Kevin A. Ford

I took a Russian class at Notre Dame. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would fly someday in a Russian spacecraft with two cosmonauts, speaking only Russian.

I enjoy going out to the plants, the factories where just some sub-element maybe of the orbiter or the space station is built. Those people take such pride in that component, and they build it to perfection, and it's just a pleasure to see that.

I grew up in Montpelier, Indiana. It's a little town in the northeast corner of Indiana. It's a rural community; about two thousand people, a very much hometown U.S.A. kind of thing.

We spend our spare time taking care of little things. I can watch a little bit of college and professional football if I want to... Our favorite pastime is trying to take pictures of our hometowns from space.

Space station is, it really is one of the more, if not the most, impressive technological achievement of the modern day, not only in what we've accomplished engineering-wise but what we've accomplished on this international scale, because anybody will tell you that half the challenge is making it all work.

Well, the coolest thing I have seen so far, in terms of, like, me being an astronaut and seeing something unusual, was the rendezvous, the docking of a Progress spaceship.