Julie Payette Quotes

Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.

From day one, I have been told I am no different from the male astronauts. As a pilot, I flew in the sky. Now that I am an astronaut, I will fly in space.

It is an incredible treat and certainly one of the highlights of any astronaut's career to do a spacewalk.

I thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually, not so much the Moon, but flying in a completely new medium.

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

I didn't go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or to go the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer, and that was the next notch in my profession.

It so happened that my goals kind of matched my career progression toward becoming an astronaut.

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

If my vision was good enough, I'd be an astronaut.

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.

Every shuttle mission's been successful.

Fortunately, I got called down to NASA for an interview. And one thing led to the next, and one day I got that call. I've been here about seven years now and am really enjoying it.

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

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.

I think the astronaut job is the best job in the world. I realized when I was older and started applying for it that it's a pretty cool job.

I've always hankered after going into space and walking on the moon and Mars. I did want to be an astronaut, and had there been a manned space flight programme in the U.K., I would have been knocking on the door.

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.

The advice I was given was just to make sure you look out of the window occasionally. It's something no astronaut ever gets tired of doing.

And, so I set my goals on astronaut because, as a military aviator, it was, I considered that to be about the peak of a flying career.

Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts.

Then, much later, my next dream was to become an astronaut, and I was fortunate to realize that dream, also.

By my mid-30s, I just thought, 'This is not going to happen. I am never going to become an astronaut in the U.K.'

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

This has been a great experience for me. The first couple of days you don't always feel too well. You adjust to the fluid shifting, how to fly through space without hitting things or anybody else. But then you get in a groove.

I don't think you ever really decide that you want to be an astronaut. I put in an application and hoped for the best.