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Quotes by Astronaut
"The space shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle. It is unlike any other thing that we've ever built. Its capabilities have carried several hundred people into space."
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"And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right."
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"Then, much later, my next dream was to become an astronaut, and I was fortunate to realize that dream, also."
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"One of the jokes on our flight is that, if we have a normal entry day going, the plan is for me... to actually take the orbiter first and fly it for maybe 10 or 15 seconds and then hand it on over to Scooter."
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"Of course, you'll have to meet the physical and psychological demands. A space walk takes a lot of energy."
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"Our shuttle crew is four people, because we're going to transfer a crew up to station, so all the jobs are divided between four people rather than five or six people. So it's been busy."
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"The most interesting thing was looking out the window and taking photographs of different places on Earth."
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"The first plane ride was in a homemade glider my buddy and I built. Unfortunately we didn't get more than four feet off the ground, because it crashed."
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"The infinite in mathematics is alway unruly unless it is properly treated."
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"We didn't use the shuttle robot arm before, so this has been a training flow to get ready for that."
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"It's not the Olympics. It's Concord, New Hampshire, and a homecoming should reflect the community I'm part of."
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"So everything turned out fine, and we were given the opportunity to go to Washington and be briefed on the project of man in space, and given the opportunity to choose whether we wanted to get involved or not."
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"Later, in the early teens, I used to ride my bike every Saturday morning to the nearest airport, ten miles away, push airplanes in and out of the hangars, and clean up the hangars."
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"We're taking up some science experiments, some crystal growth things, we have a refrigerator that carries up some samples, new samples that go into the station, we bring the old ones home; we have a lot of clothing, we have a lot of food-U.S. and Russian food."
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"But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth."
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"It is hard to know what you are talking about in mathematics, yet no one questions the validity of what you say. There is no other realm of discourse half so queer."
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"But a lot of that kind of work is done pre-flight, coordinating efforts with the flight directors and the ground teams, and figuring out how you're going to operate together."
Work,
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"The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era."
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"And just when we were at the end of our design process there was the news that the Italian government and the U.S. government had signed an agreement to fly the first Italian astronaut on that flight."
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"I think there are huge lessons there, for young people who are getting started in life, as well as other people. And that is, to take responsibility for your own life. Only you are responsible for the course you take from there."
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"In much of society, research means to investigate something you do not know or understand."
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"The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer - which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff - pulled up to the launch pad."
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"And then my chance really happened in 1996 when we added the second flight of the tether satellite."
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"The flight was extremely normal... for the first 36 seconds then after that got very interesting."
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"I think we need to do a little more all-weather testing."
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"There were different challenges along the way. Certainly the food shortage was unpleasant."
Food,
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"Since there always has to be a certain number of astronauts manning the station at all times, one of the main aspects of the mission was to transport a new team to the station and bring back some members of the previous team back to Earth."
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"The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program."
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"I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle."
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"Some of the wives didn't keep up with the program. It started breaking apart during the Apollo days."
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"Kids today don't want to get married. Too many of their friends have been married and divorced already. They just don't believe in it."
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"And, one thing I definitely enjoyed personally, from a selfish point of view, was exploration and going to places that I had never been to before and learning, you know, meeting the people and getting to know, new sights and sounds, etc."
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