“Right now is the golden time to be an astronaut, we have so much to look forward to,” said Astronaut Reid Wiseman at his panel at SXSW.

In order to answer what it is in human space flight that astronauts and the public who watch them with fascination have to look forward to, it would probably be best to let another astronaut, and now director of the Johnson Space Flight Center, to talk about it.

NASA’s mission is more then just humans in rockets, it is a fully integrated endeavor to study the cosmos. From the rovers that serve as humankind’s vanguard, to the earth sciences that teach us about the pale blue dot, NASA is on the frontier looking forward.