Selection of crews is always been somewhat of a mystery.

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.

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.

The real pleasure was having the chance to enjoy being weightless, and the other was to spend some time looking out at this beautiful Earth that we're all lucky to inhabit.

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

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.

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

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

Having the opportunity to fly the first flight of something like a space shuttle was the ultimate test flight.

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.

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

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.

If you want to go into space first time on a new vehicle that's never been flown, you want to go with a pro.

Selection of crews is always been somewhat of a mystery.

The nature of the shuttle was, we couldn't put a crew escape system in it.

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.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

Sir, you have tasted two whole worms; you have hissed all my mystery lectures and been caught fighting a liar in the quad; you will leave by the next town drain.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

The only mystery in life is why the kamikaze pilots wore helmets.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

I think that the ideal space must contain elements of magic, serenity, sorcery and mystery.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

The mystery is what prompted men to leave caves, to come out of the womb of nature.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is God's gift, that's why we call it the present.

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.

I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it's a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death.

It is a great mystery that though the human heart longs for Truth, in which alone it finds liberation and delight, the first reaction of human beings to Truth is one of hostility and fear!

It is not as though the process of production holds any mystery for me, I know exactly what it involves and I know the predominant concern in shooting one of those things is production values - or as they would say, seeing it all up there on screen.

The great mystery to me is how restaurant critics think they can get away with doing their job without anybody noticing who they are.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.

It may interest you to know that my breakup with Terry and this mystery did not happen concurrently in real life. That is a writer's device, which places Gabriel under even greater pressure when the mystery begins to reveal itself.

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

That was the crossover line for us, to be able to play that many shows, sell them out real quick and have that tribe queue up outside and still be a mystery to everybody else.

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

To us sin has not become any less of a mystery or a pain.

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

It would certainly be interesting to know what the CIA knew about Oswald six weeks before the assassination, but the contents of this particular message never reached the Warren Commission and remain a complete mystery.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists.

I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.

The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.