Historically, a successful life in comedy is a dream that’s as equally pondered and unpursued as being an astronaut.
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.
I grew up in Texas City, Texas. I didn’t know anybody who was a director or whose parents or grandparents were directors. I met somebody from a nearby town one time whose father had been to the moon – it was far more likely to be an astronaut than it was to be a writer or a director.
It’s a little surprising to me that I’m the first Houstonian to be an astronaut.
I’d love to be an astronaut. I bet you get a better understanding of our planet seeing it from a distance.
Becoming an astronaut was a little bit of happenstance for me.
I wanted to make sure that the man who found the genie would not take terrible advantage of her, so he needed to be a person of integrity and honor – which is why I made the male lead an astronaut. The rest, as they say, is history.
On the day I started college in 1979, no woman had ever been on the United States Supreme Court or served as the Speaker of the House. None had been an astronaut or the solo anchor of a network evening news broadcast. Not one had been president of an Ivy League college or run a serious campaign for president.
I wanted to be an astronaut and wanted to go to space camp, but then I found out that I was too short to become an astronaut. My mom really made me believe that if I worked hard enough and if I really wanted to do it, I could do it.
Being a rock & roll star has become as legitimate a career option as being an astronaut or a policeman or a fireman.
I’ve been lucky enough to do theatre, film, and television for a career. Unless I get offered a job as an astronaut, I won’t stray too far from it.
Back in the days of Apollo, sending humans to the moon was the only viable way to get the scientific data we wanted. But now, with our computer and robotics technology, there’s very little an astronaut can do on Mars that a well-designed rover can’t.
I joined the Army out of a deep sense of duty, but wanting to be an astronaut feels more like my destiny.
I always wanted to be an astronaut.
I seriously feel like Bowie was an astronaut who went into space and experienced things and brought back these… treasures.
My parents are from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I feel like it’s an old Southern thing where people say that, as a kid, you can be an astronaut or a ballerina or a singer, but as a grown person, you need to go and get a job.
My feelings are ‘Godspeed, John Glenn.’ But I feel badly that he took a spot away from a young astronaut who had probably waited three or four years for that slot. He’s already had his ticker-tape parade.
I’d love to go back to space, I don’t know any astronaut who doesn’t want to.
The clothes are different: pre-dog, I used to be very finicky and self-conscious about how I looked; now I schlep around in the worst clothing – big heavy boots, baggy old sweaters, a hooded down parka from L.L. Bean that makes me look like an astronaut.
As a child, I wanted to be an astronaut, then a fighter pilot, and then later, as I grew up, I was focused on scoring high marks so that I could do an MBA in marketing.
It takes an astronaut so long to get to space – that’s how long it takes to catch up on my music.
From the age of 14, I remember thinking I wanted to be a comedian. But that was like saying I wanted to be an astronaut. It felt like a million miles away, something I could never do, but would be great to.
Then, much later, my next dream was to become an astronaut, and I was fortunate to realize that dream, also.
Somehow, I knew you had to have perfect eyesight to be a test pilot, and so that was it for my astronaut career.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be in business or politics, like a CEO of a big corporation or a U.S. senator. There were also times I wanted to be an astronaut or a military officer. Yes, there were moments when I thought about doing this as a woman.
I have gone through so many examinations of what a hero is, between the World War II stuff and the astronaut stuff.
To me, fighting in Strikeforce was a dream, like saying ‘I want to be an astronaut and go to the moon.’ You don’t think that it’s actually is going to happen, you just wish it.
Like a lot of kids, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. With me, it stuck more than most kids. Ever since I was little, I wanted to do it.
Never in a million years would I have thought I could have been an astronaut candidate.
I started out as a farm girl in Iowa, and I dreamed of being an astronaut and an explorer. And I made it.
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.
I actually wanted to be an astronaut, but I don’t have a mathematical brain.
I saw this movie ‘The Right Stuff’ when I was in college, and it really rekindled my interest in being an astronaut. I started taking those steps, and then I realized it would be the chance of a lifetime. It would be a dream life: not just a job, but the whole life.
As a kid, I was obsessed with space. Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that, I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me.
I think there would be no shortage of applicants to the government astronaut corps to be settlers on the planet Mars. And I think this would be very inspiring.
In the ’60s astronauts were rockstars. Everyone wanted to be an astronaut.
There’s a perspective that I’ve gained as an astronaut that I didn’t get from my science activities. In my science activities, I learned by the seat of my pants. Spending 17 years as an astronaut, I learned the NASA formalism of systems engineering as if my life depended on it. Literally.
I’ve always hankered after going into space and walking on the moon and Mars. I did want to be an astronaut, and had there been a manned space flight programme in the U.K., I would have been knocking on the door.
If you want to be an actress or an astronaut or a doctor or anything in between, I just want to let kids know – and especially kids that look like me know – that you can do it. Even though you’re not seen, you can make yourself seen.
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.
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 was a frustrated astronaut all my life. I grew up at a time when space seemed to have no boundaries, and lots of us presumed humans would be living on the moon and landing on Mars.
Mental fitness is obviously important to being an astronaut, but so it physical fitness. For example, space walks are extremely physically demanding. We train for them in a giant swimming pool and we wear this suit that weighs about 300 pounds.
When I was in Class Four, I wanted to be an astronaut. I am still fascinated with the universe. I decided I wanted to be an actor when I was in Class Eight.
If I have a daughter and she grows up to be an astronaut, she’s gonna end up on a Black History Month stamp.
In the astronaut business – the shuttle is a very complicated vehicle; it’s the most complicated flying machine ever built. And in the astronaut business, we have a saying, which is, ‘There is no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse.’
The whole Hubble program has just been a fabulous testament to the NASA science community and the NASA astronaut community.
I grew up in Spokane, Washington, and I can’t recall ever not wanting to be an astronaut.
As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes.
We do not become an astronaut because we fear not only the risk of space, but we fear the risk of failure along the way more than we want to put in the work to make it happen – and it is easier not to try.
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.
My heart would race when I went to Pacific Science Center because I would pretend to be an astronaut, and now I get to come back and give back to the community that I think compelled me to where I am.
Spoiler alert: I did not become an astronaut.
If my vision was good enough, I’d be an astronaut.
Most of my family and friends are very familiar with the human space flight program and with the excitement of becoming an astronaut.
That I even get to play a sold-out show where people know the words and I’m singing about things I’m connected to is such a blessing. It’s the equivalent of a nine-year-old saying, ‘I want to be an astronaut when I grow up,’ and then getting to go to the moon.
One thing I probably share with everyone else in the astronaut office is composure.
