Mars has been flown by, orbited, smacked into, radar inspected, and rocketed onto, as well as bounced upon, rolled over, shoveled, drilled into, baked, and even laser blasted.
Starships are all work and no fun.
I’m not a risk taker. But astronauts are professionals, so you get out on the field and play ball. I tried to take it in stride because that’s what I had to do to get into space. That’s where I belong, and I’m pretty good at it.
I had done everything I could do as an astronaut, and we have a long line of inexperienced astronauts waiting for their first missions, and so my role really should be to step aside and help them prepare for their missions, rather than to try to get another mission.
I've always been a bit of a space geek. I wrote an article years ago about the neutral buoyancy tank, which is this biblically sized pool where they train astronauts. And it was just the coolest thing.
Astronauts working for the government will always need to be either pilots or mission specialists. Those who want to be pilots should have military experience - ideally, a test pilot background.
Everyone in the astronaut program has a degree in a science field. The crew are the ones who do the experiments, help to design some of the experiments that come from other primary researchers. So it becomes very important that you have a science background.
All of us who are flying on international space stations speak some Russian and speak some English. Both the languages are needed to fly in a Russian spacecraft and communicate with your colleagues.
There's a perspective that I've gained as an astronaut that I didn't get from my science activities. In my science activities, I learned by the seat of my pants. Spending 17 years as an astronaut, I learned the NASA formalism of systems engineering as if my life depended on it. Literally.
You may have trouble getting permission to aero or lithobrake asteroids on Earth.
To be one of the world's top space robotic arm operators is a necessary skill for an astronaut, but it doesn't have much carry-over.
And the first flight of the tether satellite happened in '92, and I was the backup on that flight.
I think I set myself on a course to become a scientist around about the time that Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' series was on television, and there really was no going back for me at that point, and then I went on to study space science and then get my Ph.D., then go aboard and work in the European Space Agency.
On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
When you're in a spacecraft, you need to know what things you can touch and what things you shouldn't touch!
Well, the coolest thing I have seen so far, in terms of, like, me being an astronaut and seeing something unusual, was the rendezvous, the docking of a Progress spaceship.
The basic thing you have to understand is everything that happens on that spaceship, from the time you crawl into that seat to the time it touches down, is controlled from the ground. There's no one thing that makes a good astronaut. I don't know any person with determination and will that can't go to space.
We had been told many times that astronauts would not make any mistakes. They were trained to be perfect.
It's a combination of science, maintenance, and general housekeeping. And then, occasionally, robotics activities or a spacewalk you might get to do.
I kind of feel like I found my cause in life servicing the Hubble Space Telescope.
I love working at NASA, but the part that has been the most satisfying on a day-to-day basis, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute, has been working on board the space station. Even if I'm just cleaning the vents in the fans, it all is important.
I interned at NASA for five years, and I grew up in Cape Canaveral, and my grandfather was an engineer on the Mercury capsule, and my grandmother was a software engineer. I literally grew up playing on the Mercury capsule prototypes.
In the Astronaut Office we're never totally out of training, we always keep our hand in it. But after five years, things have changed and so it's been good to get back into the flow and relearn a lot of things.
You wouldn't want to land on the Moon and launch to Mars. That would be very inefficient.
I operated a periscopic TV camera so the commander, Anatoly Artsebarsky, could establish where we were heading. It is real teamwork on Soyuz.
