Living Space: Endeavour

Astronauts Chris Hadfield and Stan Love discuss their flights aboard space shuttle Endeavour. Both astronauts made spacewalks during their Endeavour missions to build the International Space Station.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield:

I got into the program and a decade later, amazingly enough, had a chance to fly on Endeavour and to ride Endeavour up to the International Space Station and to put on a big white suit and to open the belly of Endeavour and to actually climb outside and to crawl around the outside of that spaceship as it was docked to the space station in orbit, building things on to the International Space Station and then ride Endeavour home, and not back to Florida, we had bad weather in Florida. But where I'd been a test pilot student, where I'd watched my very first shuttle landing back on return to flight after Challenger, we landed Endeavour out in the desert at Edwards, sort of almost like a complete circle of 10 years.

Dr. Stan Love:

On my flight there had been three rookies. And so it's the flight that is the equivalent or more challenging than a Hubble flight and we had three rookies and our commander had flown once. And so we were like, "Oh, I can't believe dad gave us the keys to the shuttle, dude!" So it's a privilege to fly as an inexperienced crew member with an inexperienced crew on a mission that would have made the mission planners from just seven years previous just blanche to contemplate even with an experienced crew.

HADFIELD:

It took me places I'd been dreaming of since I was a kid.