Quotes About Astronaut

When I became an astronaut, I knew I wanted to pursue long-duration flight aboard the station. I knew it would be a just a tremendous personal challenge, and I looked forward to it.

I can talk about casting a ballot from space since I did it last time I was on the space station. They basically send you an electronic file, it's a PDF, and you mark your choices.

There is still some gravity where we are and even as far out as our moon. That is why our moon stays in orbit around the Earth. We don't feel the gravity up here because it is so much smaller than the force we feel when we are on the Earth.

I saw this movie 'The Right Stuff' when I was in college, and it really rekindled my interest in being an astronaut. I started taking those steps, and then I realized it would be the chance of a lifetime. It would be a dream life: not just a job, but the whole life.

I'm actually thinking about maybe, on a spacewalk, not wearing my glasses. I normally wear those both for reading and a little bit of a distance correction, but the distance vision seems like it's gotten a little bit better. So I might go without.

and returning him safely to earth.

I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually, I realized it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early '70s was going to be an astronaut.

Well, the coolest thing I have seen so far, in terms of, like, me being an astronaut and seeing something unusual, was the rendezvous, the docking of a Progress spaceship.

I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.

As an astronaut, you have a very defined set of tasks to do. Those tasks may require you to work 60, 70 or 80 hours a week.

The first 6 hours of being in orbit were a little difficult on my stomach. I think things just didn't know where to go!

The strangest thing I've found is that when I got to space, I felt more comfortable in space that I've ever been on Earth before. I just felt this is my home.

Life in orbit is spectacular

The odds of becoming a NASA astronaut - you have a better chance of getting hit by lightning.

I'll be the person using the shuttle robotic arm.

In space, you don't get that much noise. Noise doesn't propagate in a vacuum.

When you go to vacuum in the airlock and you take the hose off the front of your space suit, there's a little bit of water in there, and you can see that sublimate and ice crystals form and fly away. My thought at that moment was, 'Oh, we are not kidding at vacuum here; we are really in space.'

I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.

My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.

I've been lucky enough to do theatre, film, and television for a career. Unless I get offered a job as an astronaut, I won't stray too far from it.

I stayed in the astronaut program until 1993. People ask me why I left. I thought I had a lot of things to contribute that would be difficult to do if I stayed. I thought I could have a stronger voice as an advocate for space exploration. So I ended up starting my own technology consulting company.

I'm not going into infinity. I'm going into low earth orbit.

It definitely helps to have been through the arm training flow before and to have used the arm on orbit, and it also gives me the confidence to know that our training facilities are really good, that when you get up there, you feel like you've been there.

You're going very fast when you're on orbit, going around the world once every hour and a half.