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

It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.

As an astronaut, you have a very defined set of tasks to do. Those tasks may require you to work 60, 70 or 80 hours a week.

Astronauts working for the government will always need to be either pilots or mission specialists. Those who want to be pilots should have military experience - ideally, a test pilot background.

To become an astronaut, someone has to have a dream of his own to do something that he or she has always wanted to do, then commit himself to making that dream come true.

It took me a long time to get selected as an astronaut. In fact, I applied for 20 years before I was selected.

There weren't any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.

There were about six years when there was not one American who went into space. We shouldn't do that again.

Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight.

I never declared I wanted to be an astronaut, as I considered that was presumptuous.