I think it's good to have competition. Now we have a third country that can launch astronauts, so it's good for all of us. It makes us a little bit more competitive and wanting to be the leader.

If you think about the energy that a rocket engine has to put out and all the fuel and you're sitting on top of like a bomb. And on the Space Shuttle, that big orange tank is filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the white cell rocket boosters on the sides are filled with solid propellant. There's a lot of energy in all those chemicals there and you've got to control it in a way so it doesn't explode. So, there's a lot of plumbing, a lot of valving, a lot of control systems, and it's a very complicated thing. So, how do you bring the price of that down?

Getting into a space suit and going outside, to me, getting your peripheral vision involved and looking at the Earth was a whole different experience than looking through the window. And it's kind of the same on earth. If you're driving in a car and you see like a beautiful sunset or landscape, it looks so much better if you stop and get out and kind of take it all in and that's kind of what it's like doing a spacewalk.

Tinkering is something we need to know how to do in order to keep something like the space station running. I am a tinkerer by nature.

As commander I was responsible for the overall success of the mission, and so I had to know at least a little bit about everything.

Space is very unforgiving business

I'm Chinese-American, of course, and so it's very interesting to see China actually launch their own astronauts, becoming the third nation, following the United States and Russia, to do so.