Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.
On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
In the 1990s, it's OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the Space Shuttle blowing up. It's acceptable to ridicule the Pope or the President of the United States, but God forbid you do a joke... about gays. The gay community is the last sacred cow in this society.
The space shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle. It is unlike any other thing that we've ever built. Its capabilities have carried several hundred people into space.
In my mind I needed a symbol of today's technology, and I realized that what I wanted to photograph was the Space Shuttle. And so that's where Places of Power came into being.
No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.
Instead of planning the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, America should be preparing the shuttles for their next step in space: evolving, not shutting them down and laying off thousands of people.
Having the opportunity to fly the first flight of something like a space shuttle was the ultimate test flight.
I will go around the space shuttle and give a guided tour of the major areas and describe what is done in each area. This will be called The Ultimate Field Trip.
If you gave kids peas that didn't look like peas and said they were a space shuttle, they're much more apt to eat them because it's now playtime.