Umberto Guidoni 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.

You can't 'control' a Mars mission from Earth. The Mars mission is going to have to be controlled by the people on Mars... There is just too much involved that is out of sight of Earth.

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.

It's very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there's radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It'd be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth.

I feel privileged and honored to have flown. It's been a tremendous ride, looking back on the legacy and accomplishments, like the Hubble telescope and the launching of the International Space Station in 1998.

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.

And now for Return to Flight, I'm chief of robotics working in the astronaut office in Houston, as a Canadian.

We have never lost a crew member on the space station, but of course, the Columbia accident. I was - I'd already been an astronaut for a decade when the crew of Columbia was killed. And I went through test pilot school. Rick Husband and I were out at Edwards at test pilot school together. He was the commander of Columbia.

There should be an international lunar base. That is certainly doable.

So, for me, I make no difference whether I'm training with my shuttle crew or the Expedition crew. Of course, I think I want to take more care of the Expedition crew, because they're going to stay there for a long time.

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.

If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.

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.

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.

Spacewalking is a little like rock climbing in that everything, including and especially oneself, must be tethered or docked at all times. If you forget to tether a tool, it's gone. Ditto yourself.

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.

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.

In 1983, NASA invited Canada to fly three payload specialists, in part because we had contributed the robotic arm that is used on the shuttle.

After the Shuttle checks out on its two upcoming flights, it will be ready to take larger components up to the International Space Station later this fall.

Putting seven people in orbit should not cost more than flying a commercial jet around Earth.

Back in the days of Apollo, sending humans to the moon was the only viable way to get the scientific data we wanted. But now, with our computer and robotics technology, there's very little an astronaut can do on Mars that a well-designed rover can't.

We are not building the space station for science any more than we went to the moon for science, but we got a hell of a lot of good science out of it.

When I became an astronaut, I was an engineer.

When you think about exploring deep space, it's very dangerous for humans. To potentially sacrifice human life is a delicate proposition. On the flip side, if you want to send a robot to another planet for an extended period of time and at some point you know it'll cease to function, it's not considered a tragedy.

We are going into space, and we need protection. And in case we need to space walk, we'll have to go outside.