Viewing our planet was so compelling. Words like beautiful and awesome just don't do it justice. I felt that I was looking at a paradise. I was looking at heaven. I can't imagine any place being more beautiful than our planet and how lucky we are to be able to live here.
To become an astronaut is not a question of being the best at something or things coming easy to you, but it's being a person that can work with others and not give up. And, for me, that was part of it too.
I think most astronauts are not risk takers. We take calculated risks for something that we think is worthwhile.
I applied to be an astronaut four times. I was rejected three times before I was accepted. So, it's about that, not - following your dream and not giving up.
The hardest thing for me as an astronaut was to improve my swimming skills.
At every step of the way, when I had trouble, there were people that came in, in my life that helped me. It's important to go seek help when you need it, and to give help when other people need it. And that is really more important than coming in with a gigantic brain into the astronaut program.
I was the first person to tweet from space, but now every astronaut tweets from space and does Instagram and Snapchat and Face - they have Facebook going. I think it's more of a personal relationship they have with space now. They see it as more obtainable than me watching my superhero Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon. It's like, there's no way I can do that.
My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.
Astronauts cannot pick their nicknames and can only get their nicknames from other astronauts. Any astronaut who tries to give himself a cool nickname will regret it by getting just the opposite from his astronaut friends.
The reason we have the stars twinkle at night is because the light is being kind of blurred by the atmosphere around the Earth. That is why the Hubble Space Telescope is so good, because it is above the atmosphere. So it is kind of like looking at the sun from the bottom of a swimming pool, versus looking at the sun above the swimming pool.
