Bill Nye The Science Guy Wants To Go To Space As Long As He Can Come Back To Earth.
Bill Nye the Science Guy has been a staple of children's edutainment for years, advancing the love of science in fun and practical ways kids can comprehend. With space travel becoming a more privatized venture, what with Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, Bill Nye has expressed a definite interest in joining the select few who have broken the space barrier.
In an interview with People, Nye was promoting a joint effort he has with Coca-Cola to educate people about the process of recycling plastic bottles when he was asked about the possibility of ever going to space. The 66 year old was quick to reveal that he tried out for the NASA space program four times, though after some early disasters such as The Challenger explosion, he said,
"--nobody was going to let some yahoo like me fly around."
But that wouldn't stop Nye from going if given the chance,
"I'd go in a heartbeat, as long as I can come back. There are people that say they want to go live on Mars, but I'm not that guy. I would love to visit Antarctica, I visited Greenland on the ice sheet for a couple weeks - that was cool - but I came home, which appealed to me."
He continued,
"Everybody who flies in space comes back with what they call the Overview Effect. When these guys and gals see the earth from space, it apparently affects you profoundly. There are no political boundaries, you can see evidence of human activity, and you can also see the scale and beauty of nature that we land-born animals don't see. Everybody says that."
Bill Nye would like to use the experience as a teaching tool for future generations,
"If I were able to go, I could use that as a platform to promote the importance of addressing climate change, the importance of recycling ... and I would be all over that. I think that would be great."
Interested in more fun science you can share with your youngsters, here is Bill Nye the Science Guy's latest project, sponsored by Coca-Cola, where he tackles the importance of reusing and recycling the copious amount of bottles we are so quick to discard.
