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For NASA, space is still a high priority.

If you want to go into space first time on a new vehicle that's never been flown, you want to go with a pro.

We'd never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn't been for space exploration and NASA.

That's what we want to do here at Johnson Space Center. I think what we have always brought to NASA and brought to the country is trying to push the boundaries, trying to go to the next level.

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

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.

I think a benefit is that we try to put it up in a short time. From the decision to do this mission until we fly, it's six months and one week or so, so it's a very short time.

To try to really land a spacecraft really on another world is really difficult, and if we lose that ability, it's going to be heartbreaking.

Yeah, I wasn't chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn't planned by anyone.

You don't think about the danger. The spaceship becomes your home.