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[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] My name is Steve Swanson, NASA astronaut.
I'll be on a International Space Station
for Expedition 39 and 40.
I'll be Flight Engineer for 39 and Commander for 40.
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That's where I spent my most time then
as a child growing up was in Steamboat.
I love the area tremendously.
The Rocky Mountains are a beautiful area.
I just enjoy being there, being outside.
Even it's the atmosphere of the location.
It had a lot of agricultural ranching
but then also a resort town at the same time,
so it had many different aspects to the town itself.
It was a great place to grow up.
I still love the mountains.
I still love being in the woods.
I still love doing all that kind of outdoor stuff
and I think that's what the area taught or brought to me.
I feel the most comfortable in the outdoors.
I love camping.
I can relax tremendously.
No pressure's on you.
All you have to do is eat, sleep when you want
to if you can, you know.
There's nothing really else
to do beside survive and just have fun.
And so there's no other requirements on your life then,
and I really enjoy that.
I enjoy being with my family.
I also deal with my brother and his family and the nephews
and all sorts of people.
We go and make a big trip out of it together
so it definitely is a family event.
But we'll start off, usually we do a backpacking trip
at least once during the summertime, and the idea going
in is we're going to go on a hard hike on the first day.
We'll carry everything we need
and then we'll set up a base camp.
From there we'll do day hikes.
On the day hikes we can go climb a peak.
We'll go off to the lakes to check
out the fishing in different spots.
Just explore the area.
And we do a lot of research actually where we go, too,
just because we like to find places that are new to us
and also everything not anybody else is going to be.
Not many people go to those kind of areas.
And so it's a fun, a actual adventure just
in planning the whole thing out and executing it
and then coming back and telling all the stories.
I think it's innate in most people
to explore and find new spots.
That's, again, why one reason I became an astronaut.
I do like to explore and find new areas and try adventure.
So you have to make sure that you
and your stuff are well taken care of.
That's the same thing with camping.
You can't help everybody else out.
You can't get the [inaudible] going.
You can't do all that stuff unless something's wrong
with you.
So to be a good expedition member you have
to be able to do that.
And that's the same with camping
as with any kind of space flight.
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My first mission was STS-117, went to the Space Station.
It also as in the second one.
It was STS-119 and also went to the Space Station.
And I was fortunate on both those missions to do space walks
which is really a wonderful event,
to get to another good exploration adventure type
of a thing which was really fun to do,
and I'm glad I had that experience.
And then you also then you get the, I guess, the wonder and awe
of that view of looking down on Earth.
It's a couple of different things.
One, it is very beautiful.
Two is I see places I want to go like there's another spot
like there's many mountain ranges all across the world
and you see ones like oh, I'd love to go
in that mountain range and try that and, you know,
see if I can climb some of those peaks or go over there
and these woods over here are like beautiful.
I'd like to go explore those.
So it's really about that's what I see when I look down.
There's all these places I'd really like to go and explore.
I think, you know, find out what is
on the other side of that mountain.
What is on the other side of this area over here?
What's it like to be over there?
It's just part of our, you know, innate being that you need
to find this information out and to understand it.
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