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I did not come to NASA to make history.

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

I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67. That program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us.

I didn't go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or to go the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer, and that was the next notch in my profession.

And so, I was not a military test pilot, but as soon as NASA expressed an interest in flying scientists and people who were not military test pilots, that was an epiphany that just came like a stroke of lightning.

Most people know nobody in the military.

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

If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

At the end of October 4 in 1957, when I was coming back from sea duty in the South Pacific, Sputnik went up. I realized that humans would be right behind robot aircraft or spacecraft even though I really had no plans of being in aviation or a professional aviator and certainly not in the military.

We thought our careers as cosmonauts - we were young then - would end with a flight to Mars. But, you see, life has made some course corrections.