The thing that you worry about your first flight or any flight is some kind of a problem coming up that is going to keep you from doing it. Whether it's being hit by a car, or getting in a bad accident, or coming down with some other medical disqualification. But once the boosters light, you're going.
Leroy ChiaoIt was in the back of my mind, even while I was going to school, but it wasn't until I was at university studying engineering that I thought, well what do I really want to do? And I kind of came back to that and I said, well the degrees I'm trying to get are going to qualify me to apply. And so, that's what I did after I finished my, or after I was getting my doctorates. That's when I first applied to NASA.
Leroy ChiaoOne of the things, and the most exciting, actually definitely the most exciting thing is, having children. You know, I didn't have children before. I had been married only a year before my space station mission, so having three-year-olds is a whole new experience and that's the new adventure. It may sound funny because people have kids every day, but having your own kids, having my own kids, was as fundamentally, or maybe even more fundamentally life changing then even flying in space.
Leroy ChiaoYou saw Britain back in the early days of sailing ships. They were the sea power, the controlled the seas and they had colonies all over the world and then you can look at history and watch the way that their empire kind of crumbled. I certainly don't want that to happen to the United States in space technology.
Leroy ChiaoMy mistakes made were learning how to work with different groups of people. I mean, I went to school at Berkeley, which is a pretty diverse group, but working in a professional setting, I hadn't really done that before and learning about office politics, learning about interactions between different people and I made a lot of mistakes there during my time as a young person. I was 19 or 20 at the time. So, I would say those were my biggest career mistakes, but fortunately they were made in the context of an engineering co-op program and not in a professional field.
Leroy ChiaoThis was the first time we had two ex-Soviet Cosmonauts in Houston. A lot of us, including me, viewed it with some skepticism, because I grew up during the Cold War, so I had been hit with all this propaganda all along that their stuff wasn't that good, it wasn't that safe and we were so much better. What I found out later was that their space stuff was very good and good enough that I was certainly comfortable flying on their equipment. So, it was kind of a revelation of sorts as the years went by and I think it underscores the importance right now of international cooperation.
Leroy Chiao