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I always wanted to be an astronaut. I just turned\h
four when we first landed on the Moon and I have\ha\h

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very distinct memory of my parents taking\h
me and my older sister out into the backyard\h\h

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and the Moon was rising over our house and they\h
pointed up there and said, 'We have people there,' and\h\h

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even at four I thought that just sounded like the\h
best idea ever. We have been given the scientific\h\h

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knowledge, the technical ability and the materials\h
to pursue the exploration of the universe.\h\h

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To ignore these great resources would\h
be a corruption of a god-given ability.\h\h

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I had seen a new class of astronauts that had\h
been hired for the space shuttle and I was reading\h\h

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in the newspaper what their qualifications were\h
and just going through some of them I realized\h\h

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I can do that and that was a big turning point.

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Shannon Walker Crew-1 Mission Specialist

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I'm Dr. Shannon Walker, NASA\h
astronaut, and I am getting\h\h

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ready to fly on the Crew-1 mission\h
to the International Space Station.

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Crew-1 is the first operational\h
mission of the Crew Dragon vehicle to\h\h

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the International Space Station. I was not\h
expecting the call to be assigned and so\h\h

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anytime you get a flight assignment\h
it's tremendously exciting.\h\h

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I spent six months on the station previously in\h
2010 and I am so looking forward to getting back\h\h

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there and having another six months on the space\h
station. There are so many things that you could\h\h

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do on station. What I like about it is every\h
day really is different. You get up and you may\h\h

19
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be doing a biological experiment one day, you may\h
be doing maintenance on equipment the next day,\h\h

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and then the day following that you'll be\h
doing some sort of experiment in chemistry.\h\h

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What I have found being part of the International\h
Space Station program, and not just Russia but our\h\h

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colleagues in Japan and Europe and Canada, is\h
that underneath it all we all have the same\h\h

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goals and we all have the same passions.The Dragon\h
spacecraft represents to me as just a continuing\h\h

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evolution of better computing power that's, you\h
know, evolved over the years and different ways\h\h

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that the crew can interact with the spacecraft.\h
SpaceX is a very interesting company. There are\h\h

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so many young people, I always imagine it\h
to be like it was in the early Apollo days\h\h

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at NASA with so many young engineers so passionate\h
about what they are doing. The important thing is\h\h

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we both have learned from each other and now\h
we've got a very strong bond on what we want\h\h

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to accomplish and how we need to accomplish it\h
together. I do believe that human space flight\h\h