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.

After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we'll have room for specialists. But right now we don't.

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.

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.

Small samples in the centrifuge will spin at varying rates to create synthetic gravity, like the gravity of Mars or the gravity of the moon, and measure how the specimens respond within the centrifuge.

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.

The Space Shuttle will stop directly below the Space Station and Sergei and I will be looking out two different windows looking straight down at the Space Shuttle.