To be one of the world's top space robotic arm operators is a necessary skill for an astronaut, but it doesn't have much carry-over.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We didn't use the shuttle robot arm before, so this has been a training flow to get ready for that.
I'll be the person using the shuttle robotic arm.
And now for Return to Flight, I'm chief of robotics working in the astronaut office in Houston, as a Canadian.
It's fun to work the robotic arm in part because it's really a team effort.
After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we'll have room for specialists. But right now we don't.
Astronauts are not superhuman. They lead ordinary lives and have varied personalities.
Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.
In the Astronaut Office we're never totally out of training, we always keep our hand in it. But after five years, things have changed and so it's been good to get back into the flow and relearn a lot of things.
We don't have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do.
To me, there is something superbly symbolic in the fact that an astronaut, sent up as assistant to a series of computers, found that he worked more accurately and more intelligently than they. Inside the capsule, man is still in charge.