[0:01]I tell a story, which is one that my dad told me before the Apollo missions when he was just a very little boy. He was looking up at the moon with his mom, and his mom said to him, "Don't worry, Ronnie, we'll never get there." Fast forward maybe 70 years later, it's his daughter that's actually going there. And I think that long arc is something that we can all learn from. The idea that the seemingly impossible becomes possible if you just believe in it and are willing to work hard and come together to achieve it. My name is Christina Koch, and I'm a mission specialist for NASA's Artemis 2 mission around the moon. When I look back at my dreams as a kid, I definitely never thought I would actually get here. I was very pragmatic, even though I'm a dreamer. I knew that the odds were way against me again, so I might as well do something I'm loving in the meantime. I definitely loved science and math in school and, you know, did pretty well in those things, but I also loved being active. I was always outside.
[1:02]I loved things that made me feel small. I loved looking at the night sky, often times between the pine tree branches or I loved the ocean. North Carolina also has mountains and when we go there, I just love the vastness of all of those things. I loved how they made me feel and what they made me think about in the vastness of the universe and how much out there there was to learn. I'm drawn to exploring. I'm drawn to challenges that involve both mental and physical, and I'd much rather be solving problems wearing a whole lot of equipment and in a harsh environment. And that's just something I've carried with me ever since I was a kid. Thinking about the fears or challenges that I've had to overcome, there are just so many. I mean, basically, it's just been that has been the journey. I always say to people, do what scares you and that means I have to follow my own advice. So, doing what scares me meant getting on a plane and going to the Antarctic, getting on a plane and going to study abroad in Ghana. Applying to become an astronaut, opening the EVA hatch in the airlock and going out of it into the darkness, strapping myself onto a rocket. And so for me, I think that no matter what the challenge, recognizing that if people believe in you and you believe they believe in you, challenges seem always a little bit easier. To me the moon, it represents history. It is a witness plate. Everything that's ever happened to the moon is still written on the moon. Every single person has looked at the moon their entire lives. We see the same moon, that's something really special. It it's just the epitome of a symbol of something that's in each of our hearts, but it's also represents exploration and reaching.
