It so happened that my goals kind of matched my career progression toward becoming an astronaut.

A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression.

It took me a long time to get selected as an astronaut. In fact, I applied for 20 years before I was selected.

After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we’ll have room for specialists. But right now we don’t.

My dad served in two wars has been flying airplanes for 60 years now. He was certainly quite an inspiration.

Even with only two people on board, where maintenance is a large piece of our working day, we still have time to do scientific research. We have to be ready to support those Shuttle visits...

Researchers can measure what kind of angles your legs take up during the day when they’re just trailing around behind you in weightless conditions, and what kind of impacts you feel during your exercise. They’re...

Eventually we want to have six or seven people up there, and as soon as we get a third person up there we can multiply the amount of science up there.

Since the Columbia accident, the Russian space agency, or the Russian space program, has been literally carrying the load bringing us all the supplies we need on the Progress vehicle, smaller amounts on the Soyuz...

Ever since I’ve been an astronaut I knew I wanted to do a spacewalk, and it’s really comforting to go out with a guy who’s done it a lot of times.

Small samples in the centrifuge will spin at varying rates to create synthetic gravity, like the gravity of Mars or the gravity of the moon, and measure how the specimens respond within the centrifuge.

I never made a career decision based solely on my desire to be an astronaut. I attended the Naval Academy because I wanted to be a Navy pilot. I majored in math because math had...

The Space Shuttle will stop directly below the Space Station and Sergei and I will be looking out two different windows looking straight down at the Space Shuttle.

I think it’s going to be a very important, unique data set in terms of measuring the behavior of your lower body in space and trying to figure out what we can do to preserve...

There weren’t any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.

I’m really looking forward to this great adventure of going to a place halfway around the world and launching on a Russian rocket.

We would like to carry out 100 percent, or maybe more, of our scientific program; I would like to devote some of my spare time toward extra scientific work.

If I wasn’t doing this kind of exploration, I’d like to be doing some other kind of exploration. It might be more risky, or less risky, but, in the business of exploration, risk is part...

We’re going to be focusing our science on things that will take us farther and longer into space. For many of those experiments, the crew members are human guinea pigs, which is fine; that’s part...

In the 19th Century people were looking for the Northwest Passage. Ships were lost and brave people were killed, but that doesn’t mean we never went back to that part of the world again, and...