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Quotes by Astronaut
"The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited."
188
"Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit."
81
"I never read a single book as a child. I did not read as a child. I worked on the farm. I had books in the classroom, but that was it. I never read a single book outside of the classroom."
81
"I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies."
78
"We also had to bring with us some desired scientific equipment over to the station as well as assemble new machines. For that, I had to conduct two space walks."
77
"It's a great view from here. I'm having the time of my life."
74
"Science was something that really caught my attention. It was something I really could sink my teeth into."
72
"I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises."
71
"The most interesting thing was looking out the window and taking photographs of different places on Earth."
70
"Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10."
70
"It's easy to sleep floating around - it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!"
68
"It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract."
68
"If anything, the overriding emotion is gonna just be excitement."
67
"And everything stopped quite rapidly because I knew that nobody in Europe was able to go to space. It was the privilege of being either American or Russian."
67
"I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67. That program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us."
67
"This is a day we have managed to avoid for a quarter of a century."
65
"NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like space shorts - we wear those a lot - and NASA T-shirts."
64
"Polytechnique is a school whose multidisciplinary, very high scientific level curriculum is invaluable."
64
"It's not the Olympics. It's Concord, New Hampshire, and a homecoming should reflect the community I'm part of."
64
"When you launch in a rocket, you're not really flying that rocket. You're just sort of hanging on."
64
"And since Italy was involved in the space station as well as signed an agreement with NASA. And when the possibility to enter the 1996 Mission Specialist class."
63
"This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
63
"The last thing, and the only one that you cannot physically train for, is the psychological preparation."
63
"We still have a lot of international partner modules that need to get up there to make it truly the international structure that it will be, and that's highly important; we need to get to where the crew size is bigger."
Will,
61
"I woke up an hour before I was supposed to, and started going over the mental checklist: where do I go from here, what do I do? I don't remember eating anything at all, just going through the physical, getting into the suit. We practiced that so much, it was all rote."
61
"Kennedy had made a mess in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. He had to do something to look good. The Apollo program of going to the Moon was quite a goal,."
61
"Once you've been in space, you appreciate how small and fragile the Earth is."
60
"When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen."
60
"I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts."
59
"In particular, this arm has 7 degrees-of-freedom that makes the overall motion of the arm very complex so that, before you start driving the arm, you should be very familiar with all the position it can get."
59
"Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit."
58
"We wanted to be in great shape, we wanted to be able to cope with zero gravity, we wanted to be able to cope with accelerations and decelerations and so on. So all of us trained so that we were probably in the best physical condition we had ever been in up until that point."
58
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