I purchased three of his space photography books as an Xmas gift to myself in December. Here are some quotes from his TED2014 Talk:
“What’s the most dangerous thing you have ever done, and why did you do it?
I know what the most dangerous thing is that I have ever done, because NASA does the math. If you look back to the first five Shuttle launches, the odds of a catastrophic event was 1 in 9.
So it’s a really interesting day when you wake up at the Kennedy Space Center, and you are going to go to space that day, because you realize that at the end of the day you’re either going to be floating effortlessly, gloriously, in space, or you’ll be dead.
You go into the suit-up room, the same room that our childhood heroes got dressed up in, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got suited in to ride the Apollo rocket that would take them to the moon. And I got suited up… and then driving to the launch pad, in the distance, lit by the huge xenon lights, is your spaceship, the vehicle that is going to take you off the planet.
And then each astronaut crawls up into the space ship. And at that moment, What has been a lifetime of dreams and denial has become real.
The Shuttle is the most complicated flying machine ever built. And in the astronaut business, we have a saying: There is no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse.
[On the ISS] You are on a million pound creation going around the world at 5 miles per second… allowing us to see the world to see the world in a way that is impossible through any other means, to be able to look down at the jaw-dropping gorgeousness of the turning orb, like a self-propelled art gallery of fantastic, constantly changing beauty that is the world itself. And you see, because of the speed, a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes for half of a year.”
The last scary part was going home in the Soyuz: “You are riding a meteorite home, and it’s scary to ride a meteorite.”
“You can now look back at what was an incredible experience. You have taken the dreams of that 9-year-old boy that were impossible and dauntingly scary, and put them into practice, and figured out a way to reprogram yourself, to change your primal fear, to allow you to come back with a set of experiences … that could never have been possible otherwise.”
Photo by John Werner of the MIT Media Lab Camera Culture group.
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