Robert Crippen

We were on the dark side of the Earth when we started to see outside the window this soft pink glow, which is a lot of little angry ions out there going very fast. We were hitting them very fast.

If you want to go into space first time on a new vehicle that's never been flown, you want to go with a pro.

I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67. That program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us.

I have a naturally camp sensibility and a camp sense of humour. I love the icons that gay people love.

As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.

Shaft was a pop culture figure along t he lines of, I guess, Dirty Harry - except that he wasn't as much of a racist. So yeah, I was always a fan.