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...

If anything, the overriding emotion is gonna just be excitement.

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.

This is a day we have managed to avoid for a quarter of a century.

Sometimes people here can get so focused on, Oh, I’ve got to get a flight, that it becomes the end all of everything. Then they go off and fly a couple of flights and they...

I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to...

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...

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.