And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth.
I am deeply grieved by the loss of the crew of Columbia. I express my sincere condolences to the families and friends of the astronauts. I believe that their names will remain as the bright sparkling stars in the universe and will light the way for those who will follow them on the difficult roads of space exploration.
The flight crew for the orbital mission has been picked, and I'm not on it. Of course I've been feeling pretty low for the past few days. All of us are mad because Glenn was picked.
It's really kind of a challenge to keep coordinated with the two station crews that we'll be interacting with. And of course one of them launched quite some time before our mission.
On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
Since there always has to be a certain number of astronauts manning the station at all times, one of the main aspects of the mission was to transport a new team to the station and bring back some members of the previous team back to Earth.
We used to have a crew of three on board the space station and even at one time a crew of two people, so it's something we can adjust to.
So, for me, I make no difference whether I'm training with my shuttle crew or the Expedition crew. Of course, I think I want to take more care of the Expedition crew, because they're going to stay there for a long time.
With all the weird surroundings of outer space the basic underlying theme of the show is a philosophical approach to man's relationship to woman. There are both sexes in the crew, in fact, the first officer is a woman.
