If I can get some student interested in science, if I can show members of the general public what’s going on up there in the space program, then my job’s been done.

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

The most important thing we can do is inspire young minds and to advance the kind of science, math and technology education that will help youngsters take us to the next phase of space travel.

When I got my PhD, it was a time when there were just no jobs for PhDs. Period. PhDs were getting the lowest paid technician jobs, if they were lucky, in any kind of science.

Reach for it. Push yourself as far as you can.

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

It’s not the Olympics. It’s Concord, New Hampshire, and a homecoming should reflect the community I’m part of.

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.

I don’t know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets.

I touch the future. I teach.

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...

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

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...