32 Quotes by Robert Crippen

My heart rate went up to 130-plus. Not John. He was nice, calm and collected.

He was not a guy to throw a white scarf around his neck and hop into a plane. He was an engineer and a test pilot, capable of evaluating things from a technical standpoint.

I would truly love to see us go back to the Moon and on to Mars; certainly the shuttle is not the right vehicle to make that happen.

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.

You don't break frontiers going into space by all of a sudden a big door opens and you walk through. You've got to take steps. Scott took the steps required for us to be able to fly into space.

We were flying on a winged vehicle that would do reentry different than we had ever done before. So all of those were firsts. Test pilots truly love firsts.

It was only after we got the first maneuver off that I began to enjoy the outside view. We actually could see the external tank out in front of us.

For landing, we came in over Edwards about 40,000 feet. We set up for a big circling pattern coming in to land down on the lake bed.

If you do a job, and you're not having fun doing it, you're probably not doing it right.