Some people will always be volunteers to explore, and it is, in my mind, a privilege.

I am definitely a little more nervous for my colleagues when I'm working at mission control than I am myself, on the shuttle.

On the day a country decides not to invest a cent in innovation, discovery or exploration, that country decides to be a tributary to others.

A lot of people, I think, would love to see the earth from above, wear a spacesuit. Certainly, when I was a kid, I wanted to wear a spacesuit.

The one thing we can't really train for is weightlessness, real weightlessness. It's a ton of fun. It's pure Newtonian physics. You push in one direction, you go in the opposite direction with an equal force.

Almost everything I do when I approach an operational problem comes from the time I've been in space. It's a way of organizing your thoughts. We use problem-solving; what we call "what-if-ing." What if this happened? What would we do? We go over plan B, C, D, E, F, and whatever else, depending on the criticality of what we're doing. This kind of thing can be applied almost everywhere, even at home.

The opportunities to become an astronaut in Canada were far and few.