Video: A 500-Day Trip to Mars? Count Astronaut Sunita Williams In

She just got back from space in November, but Capt. Sunita Williams is raring to go again.

Williams spent four months aboard the International Space Station last year. She has been on two missions to the station, spending a total of nearly a year in space – 322 days. And if it was up to her, she wouldn't be done yet.

Williams, who was at North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado Thursday, spoke about her experiences – she is second all-time for days logged in space by U.S. female astronauts – and why she'd happy to be part of a private trip to Mars proposed for 2018. 

“Honestly, I'd love to go,” she said. “Who wouldn't want to go? I mean, it would be pretty awesome.”

The helicopter pilot, who has been with NASA since 1998, was in Coronado to honor her friend, Capt. Shoshana Chadwick, who is leaving the base for a new Navy post.

She also noted two of her favorite things about being in space – the aurora borealis and the west coast of North America, which because of the weather, she said, is always pretty easy to spot from the space station, from Canada, through San Diego and all the way down to Baja California.

Out on a spacewalk she got to view the aurora borealis from above, a far different perspective, of course, than we have here on Earth.

“It's just this green amazing energy … What it makes you think about is there's a whole lot of energy out there in the universe that we don't even know in any way how to capture,” she said.