One of the biggest concerns about going out beyond lower Earth orbit is the radiation. We find that exercise seems to counteract a lot of the negative effects of space flight, like bone loss and muscle atrophy and cardiovascular systems issues. We exercise two hours a day on the station, which is a huge hit out of your day. It's great for staying in shape, but you know, it cuts into the productivity of the crew and if you look at how expensive it is to get a crew into space, if we can keep them healthy and have them exercise, but spend less time doing it, we can get more done.

My mistakes made were learning how to work with different groups of people. I mean, I went to school at Berkeley, which is a pretty diverse group, but working in a professional setting, I hadn't really done that before and learning about office politics, learning about interactions between different people and I made a lot of mistakes there during my time as a young person. I was 19 or 20 at the time. So, I would say those were my biggest career mistakes, but fortunately they were made in the context of an engineering co-op program and not in a professional field.

What keeps me up at night? Probably most, thinking about the future for my kids. It sounds kind of funny, but not so much what they're going to do, but how as a parent, how my wife and I as parents, how best we should prepare them for the world. And I know everybody does this, I think everybody stays up at night thinking about the best thing for their kids, and astronauts are no different.

Where we're operating is orbital adventures. We would offer five to seven days in low Earth orbit aboard our own spacecraft where customers would have the view of the Earth; get to experience really living in space, probably conducting some scientific investigations that we would piggyback onto those flights. So, they would have the whole experience, kind of a mini-experience of what professional astronauts have.

I grew up bilingual, I grew up speaking Chinese in the home, Mandarin Chinese with my parents, and I learned English because I was born and raised in the U.S. That really gave me an edge. I understand that, from the experts, if you grew up bilingual, your brain kind of gets wired to accept a new language. It was a very serious deal because not only did I have to learn Russian to a high degree in order to function as a necessary member of the crew, but also I knew that the Russians that came over that made an effort and had some success in learning English, those were the folks we trusted.

I had done everything I could do as an astronaut, and we have a long line of inexperienced astronauts waiting for their first missions, and so my role really should be to step aside and help them prepare for their missions, rather than to try to get another mission.

You saw Britain back in the early days of sailing ships. They were the sea power, the controlled the seas and they had colonies all over the world and then you can look at history and watch the way that their empire kind of crumbled. I certainly don't want that to happen to the United States in space technology.