My father was an airline pilot, so we travelled more spontaneously than a lot of families. On a Thursday, we could decide to go somewhere like Barbados the next day for a long weekend.

The beauty of the space station, and of human spaceflight, is that it is now at a level of maturity where you can invite people on-board, which is what I worked so hard to do...

Value the wisdom of humility, as well as the sense of perspective it gives you.

We have never lost a crew member on the space station, but of course, the Columbia accident. I was – I’d already been an astronaut for a decade when the crew of Columbia was killed....

Think about what happens on Earth when you throw up. You throw up and you have a bag of something horrible and then you throw it away, but if I have this bag, what am...

Our role is to develop techniques that allow us to provide emergency life-saving procedures to injured patients in an extreme, remote environment without the presence of a physician.

In the Soyuz, the little Russian capsule, you can actually hear the banging of the big shield, the big heat shield on the bottom, as it slowly erodes away from the heat and pieces of...

When we needed a long extension on the Canadarm 1 in order to be able to inspect the outside plus sensors on the end, NASA . ‘ . ‘ . looked through the whole world for who...

Some of the greatest reality television we ever had was the moon landings. When you think about it, that was human emotion and people, unscripted, working with each other – and millions and millions of...

When you look out the window of a spaceship, you see entire countries, vast swaths of continents. One turn of the head covers what once took thousands of years to traverse at ground level.

Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It’s about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences...

When we first get to space, we feel sick. Your body is really confused. You’re dizzy. Your lunch is floating around in your belly because you’re floating. What you see doesn’t match what you feel,...

To be on my very first spacewalk, to be outside, and to have contamination in my suit to the point that I couldn’t see in either eye – that, I think, would cause some people...

For the last several years and culminating in six months in orbit next year, I’ve been training for my third space flight. This one is almost in a category completely different than the previous two,...

Spacewalking trumps everything. Viscerally, it is a phenomenal place to be; to be able to glance right and see the world, glance left and see the universe, and realise for a moment that you’re holding...

I’ll reach up with the shuttle arm, almost like passing a baton from the new arm to the old arm,

‘Boldface’ is a pilot term, a magic word to describe the procedures that could, in a crisis, save your life. We say that ‘boldface is written in blood’ because often it’s created in response to...

I’ve been lucky enough to fly to space twice.

Almost everything worthwhile carries with it some sort of risk, whether it’s starting a new business, whether it’s leaving home, whether it’s getting married, or whether it’s flying in space.

So without that Canadian invention we were grounded. And so that was a really important and key part of the mission and Canadians should take real pride in it.

What I like to do when I get to a new place is buy local music early on and listen to it while we’re driving around. I think it helps explain and illuminate the culture...

I’m really looking forward to it, if you can imagine floating weightless, watching the world pour by through the big bay window of the space station playing a guitar; just a tremendous place to think...

There’s always constantly interesting things to do, and who knows, maybe I will be a good sculptor. I haven’t decided what I am going to do next, but I am not going to quit just...

Now picture Sasha floating freely in space and she wanted to go to sleep.

Ever since I was nine years old and I watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, I have felt passionately that this is an interesting human adventure. This is one of the things we’re...

No aeroplane you’ve ever gotten into had less than thousands of flights before they took their first passenger. Because vehicles are unsafe at first.

You should have a fear of some things. That doesn’t mean it incapacitates you from your ability to figure out a way to deal with it.

I’m a mechanical engineer, and I grew up on a farm, so I like practical hardware – somebody’s elegant solution that proves itself over the long term.

When I did my spacewalks, it was during space station construction. So the shuttle was docked to the fledgling ISS at the time. So we would always stay tethered.

A lot of people live in fear because they haven’t figured out how you’re going to react when faced with a certain set of circumstances. I’ve come to terms with this by looking deeply into...

Although simulators are great for building step-by-step knowledge of a procedure, the worst thing that can happen in a sim is that you get a bad grade on your performance.

If only there was someone out here with long arms,

Our three big emergencies are fire, loss of pressurization or contaminated atmosphere. Any of those things in a spaceship are very deadly and time critical. Everybody’s trained, but I’m the commander of the ship, and...

You can get claustrophobia and agoraphobia – a fear of wide, open spaces – simultaneously on a spacewalk.