After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we'll have room for specialists. But right now we don't.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We still have a lot of international partner modules that need to get up there to make it truly the international structure that it will be, and that's highly important; we need to get to where the crew size is bigger.
I don't think we're going to build a 50-person spacecraft or a 100-person spacecraft.
I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.
We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
We're going to be focusing our science on things that will take us farther and longer into space. For many of those experiments, the crew members are human guinea pigs, which is fine; that's part of my job. I don't mind being a human guinea pig.
Research into manned spaceflight is shifting from low-Earth orbit to destinations much further away, like Mars and the asteroid belt. But society will have to invent many new technologies before it can plausibly send people to those distances.
We're going to become caretakers for the robots. That's what the next generation of work is going to be.
The way that the robotics market is going to grow, at least in the home, is that we'll have a number of different special purpose robots.
We are not yet at the point where our size, our being the drama industry, is sufficient to support full time professional crews, and that is very very important.
Even with only two people on board, where maintenance is a large piece of our working day, we still have time to do scientific research. We have to be ready to support those Shuttle visits in a lot of different ways.