--- title: Inside an Astronaut’s Mind: Separating Mission From Peril | TIME canonical: https://time.com/video/sI3ccOmO/ og:title: Inside an Astronaut’s Mind: Separating Mission From Peril og:url: https://time.com/video/sI3ccOmO/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/sI3ccOmO/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Inside an Astronaut’s Mind: Separating Mission From Peril twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/sI3ccOmO/poster.jpg?width=720 --- * Science # Inside an Astronaut’s Mind: Separating Mission From Peril > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Inside an Astronaut’s Mind: Separating Mission From Peril [Watch (HLS stream): Inside an Astronaut’s Mind: Separating Mission From Peril](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/sI3ccOmO.m3u8) (2:06)  _Published 2026-04-07_ --- Apr 7, 2026 10:01 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [More Young Adults Are Getting Cancer Researchers Are Racing to Understand Why](/video/xHiTz18h/) ### More Young Adults Are Getting Cancer Researchers Are Racing to Understand Why [Watch Astronaut's 4K Timelapse of the Earth](/video/Vfsc1DqA/) ### Watch Astronaut's 4K Timelapse of the Earth [Robot Astronaut's ISS Space Chat](/video/uoVbYWPC/) ### Robot Astronaut's ISS Space Chat --- ## Transcript I've met any number of astronauts over the course of my career, and as a rule, I have found that astronauts have a capability. Most of us don't have an ability to compartmentalize danger in one box and the mission in another box. In 1993, when I was writing Apollo 13, I was sitting with Jim Lovell, the Apollo 13 commander, in his living room of his Chicago home, and I asked him, flash back to 1968, you're sitting in your living room of your Houston home, and you're about to leave to go to NASA to go into medical quarantine in the run up to the mission. Did you ever look around the room and think, gee, if this mission doesn't go as planned, this is the last time I'll ever see this room. Jim's response was, no. If you thought that way, you wouldn't go. That, to me, captured the astronauts ability to separate the mission from the peril. Jack Swigert, the command module pilot of Apollo 13, once commented that when you read the transcripts of astronauts looking at the moon or looking at the earth from a distance, a distance that only the lunar astronauts had been able to reach, the words they use to describe what they're seeing are unremarkable words. They say it's awesome. They say it's magnificent. They say it's beautiful. You wouldn't have to even go to the moon to be able to come up with descriptions like that. But Swigert's explanation for it was that astronauts cannot afford to think of the monumental nature of what they're doing. They can't afford to think of the enormity of what they're doing, because that would be a distraction from doing the job. His thinking was, you could either go to the moon or you could appreciate the enormity of going, but you can't do both. 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