This vehicle is performing like a champ. I've got a super spaceship under me.

We were only on orbit a little over two days so we had no adverse effects from being weightless...

Looking down at the Earth, you started to pick up a sense of speed much more than I had noticed on orbit.

We were on the dark side of the Earth when we started to see outside the window this soft pink glow, which is a lot of little angry ions out there going very fast. We were hitting them very fast.

When you work really hard for something for a long time it's almost impossible to believe that it's coming true.

If you want to go into space first time on a new vehicle that's never been flown, you want to go with a pro.

The powered flight took a total of about eight and a half minutes. It seemed to me it had gone by in a lash. We had gone from sitting still on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center to traveling at 17,500 miles an hour in that eight and a half minutes. It is still mind-boggling to me. I recall making some statement on the air-to-ground radio for the benefit of my fellow astronauts, who had also been in the program a long time, that it was well worth the wait.