When we created the International Space Station, outreach to teachers was an important part of our mission.

And during that meeting, one of the teachers asked me, how do I explain to my 16-year-old students why it's important to go to space?

Why should we spend our precious resources on this?

That evening at dinner, I was discussing it with my wife.

I told her what I had said to the teacher, and she said, well, you screwed that up.

And I said, okay, what should I have said?

And her answer was, if you could explain to a bushman in the African veld what it means to go to space and ask if we should pursue that goal, he would say, of course, for the same reason I might climb that tree or climb that mountain to see far.

I'm Jim Van Lack.

I've had the wonderful good fortune of working for NASA on the Space Shuttle and the Space Station program.

As any child of the 60s, I grew up idolizing the space program, and I dearly wished that I could be part of it someday, although I couldn't imagine how.

Well, when I was 16, my dad met somebody who was a private pilot, and he took me up for a ride in a Cherokee.

And those 15 minutes aloft, the first time ever off the surface of the Earth, just touched something in my soul.

And I honestly believe it was the perspective.

I served my time in the Air Force as a fighter pilot.

Learning how to work on airplanes, learning the details of how they work inside the systems and the mechanics would form the foundation of all that would follow.

You know, NASA was founded because the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik and appeared to be far ahead of the United States in technology, and the Space Station idea was initiated in 1984.

Three, two, one, and liftoff.

The Challenger accident was a major setback for NASA, obviously, but it shattered our confidence in our engineering.

But when the Challenger accident happened, I was working in Washington and knew some people at NASA.

One of my talents is risk management, and they said, we need you.

It's a lot of work to be done, and you bring a new perspective.

I did have a perspective that helped to point to things that other people sometimes missed.

In 1993, Bill Clinton was elected president.

He focused on the economy, and he said he was going to get rid of the budget deficit.

And in the process of exploring how we could increase the value in a scientific way, the idea of adding a plank of foreign policy to the program emerged.

The decision was made to seek Russian participation.

I mean, I grew up at the height of the Cold War when the United States and Soviet Union had 25,000 nuclear weapons pointed at each other.

Dan Golden turned to me and said, I need you to figure out what the risks are and how to mitigate them.

In 1993, the Russian economy was in tatters.

The future of the country, its leadership, its economy were extremely uncertain.

They might not be able to participate even if they wanted to.

And that led me to my first meeting with the senior engineer from the Khrunichev Company.

When I walked in, I found a probably mid-'60s guy sitting at a desk, not thrilled to meet another younger, spoiled, rich American who thought he had all the answers.

And it was clear that he had made up his mind this was not something he was going to permit.

I introduced myself, and I sat down, and I said, I would like to talk to you about how you design systems.

Help me understand how you construct your architectures.

How do you deal with the potential for failures?

And he gave me the strangest look for just a fleeting moment.

And then he began to talk.

And when the meeting ended and we shook hands, there was even a faint hint of a smile on his face.

And as soon as the door was closed, I turned to the interpreter and said, what just happened?

And the interpreter laughed.

He said, it's simple.

You treated him with respect.

So many Americans go in, and they lecture the Russians.

You know, the Russian spacecraft look crude compared to some of the NASA things.

You didn't do that.

You talked to him like a colleague.

It became clear that the Russians knew they had no future without us.

And we knew we had no future without them.

We have been given the opportunity to build a bridge between our countries, between our space programs.

And I still get emotional about it.

When we began the program, like so many things, including Apollo, it seemed like an impossible dream.

It's a million pounds of spacecraft assembled in flight over 30-some assembly flights with pieces that never touched each other on the ground.

And so here we were committing to doing something that no one had ever conceived of doing before with people we barely understood and in some cases barely trusted.

And yet it worked.

That opportunity for me personally was a life - changing event.

But to be perfectly honest, it was a very stressful time, a very difficult thing, 80 - plus hour weeks.

And I had a lot of scars from the hard work and the conflicts that I endured.

It leaves a legacy of tremendous scientific accomplishment, tremendous human accomplishment.

The value of what we did with the International Space Station program is it shows what people can do when they choose to work together instead of fighting with one another.

And it teaches us the tools we need in order to accomplish those things.

Great things are still possible if we just decide to work together instead of fighting.

All of these things, when you put them in the right perspective, when you have the long view, when you are looking to see far, you can shape the future into something that we want.