It’s not every day that people who dream of reaching for the stars actually get to. But Scott Bolton is one of those people who has been able to push projects that reach far into our solar system’s past.

The 60-year-old has been involved in space exploration missions for decades and is currently the associate vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at San Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute. He is also the principal investigator of NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter, which successfully arrived at the solar system’s largest planet in July 2016.

Bolton worked on Galileo, an earlier spacecraft that launched to Jupiter in 1989 and arrived in 1995. Its mission lasted until 2003. For the Juno mission, Bolton and the teams working on the project had to plan how the spacecraft would survive one of the most hostile environments in our solar system, including Jupiter’s dangerous radiation. It’s also the farthest solar-powered spacecraft ever sent by humanity.

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Quick facts on Scott Bolton What is your typical morning routine? I wake up about 6:00 a.m. and make coffee. Then within about 15 minutes, if my daughter isn’t up, I go make sure she’s awake for school, and let my son sleep an extra 15 minutes because he doesn’t need as much time to get ready. Then I make sure they go off to school on time, and then I drive to work. What is your favorite restaurant? Cured What book are you reading right now? “The Critique of Pure Reason” by Immanuel Kant What was your first job with an actual paycheck? Working at a gas station. What is your passion or hobby outside of work? Art and music, and outdoor activities. If you had to pick an entirely different career in an entirely different industry, and there were no limitations to what you could do, what would it be? Being an artist or musician of some kind.

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Last month, Bolton sat down for an interview with the San Antonio Express-News at the Southwest Research Institute. Here is an edited transcript of the interview:

Q: What was it about Jupiter that draws you in?

A: It’s a planet on steroids. Everything about it is extra. I think it became more interesting because it seemed to fall into an area that was maybe between planets and stars. If it was twice as big; it might have been able to be a star. I think now it probably has to be a lot bigger than that, but that was my initial draw, was that it was so large. It was a class of its own and nothing like the Earth.

Q: Why is it that Jupiter is thought to have been the first planet?

A: Most of it is size and mass. The idea is that the solar system formed from the leftovers after the sun formed. And Jupiter was first at the table, and so it used up most of the leftovers. And so it’s hard to imagine forming the rest of the solar system and then later forming Jupiter. One, the leftovers have been spread around by the formation of the other planets, but also, if you form Jupiter, if you had a solar system, almost certainly its giant mass and gravity field would disrupt the orbit and the natural harmony of the solar system that existed, and so things would get thrown into chaos and you might have planets lose their orbit, go into the sun, whatever.

Q: Jupiter creates a challenging environment to study. What are those challenges, and how did you and your team overcome them?

A: If you want to investigate the interior (of Jupiter), you have to get really close to it, and Jupiter’s a very hazardous place. Some of the challenges that we had to overcome was power. How do we get power for the spacecraft and the instruments if we’re that far away from the sun. We’d never had solar power running the spacecraft that far away from the sun. In fact, all of the missions that went that far away previously were run by nuclear power sources. There was no nuclear power source available, so we had to figure out how to use solar.

One of the other challenges has to do with the radiation environment. Jupiter’s a very, very hazardous place because it’s massive and it has an incredibly strong magnetic field. It’s surrounded by really, really, high-energy particles that normally kill any kind of electronics, and certainly would kill a human if you got near it and you weren’t shielded. And so we had to figure out how to shield the spacecraft, shield its brains, its computer, shield the instruments. I mean, very much, Juno is an armored tank sent to Jupiter.

Neither NASA or any other country that had been exploring space had ever built an armored tank with that much shield in it before, so that was a challenge of how do we do that and how do we ensure that it can survive? And how do you make instruments that can work inside that environment. They’re peeking out from behind the shields, so everything’s got to be shielded. The navigation was a challenge because normally you need a camera looking at the stars, and it was going to be hard to take pictures of the stars in the middle of this radiation environment. So even the camera had to be very special.

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Q: How has the spacecraft fared?

A: It’s all held up really well. We haven’t seen any problems yet from radiation, but we also designed the orbit in a way so that the beginning part of the mission, the first half is a lot easier and less hazardous than the second half. So I didn’t really expect that we were going to run into problems in the first half or it meant our designs were really in trouble.

