My job during the EVAs, the spacewalks, is to act as the inside coordinator. I remain on the aft flight deck of the shuttle, and I act in a manner to help the gentlemen outside, my fellow crewmates, who are performing the EVA tasks.
I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.
Do you know who takes weekday shuttle flights between Washington and New York? People who think they are too important for the train, let alone the bus.
Press junkets are incredibly annoying. You sit in a chair for three to six hours and have different journalists shuttle in for three minutes at a time, asking cheesy movie questions to get a quick sound bite - and that's their only objective. You can't really move or eat. You're just stuck there. It's pressure, constant pressure.
I drove a blue and yellow Super Shuttle van for two 10-hour shifts on the weekend after a week at ACT of 10 A.M.-10 P.M. I wasn't surviving too much.
Millions of Indians undertake their daily commute in our cities using their own vehicles, cabs, or other modes of personal transportation. With Shuttle, we intend to create a comfortable and reliable commute experience for them at the tap of a button on their smartphones.
Space travel is the only technology that is more dangerous and more expensive now than it was in its first year. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin, the space shuttle ended up being more dangerous and more expensive to fly than those first throwaway rockets, even though large portions of it were reusable. It's absurd.
When I did my spacewalks, it was during space station construction. So the shuttle was docked to the fledgling ISS at the time. So we would always stay tethered.
I've had a chance to fly a lot of different airplanes, but it was nothing like the shuttle ride.
In the astronaut business - the shuttle is a very complicated vehicle; it's the most complicated flying machine ever built. And in the astronaut business, we have a saying, which is, 'There is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse.'
