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\h        Mike Foale/NASA Astronaut  Hi. I'm NASA astronaut Mike Foale.

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\h        Music.

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\h        My earliest space-related memory was at the age of about six-years-old.

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\h        I went to the World State Fair in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, with my mom and grandma,

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\h        American grandma, and I saw John Glenn's capsule there. It was back in the 60s, early 60s,

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\h        and it was all blackened and it looked     
    charred.

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\h        One person only could fit in that capsule and they said that it had been in space.

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\h        And I thought, wow I'd like to do that.

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\h        Well I've lived on the Mir space station for five months and I've lived on the ISS for six months.

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\h        There was about eight year's difference in time between the missions.

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\h        Mir was 1997 and I flew on the station in     
    2003-4. The Russian bit of the space station

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\h         is the same, because the Russians had the same

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\h        technology that they took from Mir and put it onto the International Space Station.

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\h        Their spacesuits are similar, their rocket is similar. The American part, of course, and the international part,

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\h        the Japanese pieces and the European pieces on the International Space Station, weren't there on Mir.

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\h        So they're new and different. So there's a little bit of the old and a little bit of the new in the International Space Station.

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\h        However, the experience of living in space for four-and-a-half months on

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\h        Mir and six months on the International Space Station, pretty much the same.

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\h        The good thing about being an astronaut today at NASA is being part of an international program.

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\h        I was a terrible language student when I was a kid in school. However, when I was sent to

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\h        Russia to study the Mir space station, and lived there with my family four-and-a-half years,

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\h        I learned Russian, I had Russian friends, and I learned about the Russian culture and history.

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\h        I've become much more humanistic and it's of great value to me. I'm still a good scientist.

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\h        So taking part in other countries' missions is a positive thing and it lets me get new

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\h        friends and learn new approaches to solving problems in space.

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\h        To get ready to become an astronaut, you need to study hard in school, math and science, physics.

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\h        I thought quite hard about what it would take to be either a test pilot astronaut or a scientist astronaut.

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\h        I chose the science route and did well on my exams. I also did the outdoor things like, scuba diving,

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\h        and I learned to fly and I followed all of the interests that go around space flight.