Duane G. Carey Quotes

Every shuttle mission's been successful.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Finally my dream came true in that there was a possibility that I could travel to the International Space Station. I've gone through the medicals and the training and now I'm officially, by the Russian Space Federation, a cosmonaut in training.

My job during the EVAs, the spacewalks, is to act as the inside coordinator. I remain on the aft flight deck of the shuttle, and I act in a manner to help the gentlemen outside, my fellow crewmates, who are performing the EVA tasks.

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

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

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.

I am definitely a little more nervous for my colleagues when I'm working at mission control than I am myself on the shuttle.

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.

During one of the Apollo missions, I saw Walter Cronkite showing off the flight plan. It just mesmerized me. All this detail! That's what I wanted.

The astronaut corps is a very small part of a very large team that enables human spaceflight.

Another real problem was over putting our helmets on for re-entry, because we all had severe head colds. They couldn't come up there and make us. Houston, you have a problem!

Our shuttle crew is four people, because we're going to transfer a crew up to station, so all the jobs are divided between four people rather than five or six people. So it's been busy.

The Space Shuttle will stop directly below the Space Station and Sergei and I will be looking out two different windows looking straight down at the Space Shuttle.

Astronauts are not superhuman. They lead ordinary lives and have varied personalities.

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.

Rendezvous day is the third day of our mission, and that's a big day for us.

I witnessed the building of the Space Shuttle Columbia, the first orbiter to be launched into space.

I fully expect that NASA will send me back to the moon as they treated Sen. Glenn, and if they don't do otherwise, why, then I'll have to do it myself.