Even with only two people on board, where maintenance is a large piece of our working day, we still have time to do scientific research. We have to be ready to support those Shuttle visits in a lot of different ways.

There weren't any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.

We're going to be focusing our science on things that will take us farther and longer into space. For many of those experiments, the crew members are human guinea pigs, which is fine; that's part of my job. I don't mind being a human guinea pig.

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

We would like to carry out 100 percent, or maybe more, of our scientific program; I would like to devote some of my spare time toward extra scientific work.

In the 19th Century people were looking for the Northwest Passage. Ships were lost and brave people were killed, but that doesn't mean we never went back to that part of the world again, and I consider it the same in space exploration.

A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression.