Ephraim Rabin, an Israeli-American businessman, participated in a Blue Origin flight into space last week and took the hostage dog tag with him.
In an interview with Ynet, he said that from space, he could see how insignificant planet earth seemed.
Rabin was born in Israel and lived in the desert town of Arad until the age of 10. "When you live in Arad, there is not much to do but look up into the sky," he said adding that his interest in space began there. He said that watching the movies in the Star Wars and Star Trek series which were showing at the time, helped shape his lifelong ambition to visit space.
Rabin took several U.S.-related and Israel-related items with him on his journey to the great unknown, including the hostage pin, a Star of David necklace, pins with the Israeli and American flags, a microchip of the bible and the dog tag.
Rabin and the five other astronauts trained for about two years for the mission. "I've gone on a very strict regimen, myself training myself both physically and mentally for this," he said. "The realization is once you look out the window and you see the void, it's not the color black, it's something else, it's just empty and it goes on."
Rabin said that he hopes to go on another mission in space and that space is the final frontier. He foresees that humanity will embark on projects such as asteroid mining and possibly colonize space in the far future.