If I wasn't doing this kind of exploration, I'd like to be doing some other kind of exploration. It might be more risky, or less risky, but, in the business of exploration, risk is part of the territory.

It so happened that my goals kind of matched my career progression toward becoming an astronaut.

I never made a career decision based solely on my desire to be an astronaut. I attended the Naval Academy because I wanted to be a Navy pilot. I majored in math because math had always come pretty easily to me and I liked it.

The Space Shuttle will stop directly below the Space Station and Sergei and I will be looking out two different windows looking straight down at the Space Shuttle.

Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.

Invoking Nature always measures the distance we have yet to travel to achieve real progress on environmental issues.

Touch seems to be such an important tool for enhancing social cooperation and affiliation that we have evolved a special physical route along which those subliminal feelings of social connection travel from skin to brain.

Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to 'Demon Pass.'