Astronaut Life Quotes

The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.

Being an astronaut is a wonderful career. I feel very privileged. But what I really hope for young people is that they find a career they're passionate about, something that's challenging and worthwhile.

In space, you need to stay as 'usual' as possible. On the space station, I would brush my hair every day.

I was only a hero by default. The flights were few and far between. There weren't that many astronauts. The moon flights were so interesting and exciting.

As far as the sounds on the space station, it's pumps, fans, motors, certain modules are louder than others, but it's generally a pretty nice working environment. It's not too loud or too smelly.

As we all know, there is no underwear in space.

The great thing about being an astronaut is you kind of get to do a little bit of everything. I mean, we're going to ride a rocket uphill.

After my spacewalks, I am quite exhilarated but also tired, similar to a workout on Planet Earth.

That's really why I want to go to space - I want to be weightless for so long that it gets boring.

I'd love to go back to space, I don't know any astronaut who doesn't want to.

I can remember walking on the moon.

Still, I also know that most people, including me, tend to applaud the wrong things: the showy, dramatic record-setting sprint rather than the years of dogged preparation or the unwavering grace displayed during a string of losses. Applause, then, never bore much relation to the reality of my life as an astronaut, which was not all about, or even mostly about, flying around in space.

Actually, it wasn't a kid dream, because my father was a cosmonaut, and I was able to see all pros and cons of this job, and when I was a kid, it was more minuses than plusses: always busy, studying all day long, exams.

Apart from the obvious advantages of having ice to melt, filter, then drink, you can also break apart the water's hydrogen from its oxygen. Use the hydrogen and some of the oxygen as active ingredients in rocket fuel and keep the rest of the oxygen for breathing. And in your spare time between space missions, you can always go ice skating on the frozen lake created with the extracted water.

Being an astronaut, there are not a lot of things that have really shocked me in my life.

But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.

Traveling through space is stupifyingly monotonous.

We try to keep it a normal day while we're up in space. You know, you don't want to change your time cycle too much, so we just keep it normal. And so, about 5 or 6 o'clock at night, after we finish working, we knock it off by having prerecorded shows that we watch sometimes through the computer while we're eating dinner.

Once you've grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a groundpounder.

I saw this movie 'The Right Stuff' when I was in college, and it really rekindled my interest in being an astronaut. I started taking those steps, and then I realized it would be the chance of a lifetime. It would be a dream life: not just a job, but the whole life.

I always have traveled with a camera throughout my life, but I always had my old 35mm film camera. When I was training to go into space, the only equipment there was a digital camera. I went through a fast-track class on Earth. It actually was fun, though I'm basically a dinosaur with computers.

I can honestly say - and it's a big surprise to me - that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.

I'm happy here on the surface of the earth. If space travel ever got to be as simple as jet travel today, yeah, I'd take a jet flight to the moon.

Life as an astronaut in space is a very interesting one. There are things we all take for granted here on earth, like gravity, that can make things a bit challenging. One of the fun things about getting here is the zero gravity and floating around. But it also makes things very difficult.

Now, as an astronaut, I have to bring a Sharpie with me everywhere - so I have a pen to sign autographs.