Having three operational vehicles in the fleet affords the shuttle program great schedule flexibility as we move toward flying safely and completing the international space station.
I think both the space shuttle program and the International Space Station program have not really lived up to their expectations.
When Russians were having troubles, the Space Shuttle supported the Space Station Mir bringing up much needed supplies and replacements, critical spares, really. That they were able to keep their space station going for much longer than they would have without us. So, I think that shows the value of international cooperation.
NASA is developing space taxis to shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station. And just like New York taxis, they're all going to be driven by aliens.
Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.
When I was in high school we had the first shuttle launch, and it reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the space program. I was in awe of the space shuttle as such a tremendous machine taking people into space. It seemed like such a wonderful thing that I wanted to be a part of.
It's pretty amazing to me that we have had a space shuttle program that's lasted for 30 years - for one space shuttle. That's quite an achievement.
In 2009 I went up on the space shuttle. I was in space for 16 days and docked at the space station for 11 days. The entire crew did five space walks, of which I was involved with three of them. When you're doing a space walk, you always have a buddy with you. It's a very dangerous environment when you're doing a space walk.
The Space Shuttle will stop directly below the Space Station and Sergei and I will be looking out two different windows looking straight down at the Space Shuttle.
We've learned a lot by building the International Space Station, the good, the bad. But, the fact is is that working together as a team, unity aboard that space station, we can accomplish great things.
It's an international space station. We have crew members from both the U.S. and Russia and now the United Kingdom with Tim Peake from the U.K... It's great to see that, on this space station, that we can work across cultures in a very cooperative way.
After the Shuttle checks out on its two upcoming flights, it will be ready to take larger components up to the International Space Station later this fall.
We certainly would not be here, living and working on the International Space Station without the commitment and dedication of all the folks who worked the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo Programs as well as the Russian Space Program.
I really love sharing with young Canadians the changes we're seeing in the space program right now with what we call "commercial space." We have commercial cargo delivery to the space station, and now we have what we call "commercial crew," where we're going to be delivering people to low orbit on new vehicles that are being designed by Boeing and SpaceX.
A lot of these things will fly in later forms on the space station themselves, or a later form of that research will, once they kind of find out some of the basics from flying it on shuttle.
We were trying to do as much science as we could because that was the main purpose of the international space station. But without the shuttle to bring up heavy laboratory equipment and bring back samples, we were limited by what we could do, but I was proud that we actually accomplished more science that was planned for the flight. And I got a chance to do two Russian spacewalks on that flight, I had become an expert in U.S. spacewalks and using U.S. suits and techniques, and this was a chance to put on a Russian Orlan suit and do two construction space flights outside of the space station.
CASIS has to succeed because for it not to succeed would be a huge setback for the International Space Station program.