Shannon Walker

When your flying in a jet aircraft, everything goes much faster.

The Soyuz is probably only slightly smaller than the Dragon.

I don't really have a lot of anxieties.

Having the opportunity to look out this wonderful 360-degree-view, down at the Earth - and at the rest of the universe - is pretty special.

If you work hard, the things to which you aspire can happen.

There is something quite special about getting into a plane with my mother and going somewhere.

One thing I really like about flying is that it is an activity that my mother and I can do together.

To be able to watch our colleagues, our friends come home safely is always an emotional event.

It is incredibly exciting to be able to actually go and live on the space station after having worked so long on seeing the hardware built, getting it launched and maintaining it.

When I was in high school we had the first shuttle launch, and it reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the space program. I was in awe of the space shuttle as such a tremendous machine taking people into space. It seemed like such a wonderful thing that I wanted to be a part of.

I do remember the space program from my earliest memories. It's always been with me and something I wanted to be a part of.

My sleeping bag is affixed to a wall and I climb inside and sort of float around in the sleeping bag at night while I'm sleeping.

In some ways, it's the start of all those science-fiction movies that we watched as kids coming to fruition where you've got entities living and working out in space and off the planet. Just to be at the forefront of that is enormously exciting.

I would love to fly to the Moon or Mars.

All astronauts have degrees in science, engineering, or medicine, but other than that, there's no one path to NASA. The one thing everyone has in common is we've all exceled in our chosen field.

I liked learning things. I liked solving problems and doing my homework. I realize a lot of kids don't like that, but I always enjoyed going to school.

Sometimes you can have too much information. You keep gathering information and never bother to find out what the real answer is.

We have stars, planets and galaxies in space. There's lots of nothingness out there, but it's really not. There's gas, dust and other bits of matter floating around emptier' areas of the universe, but you can't see it very easily.

Like a lot of kids, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. With me, it stuck more than most kids. Ever since I was little, I wanted to do it.

At a young age, I became interested in space and science after watching the U.S. land on the moon for the first time.