Shannon Walker

“It's a little surprising to me that I'm the first Houstonian to be an astronaut.”

“When I became an astronaut, I knew I wanted to pursue long-duration flight aboard the station. I knew it would be a just a tremendous personal challenge, and I looked forward to it.”

“We've got pictures from the Space Station going back 20 years. We can see the glaciers receding in the photography that we do. We can see the effects of lakes drying up and other things that are happening around the planet.”

“Most of my family and friends are very familiar with the human space flight program and with the excitement of becoming an astronaut.”

“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.”

“Once you're in space, you don't get visitors very often.”

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

“The important thing is to try to stay connected with friends and family.”

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

“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.”

“When I was growing up, I used to have dreams of going to fly. Being in space reminds me of that.”

“I don't really have a lot of anxieties.”

“So much of our training focuses so much on the systems and how to operate the station, and not just the day-to-day life in terms of slowing down and enjoying the experience.”

“Well, I was quite young when we first walked on the moon; I had just turned four, but I did watch it on TV. I think that just set the seed right then that that would be a really interesting thing to do.”

“It's unfortunate, but I know it's the right thing to do to end the shuttle program. If we want to do other things, we need a different spacecraft.”

“Learning how to and being expected to know how to fly an international partner vehicle is quite something, especially having to do it all in Russian.”

“One thing in space, just like home: you cannot escape housework. Every Saturday is clean-the-station day.”

“The reason that we don't have happy hours up here is because you never know when something might actually go sideways, and so we always have to be prepared in a worst, worst case scenario to jump on our spacecraft and go home. So, we have to keep it pretty straight and narrow while we're up here.”

“I studied physics as an undergraduate, and after I graduated from Rice University, I was actually hired at the Johnson Space Center as a flight controller.”

“I'm one who likes to eat regularly, so not being able to eat for eight hours makes me a little cranky.”