Claude Nicollier Astronaut Quotations

On one hand, to be able to go from one direction in the sky to study such an object to another direction to study another object, and on the other hand to be able to maintain accurately the position in space.

I feel very privileged to be part of this mission, and when my nomination was announced, I was really very, very happy to be selected for this mission.

It is going to be an experiment of how it works, and I see I have all reasons to believe that it will work fine. But it's a short time. And we also have pushed the envelope here a little beyond what has been done in the past.

We have the Fine Guidance Sensors, one of which we will exchange out of three. Another one we changed on the last servicing mission, and on the fourth servicing mission in 2003 or 2004, the third one will be exchanged.

We developed already, before the first servicing mission, this has been further developed on the second servicing mission and we refined it this time, all the terminology.

In a way, what we do is not totally different from some of the tasks that will be performed for the assembly of the International Space Station.

I think a benefit is that we try to put it up in a short time. From the decision to do this mission until we fly, it's six months and one week or so, so it's a very short time.

I didn't think that, as a Swiss, it was possible to do that, although I was really dreaming to do that. It was an impossible dream.

The computer that is presently on board is a relatively old computer that has limited capability in terms of its speed and its memory capacity.

You can see these boxes which are covered with metal foils for thermal reasons, and they are also, most of the time, thermally controlled inside to keep reasonable temperature inside each of these containers.