Quotes from Anne McClain

Fifty years after humans landed on the moon for the first time, America has driven a golden spike on the trail to new space exploration feats through the work of our commercial partner SpaceX and all of the dedicated and talented flight controllers at NASA and our international partners.

I joined the Army out of a deep sense of duty, but wanting to be an astronaut feels more like my destiny.

Something about exploration has fascinated me from a young age.

No matter what your passion is, you really can find it within the Army. The opportunities really are endless and the sky is not the limit.

The astronaut corps is a very small part of a very large team that enables human spaceflight.

When you are finally in space and you're finally looking back at Earth and you realize for the first time in your life there's nothing standing between you and your dream, it's just so hard to describe the profound impact of that.

We go across lands, we go across water. And then the next logical step was to start flying just over a hundred years ago and of course, now we're going to look up at the stars and say what's next, what's out there?

You kind of just float inside of your sleeping bag and you attach your sleeping bag to the wall. Then our arms kind of float up. So, we look a little bit like zombies.

I encourage all humans to do something out of your comfort zone that forces you to adapt. You'll be pleasantly surprised of your capabilities.

We have a great NASA support team that uplinks the nightly news. And if we have favorite TV shows or movies or sporting events, they can uplink those too. We also have access to the Internet just like we would on the ground. We have email. And we video-conference with our families about once a week. We feel pretty connected up here.

I think the more people that can go up to space and look back is great, but it's not just this overview and look back effect. There's also a lot of concrete gains from getting more people up in space.

With so much conflict in the world, space exploration can be a beacon of hope.

No one cares about race or religion or nationality in space travel. We're all just part of Team Human.

The folks at NASA really look at the world and try to envision how things can be better.

The most uncomfortable thing about going to space is coming home. It's a little strange to get used to gravity again.

It's extremely humbling to look around the astronaut office, see how much experience there is, see how many lessons there are to learn and it's truly starting at square one.

Sometimes we focus too much on our differences, but when we all look up into space, we see the same stars and we see the same sun. It really can be unifying.

Our bodies are the subject of many experiments, but these experiments on the space station sometimes take years because in order for a scientist to get 10 data points, that can take six or seven years.

The training flow for the space station is a year-and-a-half to two years.

I think that my career and perhaps me being on the International Space Station can really show women and girls and everybody that hey, we're not just sitting at the table, we're leading the table.

But every crew that makes it to orbit is lucky. Spaceflight's not easy.

You get this overview effect where you realize how small we are and how fragile our planet is and how we're really all in it together. You don't see borders from space, you don't see diversity and differences in people on Earth.

I first told my parents that I wanted to be an astronaut when I was 3 years old.

When somebody says I wanted to be an astronaut my question is 'Did you apply?' And most people say no. And to me that's a self-elimination.