I went to school at night in L.A. to brush up on my engineering while I applied to the astronaut program. I really did not know if I would get in. It was the year after the Challenger accident in 1987.
When you have teachers saying, 'I don't have enough time for hands-on activities,' we need to rethink the way we do education.
You have to actually be weighted to something to do the moonwalk, you know.
I think that people need an adrenalin rush. Folks need something aspirational; they need to do something that is hard. That's what ignites the imagination.
I stayed in the astronaut program until 1993. People ask me why I left. I thought I had a lot of things to contribute that would be difficult to do if I stayed. I thought I could have a stronger voice as an advocate for space exploration. So I ended up starting my own technology consulting company.
People put themselves in difficult situations in lots of different areas. What you count on is people taking every precaution. The aerospace industry is unique in this aspect because a thousandths-of-an-inch mistake can cause spectacular failures.
Intuitive versus analytical? That's a foolish choice. It's foolish, just like trying to choose between being realistic or idealistic. You need both in life.
Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.
Sometimes people ask me how difficult the astronaut program was, but being in Sierra Leone, being responsible for the health of more than 200 people, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at age 26 - that prepared me to take on a lot of different challenges.
As an astronaut, you have a very defined set of tasks to do. Those tasks may require you to work 60, 70 or 80 hours a week.
Everyone in the astronaut program has a degree in a science field. The crew are the ones who do the experiments, help to design some of the experiments that come from other primary researchers. So it becomes very important that you have a science background.
I think science fiction helps us think about possibilities, to speculate - it helps us look at our society from a different perspective. It lets us look at our mores, using science as the backdrop, as the game changer.
The really wonderful thing that happened to me when I was in space was this feeling of belonging to the entire universe.
One Hundred Year Starship really is about the idea that is we pursue an extraordinary tomorrow; we'll build a better world today.
A big part of engaging kids in science is not getting the single, correct answer; it's being willing to work with students to discover the correct answer.
The biggest challenge we all face is to learn about ourselves and to understand our strengths and weaknesses. We need to utilize our strengths, but not so much that we don't work on our weaknesses.
The reality is that we know that this universe, that our galaxy, has billions of stars. We know that stars have planets. So the likelihood that there is life somewhere else to me is just absolutely there.
What I'm very concerned about is how do we bolster our self-awareness as humans, as biological organisms?
The best way to get students involved in science and want to follow either science careers or incorporate it in their lives or to achieve science literacy is to expose them to the various jobs in STEM. It's broad from biologists to electricians to nanotechnologists to building fusion engines. It's a wide range of things.
Timidity does not inspire bold acts.
