“The basic thing you have to understand is everything that happens on t...” — Ed Dwight Quote

“The basic thing you have to understand is everything that happens on that spaceship, from the time you crawl into that seat to the time it touches down, is controlled from the ground. There's no one thing that makes a good astronaut. I don't know any person with determination and will that can't go to space.”

“I went to white schools and I didn't know anything about black history.”

“I was welding art from my house, making abstract figures out of metal.”

“There's always a fine line that divides hostility from neutrality, and I don't want to pass that line.”

“I did this whole series on the buffalo soldiers-on black soldiers-I did another series on black cowboys, and I presented myself to the gallery system, and all these people with these massive collections didn't know there were black cowboys or black soldiers. I ended up hitting a niche I didn't know was there.”

“I got this letter asking me if I wanted to or if I would consider going to experimental test pilot school and becoming the first Negro astronaut and I thought it was crazy.”

“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 didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.”

“I started out as a farm girl in Iowa, and I dreamed of being an astronaut and an explorer. And I made it.”

“I flew fighters for the Navy in San Diego for three years, went and did my post-graduate education, and then I was a test pilot in Patuxent River, Maryland, for a few years. I was back in the fleet in the Navy when I was selected to come back here to NASA to become an astronaut.”

“I progressed through my schooling, undergraduate and graduate degrees, excited about math and science and engineering, but really didn't think about being an astronaut at that point. It was kind of unreachable.”

“Being an astronaut, there are not a lot of things that have really shocked me in my life.”