and tangibility’. ‘You can’t have a budget line without a tangible benefit you can trace back to the public investment’.

I’m not saying this WHY is necessarily a good way to sell space to Congress. But, I think we need to stop being afraid of these soft reasons for once. The real, deepest, truest value of space exploration, to me, can’t be traced to economic or industrial gains, or even the purest of pure scientific inquiries or any rational argument for simple survival.

Exploration isn’t just a budget line item. Exploration is a statement. It signifies a human desire to not sit back and accept the world as it is. Everything else stems from this desire. It is in the decision to step up instead of waiting back. Challenge instead of criticize. Open up instead of closing off. Having courage to accept risk instead of finding excuses to play it safe. That’s the statement that we’re all playing an active part in making right here.

How do you put a dollar value on that?

And while we’re at it, how can we afford not to bring along the rest of humanity on this journey of discovery while we make this grand statement that supposedly defines our identity?

I used to think it was a bit selfish, even if it was just a small slice of the pie, and even though I knew it was an inspiring undertaking, to explore. The whole effort had this subtle hint of narcissism—because in the end, exploration, the way I previously thought about it, was this amazing, inspiring experience that could only be felt on a very individual level and that the best things that came out of exploration were those deeply personal reflections. Awesome as though it may be, exploring space has been an extremely personal, exclusive, and some might say elitist endeavor.

We know exploring is not going to end hunger, disease, or genocide. It’s not going to end injustice or tyranny or greed or despotism. It isn’t going to convince people to stop watching Jersey Shore and start volunteering to dish out food and clothing at homeless shelters.

But it is going to teach us a thing or two about being human and what that means.

As such, exploration isn’t just a luxury—something we do only because our wealth and privilege provides us with the means to take off on joyrides across the solar system. It’s a responsibility we take on to understand the human condition and it’s just something that comes along with this whole “being human” deal.

And as a responsibility, it shouldn’t be an individual experience—it should be a shared experience.

And that’s what ultimately resolved that nagging feeling of elitism I once had about exploration.

Jacques Cousteau once said: “Those who have the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life have no right to keep it to themselves.”

(This, coming from the inventor of SCUBA diving—someone who spent 40 years exploring the oceans and communicating the importance of protecting the planet to audiences around the globe.)

So we should probably listen to him.

At NASA, we’re leading an extraordinary endeavor and we have no right to keep that extraordinary endeavor to ourselves. We’re not just educating people about the benefits of exploration that only a handful of people are deemed worthy of experiencing—we have a responsibility to humanity not just to explore, but to engage everyone to come along on the pursuit of the extraordinary in life.

By taking on that responsibility—we are stepping up with audacity to accept the challenge of asking the question WHY. If we accept that challenge, we might just have a shot at leading others to do the same.

Let me give you a different answer—a kind of a summary—to my thoughts on the question WHY.

We explore because it is the spirit of exploration—the pushing out of boundaries and comfort zones and having the courage to ask the WHYs of the universe—that drives our very civilization and ultimately helps us understand the human condition with a greater degree of clarity.

I think one of the reasons we’ve been lost and our programs falter and lose support and the headlines proclaim the blunders and end of the space program—is because we’re afraid of this reason. We’ve been forced to temper our enthusiasm and true dreams and convictions and we’re afraid that we’ll be laughed at by the rest of society for our crazy, lofty space dreams so we cram the true motivation of exploration into these benefit buckets. What we’re doing is playing it safe when what we should be doing is not giving a damn about what we think people want to hear or how they want to hear it. What we should be doing is leading—lifting society up to new heights, rising to honor the legacy of those who came before us.

To boldly go… If it wasn’t such a nerdy sci fi cliché, that’s what our space program would be about. “Boldly” means to have courage, to take risk, to dream and think BIG. Taken on another level, isn’t that what life is all about? It isn’t about playing it safe. Nobody won the heart of the dream girl in the second row of biology class or sunk a game-winning three-pointer at the buzzer by “playing it safe”. Exploration is boldly proclaiming to the universe that we are going out there—that we are not content to sit back here—that we believe in the spirit of exploration because it is from within that spirit that we find courage, hope, dreams, inspiration, wonder and unity.

Whether you think our system works or not, that spirit—that idea—underlies every decision that shapes our society.

We may have policy changes and leadership changes and all sorts of things standing in our way, but if we have the courage to realize that, to not just answer the WHY in the same limiting justification language that keeps the seemingly more rational 99 cent government rolling, to dig deeper than a high school reunion hangover, to reach past that metaphorical slice of your roommate’s cold pepperoni pizza sitting in the fridge just asking to be eaten, to carry our Charlie Brown’s up the glacial mountainsides of life to meet our own Tibetan muses, and to imagine a world where the monuments we build today will be saluted by the 4-year olds of tomorrow, we have a shot at not only achieving new milestones in humanity’s outward push onto the space frontier, but at bringing about our own evolution.

Why?
That’s who we are.
And that’s who we want to be.
And that’s what inspires me.

So, to recap, I’ll finish by going back to where I started, with those three things:

1) Everything starts with the WHY.
2) At NASA we do everything BIG.
3) Our purpose here is to inspire people to ask WHY and think BIG.

And if I can get up here and ramble about goldfish, leftover pizza and hangovers for an hour without driving everybody running for the doors, so can you.

Thanks.

(One of my favorite books and probably the only reason I ever got hired by NASA way back in 2003 as a co-op- because I had just finished this book before my interview and was pumped up on wild, abstract ideas and dreamy imagery and poetic quotes… come to think of it, good thing the interviewer didn’t think I was insane or drugged…)

“We are fascinated by the roiling surf for the same reason we are transfixed by fire: we too are matter asserting itself as energy. So are the fires of the night sky, where our being was written long before planets were born or oceans condensed or mortal cells emerged from primordial soup. The communion of cells formed a lung, a heart- an eye. And the world awoke.

The price of vision was mortality, but its prize was the capacity for love and wonder. And if the cosmos is spirit incarnate, then the flame of life, the eye of consciousness, is its resurrection. Like salmon, we hurl ourselves against entropy, returning in fits and starts and occasional heroic leaps to our place of origin; as though the primal spirit had fallen into infinite multiformity and had somehow forgotten itself in the process.

We are that ineffable essence, slowly, agonizingly, remembering.”

Touche, John A. Shedd. Touche.

“One of the most common mistakes is not recognizing how these value systems will shape you. People think that they can insulate themselves, that they’re different. They’re not. The relevant question in looking at a job is not “what will I do?” but “who will I become?” What belief system will you adopt, and what will take on heightened importance in your life? Because once you’re rooted in a particular system- whether it’s medicine, New York City, Microsoft, of a startup- it’s often agonizingly difficult to unravel yourself from its values, practices, and rewards.”