Chris Hadfield Quotes

I thought I was prepared for space, and it still absolutely defied every expectation and dream. It is an incredible thing to put yourself on a rocket and launch off the planet. It is an amazing thing to see the planet from space. This blue sphere is almost indescribably beautiful.

When you launch in a rocket, you're not really flying that rocket. You're just sort of hanging on.

A zero-gravity flight is a first step toward space travel.

The space shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle. It is unlike any other thing that we've ever built. Its capabilities have carried several hundred people into space.

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.

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

It's hard not to be excited when you're going to find a way to land on the moon.

I still dream about being on the space station with the feeling of being weightless. The weightlessness is the most amazing, relaxing and natural feeling.

When the space shuttle's engines cut off, and you're finally in space, in orbit, weightless... I remember unstrapping from my seat, floating over to the window, and that's when I got my first view of Earth. Just a spectacular view, and a chance to see our planet as a planet.

I wanted to get superimposed on a shuttle launch.

You know, west Texas is already beautiful to view from the ground. I can't even imagine what it must look like as you're floating down to Earth in a capsule making its return trip from outer space.

I was a flight engineer on my second flight, which is the most senior position a non-American can have aboard the shuttle. We're the cockpit crew. We fly the vehicle up to space, dock the vehicle to the space station, undock it at the end of the mission, and return it to the ground.

The first time I went into space was just so much more than you could imagine or prepare yourself for.

After being once in space, I was keen to go back there. But it didn't happen.

Having the opportunity to fly the first flight of something like a space shuttle was the ultimate test flight.

I thought any chance I had of space travel would be military or government-controlled.

I've been lucky enough to fly to space twice.

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.

They forbade me from flying, despite all my protests and arguments. After being once in space, I was desperately keen to go back there. But it didn't happen.

Spaceflight, especially in the Mercury spacecraft, clearly wasn't going to be much like flying an airplane.

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.

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

I'm not going into infinity. I'm going into low earth orbit.

It is rash to set limits to the progress of science. A man who had maintained at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee that within fifty years one would fly the Atlantic in a matter of hours would have risked being certified and locked up; yet we have seen this happen, and in the circumstances I am not prepared to rule out with any confidence the possibility one day of journeys through space in vessels carrying supplies of food and oxygen to the moon and the nearer planets.

Going to Mars is a bunch of baby steps, and it started off with the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin.