Philippe Perrin Quotes

In 2009 I went up on the space shuttle. I was in space for 16 days and docked at the space station for 11 days. The entire crew did five space walks, of which I was involved with three of them. When you're doing a space walk, you always have a buddy with you. It's a very dangerous environment when you're doing a space walk.

My job during the EVAs, the spacewalks, is to act as the inside coordinator. I remain on the aft flight deck of the shuttle, and I act in a manner to help the gentlemen outside, my fellow crewmates, who are performing the EVA tasks.

The exploration of space: Be it by humans or robots, based on the best choice for the mission and the most efficient means to return the data and science sought. Most of the time, this will mean we send robots due to cost and danger. But sometimes, we will need the irreplaceable judgment and descriptive abilities of a person on the spot.

I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.

I had been here five years already, training very hard, learning about the systems, the shuttle, the station systems. But, everything really became real when I started to work with them.

I'll be helping them getting suited up, getting them in the airlock, getting the airlock prepared, and getting them out the hatch, and then talking them through these three spacewalks.

Finally my dream came true in that there was a possibility that I could travel to the International Space Station. I've gone through the medicals and the training and now I'm officially, by the Russian Space Federation, a cosmonaut in training.

Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.

I've been so lucky to have done two spacewalks. If you looked at your wristwatch, I was outside about 15 hours, which is about 10 times around the world. And, you know, there's a whole time dilation, distortion thing.

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.

When this space walk will be completed, then the arm will be fully operational and ready for the next activity that will be pretty much the testing, the first flight testing of the space station arm.

You're very well trained for the spacewalk, so when you go outside, it's not like the movies.

If you're going to go into space, you have to have an objective, a mission. Where do you want to go? Earth orbit? The moon? Mars? What's the technology to get there? You develop the technology for the mission.

On my first mission, I was the spacewalk supervisor: the person that runs the spacewalk from inside the vehicle. As such, I was the one that closed the hatch when my colleagues left to work outside for six hours. And I was also the person who opens the hatch when they come back, and we repressurize.

I've completed half of my space training at Space City in Moscow. I love adventure, and I've been training in a centrifuge and MiG Fighter with a view to going into space and being a spokesman for space exploration!

I've put a lot of my life into making it possible to fly in space at all.

Well, we have two major goals. The most important one is to get the station arm on board the station, because that's this really milestone in the space station building since from now on they will be using this arm to continue building the space station.

We were only on orbit a little over two days, so we had no adverse effects from being weightless.

The space shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle. It is unlike any other thing that we've ever built. Its capabilities have carried several hundred people into space.

I have wanted to fly into space for many years, but never imagined it would really be feasible.

Especially when I first really started to work with Kenneth and Franklin, who had been in space already. And so, they were able to talk about space and tell me a few things about how things would really happen.

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, specifically to live in on the space station for six months, to command a space ship and to fly a new rocket ship.

I don't think we're going to build a 50-person spacecraft or a 100-person spacecraft.

I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.

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.