Ed Dwight Quotes

I loved being a test pilot, and so being an astronaut was - was not my end point in, you know, either I achieved success by being an astronaut, or if I don't get picked, I'm not successful. I loved my career as a pilot, and it was a bonus to be selected as an astronaut.

I thought that NASA didn't take biologists and so nothing would come of it. But I knew I would regret it if I did not apply.

Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.

In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.

Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business.

Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts.

Somehow, I knew you had to have perfect eyesight to be a test pilot, and so that was it for my astronaut career.

I believe that there will be women astronauts sometime just as there are women airplane pilots.

I was a naval officer and aviator. I tested airplanes and got selected to be an astronaut later on.

My dad worked at NASA his whole career; he's a research scientist.

I knew I wanted to be a part of NASA in any case, and so I chose my goals in education to be consistent with working at NASA even as, you know, a scientist.

It was a unique childhood, to say the least. My father was born in Patiala to refugee parents and was a part of the Indian Air Force. The talented few amongst the Air Force pilots are made test pilots. Test pilots are best suited to look at the space programme as they are trained to expect the unexpected.

Nothing focuses your mind quite like flying a jet. That's one reason NASA requires that astronauts fly T-38s: it forces us to concentrate and prioritize in some of the same ways we need to in a rocket ship.

Not long after I got my test pilot qualification, I realised there was no manned space flight programme in the U.K., and there was unlikely to be one.

I didn't go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or to go the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer, and that was the next notch in my profession.

I'm actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.

I had always been interested in the space program, and I didn't know if I could be an astronaut like I'd dreamt about when I was a little kid - to me it sounded kind of silly, someone grow up to be an astronaut - but, when I was in my 20s, I thought maybe I can get a job with NASA or a contractor, do something with the space program.

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

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.

What I was most curious about was why Armstrong, a top U.S. Navy test pilot, flying the most advanced aircraft in the world, would want to join the astronaut corps in 1962, which included chimpanzees and monkeys.

Only in space did I realize how lucky I am to be Korean. Only in Korea could I have gone to space before turning 30 years old.

All astronauts, even civilians like me without pilot experience, have to learn how to co-pilot a jet called a T-38.

If you want more kids to become engineers in space, travellers, and pilots, then you have to expose them to those types of careers.

I wanted to be an aerospace engineer because I really like space. But I didn't go to the army.

NASA is a big organization with a lot of needs that have to be met. So there are a lot of opportunities.