The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.

The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything youve ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy.

I never thought I didn't have a card to play.

I was born a year after Lindbergh made his historic trip across the Atlantic. Boys like either dinosaurs or airplanes. I was very much an airplane boy.

The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.

I didnt go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or to go the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer, and that was the next notch in my profession.

The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.