Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe

by Mike Massimino

You’re going 100 miles an hour before you clear the tower. You accelerate from 0 to 17,500 miles an hour in eight and a half minutes.

There are emergency placards and safety signs all over the interior of the shuttle, telling you what to do and where to go. That stuff is there to give you something to read before you die.

By focusing on his test pilot days and not on the moon landing, I think he was trying to tell us that life is not about achieving one great thing, because once that thing is over, life keeps going. What motivates you then? The important thing is having a passion, something you love doing, and the greatest joy in the world is that you get to wake up every day and do it. For him it was flying.

Twelve men have walked on the moon. Four of them went to MIT. If you want to be an astronaut, going to a school like MIT is like going to Hollywood if you want to be a movie star: It’s where you need to

If you work hard and get help from good friends, together you can overcome almost any challenge, no matter how great. More than aerospace systems or neuroscience or anything else I studied, that life lesson was the most valuable thing I learned at MIT.