Duane G. Carey Quotes

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

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

I've had a chance to fly a lot of different airplanes, but it was nothing like the shuttle ride.

As someone who flew two space capsules and twice landed in the ocean, I can attest from personal experience how much logistics work is needed to get you home.

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.

I wanted to get superimposed on a shuttle launch.

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.

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

Now, as an astronaut, I have to bring a Sharpie with me everywhere - so I have a pen to sign autographs.

I've put a lot of my life into making it possible to fly in space at all.

I was born in 1960 and can still tell you the name of every astronaut from Mercury to Apollo. If I had a chance, I'd love to go into space on one of the privately developed space crafts.

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

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.

Every shuttle mission's been successful.

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

Remember, I am not trying to orbit the earth. It is a simple elevator ride for 20 minutes.

In 2009 I went up on the space shuttle. I was in space for 16 days and docked at the space station for 11 days. The entire crew did five space walks, of which I was involved with three of them. When you're doing a space walk, you always have a buddy with you. It's a very dangerous environment when you're doing a space walk.

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.

Astronauts are very professional and when they're preparing for launch, they prepare for it as the most serious endeavor of our lives.

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.

When you see the orbiter headed out the launch pad and then crawling up the hill and being hard down on the pad, it does something to you.

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.

The rockets... can be built so powerfully that they could be capable of carrying a man aloft.