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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
There's a lot of work to do - not only the science but maintaining the facilities up here. When you go down from a crew of six to a crew of three, obviously you've lost half of your crew time available, so it does have an impact. But it's an impact we plan for.
We're not passengers on Spaceship Earth. We're the crew.
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.
Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
And then finally, I'm the commander, so I am fundamentally responsible for the lives of the other people on board and the health and longevity of the space station. I need to bring six people back happy, healthy and feeling like they've had the best six months of their life.
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.
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.
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
It's hard to act terrified when you have 200 crew members around you.