“You might have heard about a transformation that can occur when someon...” — Leroy Chiao Quote

“You might have heard about a transformation that can occur when someone first sees Earth from space - how it becomes harder to think about 'my country' or 'my people' and harder not to think about 'our planet.' I can tell you, that transformation is real.”

“I'm skeptical of claims that we've been visited by aliens from another planet or other dimension, but I don't rule it out 100 percent. I have an open mind, and I do believe there's other life in the universe.”

“Coming down under a parachute is quite different as well. You hit the ground pretty hard, but all the systems work very well to keep it from hurting, so it doesn't even hurt when you hit. It was a great experience to be able to do both.”

“I always say getting my bachelor's was the single hardest thing I've done in my life. Once I got to university, I was working harder than I ever had before and, for the first time in my life, I was getting bad grades. It was demoralising.”

“I'm Chinese-American, of course, and so it's very interesting to see China actually launch their own astronauts, becoming the third nation, following the United States and Russia, to do so.”

“Mars missions will require up to three years in reduced gravity, so we need to make sure astronauts can not only survive but thrive as they move outward to explore this new world.”

“Age can be wonderful for red wine, but not for spacecraft.”

“As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt.”

“I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.”

“You'd be surprised. A number of developers recognize that having a cultural activity in their space brings kudos. People like the idea of being near to creatives.”

“Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.”