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Quotes by Astronaut

"So, whenever Scooter was the Pilot, he never had a chance to fly the orbiter. So, the joke is: I'm going to have a chance to fly it first and hand it over to him."

"If you want something that's going to provide you with a lot of challenges and a variety of different things to do, then you really can't beat a place like the Air Force. I don't mean this to sound like a recruiting pitch. But it's been a lot of fun."

"Well, we have two major goals. The most important one is to get the station arm on board the station, because that's this really milestone in the space station building since from now on they will be using this arm to continue building the space station."

"Gravity pulls our bodily fluids down, like water in a glass goes to the bottom part of a glass. In space, the water doesn't stay in the bottom of the glass. It distributes itself evenly over time throughout the entire volume of the glass."

"It's such a long mission and we get to spend so much time in space... we're doing such exciting research. And I don't want to overemphasize the life science research, but as a physician the life science research that we're doing is extremely exciting."

"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."

"I think the sense of family and family achievement, plus the discipline which I received there from that one-room school were really very helpful in what I did later on."

"I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did."

"Selection of crews is always been somewhat of a mystery."

"It's not the Olympics. It's Concord, New Hampshire, and a homecoming should reflect the community I'm part of."

"I guess we all like to be recognized not for one piece of fireworks, but for the ledger of our daily work."
Work,

"You know, Scooter's going to do the first separation burn; I'm going to do the second separation burn."

"Russia is still the leader in world space exploration. But its position of leader involves great responsibility - we have no right to lag behind. We can and we must move constantly forward."

"And, you run also video because to fly this arm, you're relying mostly on some external camera views that may be coming from the arm itself or from the station."

"Their spirituality was in nature, even though Emerson was a preacher on the pulpit, he ended up going out into nature for direct, face-to-face communication with God, if you want to call all of this creation part of God."

"Now you're coming back to Earth, and things are getting more and more dynamic."

"I started this whole endeavor really. And at the beginning we had the selection in Italy. And that was pretty much among people that had held previous experience in that particular satellite. So, I was in that, in a good position then."

"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."

"Another real problem was over putting our helmets on for re-entry, because we all had severe head colds. They couldn't come up there and make us. Houston, you have a problem!"

"Having the opportunity to fly the first flight of something like a space shuttle was the ultimate test flight."

"The training comes to us with the benefit of what has gone before."

"It's only when you're flying above it that you realize how incredible the Earth really is."

"The microgravity or the very, very low amount of gravity that we have up in space forces some changes in different processes. It forces changes in us as human beings."

"Rendezvous day is the third day of our mission, and that's a big day for us."
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