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Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.

If I hadn't been inside of Biosphere 2 and really lived a biological life-support system, I definitely would not be involved in life-support systems for space.

It's such a long mission and we get to spend so much time in space... we're doing such exciting research. And I don't want to overemphasize the life science research, but as a physician the life science research that we're doing is extremely exciting.

We want to make sure we get living astronauts to the surface of Mars.

Being able to have a laboratory on Mars, being able to have some sort of sustained human presence on Mars in the future, I think, is critically important for science.

All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.

Space architectures capable of supporting a permanent human presence on Mars are extraordinarily complex, with many different interdependent systems.

You make a great investment in the consumer Internet, maybe you make a lot of money and create something useful, interesting, or fun. But in life sciences, you have a chance to be part of something that lets people live longer and healthier and not lose the people they care about. That is really profound.

We thought our careers as cosmonauts - we were young then - would end with a flight to Mars. But, you see, life has made some course corrections.

The society of life on Mars, or the challenge of making Mars more livable, will have significant benefits on our attempts to modify and change in some ways the environment here on Earth.