Top Highlights

• What is it worth to see two former bitter enemies transform weapons into transport for exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge? What is it worth to see former enemy nations turn their warriors into crewmates and lifelong friends? This is impossible to put a dollar figure on, but to me it’s one of the things that makes this project worth...
• I’ve heard it said that the children of conflict seekers are raised to have the emotional control their parents lack and then some—that fighters raise peacemakers. My parents bought a series of boats, always in deplorable condition.
• …scattered one thousand four hundred feet. Temperature one nine. Dew point one seven. Altimeter two niner niner five. ATIS information Oscar…
• Every time Russian mission control talks to us we can hear the characteristic dit-dit-dit of cell phone interference. I want to yell at them to turn off their cell phones, but in the name of international cooperation I don’t.
• I smell something strangely familiar and unmistakable, a strong burned metal smell, like the smell of sparklers on the Fourth of July. Objects that have been exposed to the vacuum of space have this unique smell on them, like the smell of welding—the smell of space.