Early success is a terrible teacher. You're essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can't do it. You don't know how.

No one ever accomplished anything great sitting down.

Scientific literacy is one of the underpinnings of everything I do. It's why I work with schools. It's why I teach at university. I do a lot of outreach to try and improve general scientific literacy, but the core of all scientific literacy is just literacy.

The cool things about space is when you put your pants on here, you can put them on two legs at a time.

One Chief Astronaut used to make a point of phoning the front desk at the clinic where applicants are sent for medical testing, to find out which ones treated the staff well-and which ones stood out in a bad way. The nurses and clinic staff have seen a whole lot of astronauts over the years, and they know what the wrong stuff looks like. A person with a superiority complex might unwittingly, right there in the waiting room, quash his or her chances of ever going to space.

The Bahamas are gorgeous. The deep trench in the ocean floor called the Tongue of the Ocean, which comes between the islands, is the most beautiful deep indigo colour.

Our role is to develop techniques that allow us to provide emergency life-saving procedures to injured patients in an extreme, remote environment without the presence of a physician.