James Kelly, STS-114 Pilot: Yeah. I would say, people who know me and I’m sure that if you interview other folks they’ll tell you that I’ve never been a shy person about my opinions on what I think needs to be done here and there, but this has reinforced it even more. And I guess what you really have to do after something like this is, is what I would say is turn down your “stupid filter,” which means that a lot of times you won’t ask a question if you don’t have the whole information; you go, "Well, I can’t ask it because I’m not sure if I totally understand." You have to turn that filter down now as we go to Return to Flight. And if you don’t completely understand that, that doesn’t mean that the question you’re going to ask isn’t the perfect question to ask. And maybe it’s not, so maybe you do ask some dumb questions. You ask some questions that aren’t germane, and that’s OK -- we need more of those right now and we’d rather have a whole bunch of extra questions so long as we get the right ones to be asked. So where it’s really probably changed me professionally is I’m more aggressive than I was about going after things that I don’t understand or things that I see happening that maybe aren’t going what I think is the best way or that we as a crew, through our commander, Eileen Collins, thinks is not the way for things to go, so we’re a bit more aggressive about that. And then, on a personal side, obviously after something like this, it happens to people so close to you, you just take more time enjoying your family, enjoying when you’re doing things with them, and obviously, it means a little bit more. You know, you just, you get that understanding that as you’re watching your kids do a concert or, or a sporting event or something like that, you take more, you take more pleasure in doing that and you relax a little bit more. So I found that I’ve, I’ve been able to relax a lot more, especially over the last couple of months. I don’t get to relax as often ’cause we’re so busy, but when I do it’s a lot easier to turn all that off and just enjoy the moment.
And in that regard, what kind of issues have you discussed with your family, as you have trained for this flight, as you’ve emerged from the shock and the sadness into this rededication that you mentioned a moment ago, that is different than even four weeks before your, you had been scheduled to be launched?
James Kelly, STS-114 Pilot: Right. I talked to my family the whole time, even before this, and I will tell you that my conception of the risk hasn’t changed all that much from Columbia. I come from a flight test background and, and flying fighter aircraft in combat -- not in actual combat but in combat training -- and things like that, so it’s a dangerous environment and my wife and I have lost friends through the years in aircraft accidents so it’s always been something that we’ve lived with. Not on the same scale, obviously, but that type of thing. What the real difference is the public aspect of it. Just what you see the families having gone through through the past year really brings it home where we stand in the U.S. community, you know, in the high regard that they held for the crew and also for the families. So that makes it a completely different dynamic for the families, especially for our Return to Flight: whether it’s successful or not there’s going to be a whole lot more emphasis on, on how things are going for them, but obviously if something bad were to happen, you know what the aftermath of that would be. So, that’s been a, a topic of discussion -- not so much the risk as all the media flurry that goes around it. And then with my kids, they’re of differing ages, so we’ve talked about, I’ve talked about all the technical aspects with the older kids especially, because they’re both interested, my two boys are both interested in engineering, science. One would like to follow in my footsteps, that kind of thing. So we’ve talked it all through with them, and I asked for their opinions, what they think, and I want them to be comfortable with what’s going on. And I would never put it on them what they think I should do, but I want them to be fully aware of what I’m doing and why I’m doing it so that when I’m up there they understand why I’m up there. And, and God forbid if something tragic happened again, they’d understand why I went and, and, and why it was worth so much to me.
