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When I was in grad school, I wanted to be in academia forever.
Kathleen Rubins -
When you go to vacuum in the airlock and you take the hose off the front of your space suit, there's a little bit of water in there, and you can see that sublimate and ice crystals form and fly away. My thought at that moment was, 'Oh, we are not kidding at vacuum here; we are really in space.'
Kathleen Rubins
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It changes your perspective to be able to look out the window and see the planet. One of the thoughts that I had when I first got up here was, 'We really do live on a planet, and we are in a solar system, and we are flying through space right now.' I mean, this is something that you know, obviously, but to see the planet - it's amazing.
Kathleen Rubins -
They say that in space, nobody can hear you scream. The first time I stepped out of the airlock, I was ready to scream - not because I was scared but because I was so excited to see the Earth below me.
Kathleen Rubins -
When we're doing the space walks, we're working very very hard. Every single minute is choreographed. But there's a few minutes here and there where ground is maybe talking about something, and you have to put your tools down and wait. Just getting a chance to look through your visor and see the planet go by was incredible.
Kathleen Rubins -
I don't think you ever really decide that you want to be an astronaut. I put in an application and hoped for the best.
Kathleen Rubins -
When I was at Stanford, I was actually in the cancer biology program, but I mostly focused on infectious disease.
Kathleen Rubins -
When I started working at NASA and understanding what the capabilities really were of the space station and the space program, one of the biggest draws for me was the ability to do experiments in space. We can do a number of experiments where gravity is actually a variable.
Kathleen Rubins
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I think it's going to be amazing to see how the world of microbiology, molecular and cellular biology, and human physiology is massively changed by microgravity.
Kathleen Rubins -
I was the one with a subscription to 'Sky and Telescope' magazine as a kid while my friends were reading 'Tiger Beat.'
Kathleen Rubins -
You need nerves of steel if climbing aboard a rocket is your career path.
Kathleen Rubins -
My lab used to do gene expression and genomics, and we did a lot of sequencing samples from virus outbreaks.
Kathleen Rubins -
As an undergraduate majoring in biology at the University of California, San Diego, I worked on infectious diseases at the nearby Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Kathleen Rubins -
I decided to do graduate studies in virology at Stanford University in California because it had a hospital, which made working on clinical applications easier.
Kathleen Rubins
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There's a world of insights to be gained into human health and disease by understanding how gravity and space radiation influence biology.
Kathleen Rubins -
We have to engineer devices that are going to work in space stations. Those same things are going to work in the most remote regions on Earth.
Kathleen Rubins -
I kind of watch anything on the Syfy channel.
Kathleen Rubins -
We're pretty interested in microbial communities on-board space stations. It's a closed-loop system. Our water is recycled; our air is recycled.
Kathleen Rubins -
I've always been fascinated with science and exploring our world, from microbes to the solar system.
Kathleen Rubins -
If you find something that you're excited about and you're interested in, my advice to young women and young men would be do what you're really interested in and what drives and motivates you.
Kathleen Rubins
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There's actually an incredible amount of parallels between working in central Congo in a remote, isolated village and doing research aboard the space station.
Kathleen Rubins -
Joining NASA was very exciting, but it was the hardest decision I have had to make in my life.
Kathleen Rubins -
I'm involved with health care/medical supply delivery to Africa and started a non-profit organization to bring supplies to Congo.
Kathleen Rubins -
The planet is beautiful.
Kathleen Rubins