Tom Hanks Quotes

Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.

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

He who commands an Apollo flight will not command a second one.

The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer - which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff - pulled up to the launch pad.

In a small spacecraft, it was hard for the other two guys to sleep when the on-duty man was talking to Mission Control regularly.

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.

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.

I operated a periscopic TV camera so the commander, Anatoly Artsebarsky, could establish where we were heading. It is real teamwork on Soyuz.

For some time, I thought Apollo 13 was a failure. I was disappointed I didn't get to land on the moon. But actually, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.

Roger, we copy. It was beautiful from here, Tranquility. Over.

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.

So, whenever Scooter was the Pilot, he never had a chance to fly the orbiter. So, the joke is: I'm going to have a chance to fly it first and hand it over to him.

It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.

We've all heard about space and landing on the moon, but somehow it's a very tom-boyish adventure. It's planting the flag on the moon by Neil Armstrong, and it has this very male-hero edge to it.

You don't think about the danger. The spaceship becomes your home.

Being in space, I'm really looking forward to working with this team of folks that I'm with.

Because when we're in space, my job is primarily getting us there and getting us back.

Another real problem was over putting our helmets on for re-entry, because we all had severe head colds. They couldn't come up there and make us. Houston, you have a problem!

Rendezvous day is the third day of our mission, and that's a big day for us.

The much-hyped Ares 1-X was much ado about nothing.

Pioneering in space was something I would willingly give my life for.

I fully expect that NASA will send me back to the moon as they treated Sen. Glenn, and if they don't do otherwise, why, then I'll have to do it myself.

While on the space station, I kept up with news a couple of ways - Mission Control sent daily summaries, and I would scan headlines on Google News when we had an Internet connection, which was about half the time.

It's a really big deal to do a spacewalk. It's much riskier than staying indoors. It's complex. It uses up a lot of the precious resources onboard. It uses up oxygen. It uses up carbon dioxide scrubbers.

To be on my very first spacewalk, to be outside, and to have contamination in my suit to the point that I couldn't see in either eye - that, I think, would cause some people to lose control.