Helen Sharman Quotes

We have a lot of systems here on board the space station, and we can't call a repair man when one of them breaks.

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily.

There's actually an incredible amount of parallels between working in central Congo in a remote, isolated village and doing research aboard the space station.

I think the legacy of the space station will be that we can do something this technically complex in an international way.

I believe you'll see a low Earth orbit space travel business begin.

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.

We have a great NASA support team that uplinks the nightly news. And if we have favorite TV shows or movies or sporting events, they can uplink those too. We also have access to the Internet just like we would on the ground. We have email. And we video-conference with our families about once a week. We feel pretty connected up here.

It's just this beautiful laboratory in space, and it's doing a lot of really cool things. So being up there and just being able to fly through that big station one more time and do some experiments while you're up there and get that view out of the cupola... priceless.

It is time to kickstart a new U.S. space transportation industry and time to spread that industry into space itself, leveraging our space station legacy to ignite imaginations and entrepreneurship so that we can move farther out, back to the Moon, out to the asteroids, and on to Mars.

I think the International Space Station is providing a key bridge from us living on Earth to going somewhere into deep space.

The training flow for the space station is a year-and-a-half to two years.

The Progress is launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, just like the Soyuz. It almost looks the same as the Soyuz but unmanned, so, essentially filled up with supplies for us - anything from food, science experiments, repair parts, etc., can go in it.

In space, you need to stay as 'usual' as possible. On the space station, I would brush my hair every day.

My first date was with Endeavour, and my last date is going to be with Endeavour, as far as space shuttles are concerned.

We're using the space station as a test bed for some of the technologies that are going to enable us to work autonomously in space and hit some of our deep-space exploration goals.

Something people don't recognize is that being on the space station is probably a lot like being in some kind of confinement - like isolation.

When I started working at NASA and understanding what the capabilities really were of the space station and the space program, one of the biggest draws for me was the ability to do experiments in space. We can do a number of experiments where gravity is actually a variable.

If you have a Falcon Heavy, and you have a Dragon, and you have a Bigelow module, then all of a sudden, life gets interesting.

The exploration of space: Be it by humans or robots, based on the best choice for the mission and the most efficient means to return the data and science sought. Most of the time, this will mean we send robots due to cost and danger. But sometimes, we will need the irreplaceable judgment and descriptive abilities of a person on the spot.

Saved by the Bell' in space would be so great.

We're fortunate to have football on the space station.

The building of the International Space Station is something wonderful, and it will show us how to take the next step beyond low-Earth orbit.

I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.

The ride to orbit was impressive, as it always is. But once I got on board the space station, it really felt like I was visiting an old home; it felt very comfortable.

To me, the amazing thing is that so much that was science fiction back then, political fiction, today is reality. We have indeed a spacecraft called an international space station. And we have the diversity of this planet working on that ship, including Americans and Russians working side by side. I think the imagineers are the ones that set the goal. And the inventors and the technicians see that as a goal to work toward, or the political scientists and the diplomats. And eventually, that's arrived at.