Leroy Chiao Quotes

Every shuttle mission's been successful.

And the first flight of the tether satellite happened in '92, and I was the backup on that flight.

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.

On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.

And just when we were at the end of our design process there was the news that the Italian government and the U.S. government had signed an agreement to fly the first Italian astronaut on that flight.

So everything turned out fine, and we were given the opportunity to go to Washington and be briefed on the project of man in space, and given the opportunity to choose whether we wanted to get involved or not.

I think both the space shuttle program and the International Space Station program have not really lived up to their expectations.

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.

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

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

So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.

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.

Well, with so many space shuttle missions that we've done, I think it's just sort of natural that each one hasn't necessarily gotten the attention that the early ones did.

It's very sad that there's going to be a hiatus in manned space flight from the U.S. The Shuttle was a fantastic, hugely complex vehicle. It was inevitable it would come to an end, but this is the opportunity for the commercial world to get involved. As the Shuttle era ends, another window of opportunity opens.

I lived at Star City for more than a year ahead of my trip to Mir on May 18, 1991 in Soyuz TM-12. My life at Star City was so remote that learning Russian became my greatest priority.

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

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.

I was working as a flight director on the Gemini IX mission, and it seemed almost overnight I was picking up the responsibilities for the Apollo Program.

We had been told many times that astronauts would not make any mistakes. They were trained to be perfect.

If I were to do a movie about Apollo 13, I'd be at NASA studying what it took to go into space. It's part of your job to go deep, to interview the right people.

I have had the privilege to be a member of many high-performance teams at NASA, both on and off the planet.

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.

If I were part of Gaganyaan, I could have been sure that for the next few years, there would have been a second space mission and a third space mission.

I was the 128th human in space. So I didn't really sweat about it.