The second half and in the next year or two is when it gets really tough, and that’s because Jupiter’s gravity field is not perfectly symmetric. So each time the spacecraft goes around Jupiter, its orbit gets pushed around and it gets moved into more hazardous parts of the territory that it’s going around. And so that’s the thing that keeps me up at night, hoping that I’m not going to get a phone call or a text message in the middle of the night from my team saying, “We’re in trouble.” So far we haven’t.

Q: What’s it like to work with NASA, especially planning missions that can take a long time from start to finish?

A: One, it takes patience. This is not a job where you go set up something, and a year, everything’s fine and you do it and you’re done. It takes almost a generation. You’ve got to watch your kids grow up while you’re waiting for a mission. You need a lot of patience. Along with that, you also have a very large team. These things aren’t done by one person. When you have a really large team, and you’re going to work together for a long time, you need to make sure there’s really good communications among the team, people feel appreciated, people are really working hard.

We work very hard to make sure that the team works well together and that everybody works as one team. There aren’t different teams competing with each other. There are people from different companies, different institutions, different universities — everybody’s got to be working under sort of the Juno umbrella. They’re all part of one team all trying to get the best even though they might be competing for resources occasionally. We try to work hard to make sure that they understand that, and that in fact, we all just want the best for society. We just want to learn the most science we can.

Q: Do you think that space exploration organizations like NASA have goals? What are they?

A: We’re reaching out not just to the beginning of our Earth or our solar system but the beginning of the whole universe. I think those are NASA’s goals. They do evolve over time. More importantly, the goals may not evolve as much as the method and what the plan is to learn. That’s partly because when you learn one thing, you get a few more questions answered. You raise other new questions. You now need to evolve your program and evolve the next events based on what your new knowledge is. What are the new questions that you want to ask? Which theories now have been proven wrong? Which theories are now more in vogue? Are there new ideas out there that we need to go explore?

The program that the world is doing as far as space exploration — not just NASA but other countries as well — has to constantly evolve based on new discoveries and new ideas. I think the long-term goals sort of stay the same. They might get focused a little bit differently depending on politics but also on our discoveries. We discover oceans on other planets or in moons, and so we think, “Oh wow, if there are oceans there, that’s a little bit like the Earth. Maybe we should go look and see what kind of life might be there if there is life there. Could you have life form there?”

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Q: Speaking of life, we have companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin pushing the limits of private spacecraft capabilities. Musk wants humanity to become an interplanetary species. What are your thoughts on this?

A: I think if you want humans to live forever, the species, then you absolutely need to figure out a way to get off the Earth and move on. I hope we have a while before that happens. I don’t see something that means you have to get off right away. We do have to learn how to evolve to a changing Earth. I mean, the Earth’s climate changes, and it changed before we ever got here, and it’s going to change after we leave, if we die out. We may also be able to cause the change, which is also not necessarily an advantage. So we have to learn how to evolve and deal with the Earth’s changes anyway.

But being able to reach out and try to become an interplanetary species seems like a good idea to me. I mean, growing up in the Star Trek generation, I wanted to be on the Enterprise, cruising around the galaxy. I wanted to go to other galaxies. I wasn’t even satisfied with Star Trek; I wanted to go past where they were. And I believe that if humanity lasts long enough, we will reach that. It seems like there’s some basic barriers when you look at the simple laws of physics, as far as the speed of light and how far away things are. Can you actually do that? But I believe you should just keep pushing it and keep getting out there. And reaching out to Mars, as Elon Musk likes to advertise, or Jeff Bezos, I think is a good goal. And I think the way they’re doing it is innovative, and I appreciate it.

Q: Would you take up an offer to go to space?

A: I would go out for a ride. And I think initially, it would just be to go up and see the Earth, which I think would be cool. But I’d like to go further, and I’d go for a ride out to the Moon or to Mars if I thought it was going to be safe. I don’t have a death wish. I’m not one of the people that says, “I’ll go to Mars even if you have no way to bring me back home.” I’m not sure I would jump on that.