Carolina Quotes
Technically, we were fully qualified, fully ready, and everything. Emotionally, I wasn’t even close. I started crying. Not bawling or anything, but just kind of tears rolling down my cheek when I looked out the window and saw the continent of Africa coming up. It looked like a big island. Just awesome, unlike anything I’d ever imagined.
Charles Bolden Carolinian
Source
Oral history interview by Sandra Johnson, Houston, Texas, 6 January 2004; NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
- form
- interview
- work
- NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
- year
- 2004
Cite this record
“Technically, we were fully qualified, fully ready, and every…” Charles Bolden. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-814FB73AD3. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/814fb73ad3
More from Charles Bolden
I knew what astronauts were, but again, because I had grown up in South Carolina and I had seen the things that I had seen, I knew who astronauts were, I knew what they did, but not in my wildest imagination could somebody like me become an astronaut, because they were all white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, all test pilots, all about five-feet-ten. They all looked alike. And I was none of those.
I just don’t remember being afraid. Apprehensive is something different. Before every single flight—and I flew four times—before every single flight I would lay there in my seat, just with stuff in your stomach, because there was so much to do that you just didn’t want to do something wrong and put the crew in jeopardy. So, that bothered me. You work your way through it, but to say that it was a piece of cake—for some people it was, or for some people it may have been, but never for me. I worked really hard every flight.
Plebe year is just rough. I cried all the time. I wanted to go home, and my father kept me there. Every time I’d call on the weekends, he’d say, “Stay one more week and then we’ll talk about it.”