Top 15 Quotes by Robert Crippen

Selection of crews is always been somewhat of a mystery.

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.

When you work really hard for something for a long time it's almost impossible to believe that it's coming true.

The space shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle. It is unlike any other thing that we've ever built. Its capabilities have carried several hundred people into space.

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 thought it was going to take a lot more countdowns on the pad. We actually did scrub once, but I figured we'd scrub several times since it's a pretty complicated vehicle.

We were only on orbit a little over two days, so we had no adverse effects from being weightless.

Living inside the shuttle was a little like camping out. We ended up sleeping in our seats. You had to pay attention to housekeeping, not get things too dirty.

Looking down at the Earth, you started to pick up a sense of speed much more than I had noticed on orbit.

You're going very fast when you're on orbit, going around the world once every hour and a half.