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When I was really young,
my dreams were more down to earth;
however, they were always about technology.
I liked machinery. Big, complicated machinery.
As I headed towards my high-school graduation,
I read quite a lot of quality sci-fi and thought
it would be great to work in the space industry if I were lucky.
Like all boys, we'd look up into the sky,
we'd read books, including the ones about space travel.
I was old enough by that moment to realize that the odds
of me becoming a cosmonaut weren't that high.
My name is Sergei Krikalev and I'm a cosmonaut.
The first crew started to come together,
and as I had experience of working on both Mir and the shuttle,
I was selected for that first crew.
At first Bill Shepherd and I were the only ones there.
Shortly afterwards, Yuri Gidzenko was added to our crew,
and that was the crew.
Bill Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko and myself,
that trained for nearly four years for that first long-term mission.
The training was intense and unusual, even by modern standards.
The level of our training was well above average,
because we studied a lot of things
just in case there's an emergency we cannot predict.
We trained both in Houston and here in Star City.
It was a very interesting and friendly
experience exchange, information exchange,
emotional exchange, impressions exchange,
because everyone could learn something new.
Yes! We've arrived! We've arrived!
We've finally arrived!
The first time!
The new station. The new International Space Station.
Somebody has to turn on the lights.
I remember knowing by touch, entering in the dark,
where the switches were,
so we switched on the lights, and it was kind of a seminal event.
Well, I think looking back, we can see it was an historic moment.
But back then, we were completely immersed in our work.
We realized that we had reached a station that was in a dormant mode,
and none of the systems could really support the crew's functions,
so we had ahead of us a rather important and rather urgent work
to activate all of the station systems
for it to begin to work as it should, supporting the crew's lives.
I'm Sergey Volkov, a Russian pilot and cosmonaut.
My father, Alexander Volkov, also went to space, to the Mir station.
I was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, when my father was an instructor pilot.
Then he was selected to join a cosmonaut group
and our family moved to Star City in 1978.
I was four at the time,
so it feels like I've lived my whole life in Star City.
Because my father was a cosmonaut,
I was seeing not just the public side of the profession.
I saw it from the inside,
and maybe that's why I didn't dream of becoming a cosmonaut as a child.
This profession seemed so heroic and so difficult to me.
When I grew up, I made the conscious decision
to take on the responsibility and accept the risks.
It was strange
because my father was the Commanding Officer
and he learned about me joining by looking through case files
of the candidates selected for the physical.
So he came home one night with a question,
"Have you decided to become a cosmonaut?"
So we talked, and that's when my mother learned
about me wanting to be a cosmonaut.
Of course, it came as a surprise for them, to put it mildly.
He came to all three of my take-offs.
It's a complicated mix of feelings, but of positive feelings,
because you train very hard, for a long time.
It took me ten years.
My father led me to the rocket.
We walked together, he supported me,
we walked from the bus across the take-off pad,
and he walked with me to the lift.
Then when we were lifted up inside the rocket,
into our own spaceship,
we were closed in, and you hear the rocket come alive.
Valves open, fuel moves, the liquids,
you're inside, you're one with it, and when the launch actually starts,
and you hear the engines work down there,
this calm vibration, the right kind.
The second the rocket goes, that first overload,
these three people, not just me, but the whole crew,
are the happiest people on Earth.
Hello, Mr. Wakata.
Pleased to meet you, first talking robot in space.
Pleased to meet you, first Japanese commander of the ISS.
Space exploration is important because it's a way to expand our world.
The fact that we've now learned to go higher than the atmosphere
is probably a step as crucial as learning to cross the sea.
Sooner or later we must find some settlements on the moon,
then maybe on Mars's satellites, on Mars itself,
so these are the first steps to making our civilization multi-planetary.
We do realize we've just started on this path
and maybe walking it is slower
than sci-fi writers thought 30 or 40 years ago,
but we still have to take steps now
to finally arrive where our destiny lies.