Susan Helms is a former NASA astronaut and retired member of the United States Air Force. During her time in the military, Helms flew over 30 different types of aircraft and received four Legion of Merit awards and three Defense Superior Service medals. She also holds the record for longest space walk and spent over 5,000 hours in space. She retired in 2014 with the rank of lieutenant general and now serves on the Wilson Center Board of Trustees. What did she learn over the course of such a distinguished career, much of it spent miles above the ground?

“When you look back on the Earth, you don’t see the borders of nations,” Helms says in a special edition of Wilson Center NOW. “You do see the impact of humans on Earth but you don’t see who owns what territory. And it does give you the sense, when you sit back and think about it altruistically, there really isn’t Earth ownership by the humans so much as the humans are really guests on an amazing object, which is planet Earth.” 

The thin blue line of the atmosphere is “more like the skin of an apple than the sense of a large donut surrounding the Earth’s landmasses and waterways,” she says. Through this fragile layer, “you can see the impact of humans on Earth in ways that can be a bit disconcerting.”

Helms did not have to look too closely to “see pollution over certain places, you can see the evidence of scarring on the landmasses by the humans working on mining and working in other areas, deforestation.”

The damage she witnessed made Helms realize the planet is a limited resource and humanity is in this together. “There is only good that would come from sending as many people as possible to look back on our Earth and to get a sense of how beautiful and fragile it is.”