Education Quote by Duane G. Carey

The refreshingly plainspoken “from a selfish point of view” is doing more work than it seems. Coming from an astronaut, it punctures the myth that spaceflight is pure sacrifice and national glory. Duane G. Carey admits the private payoff: the thrill of being somewhere almost no one gets to be, the satisfaction of novelty, the sensory rush of “new sights and sounds.” It’s an unvarnished confession nestled inside the language of professionalism, the kind you hear from people trained to downplay emotion and foreground mission objectives.

The intent isn’t to brag; it’s to humanize. Astronauts are often presented as instruments of a program - calm, dutiful, interchangeable. Carey’s phrasing resists that. By calling his enjoyment “selfish,” he anticipates criticism and defuses it, as if to say: yes, I know taxpayers, science, and teamwork are the official reasons. But you’d be lying if you didn’t also admit the personal hunger that makes the risk tolerable.

The context matters: Carey’s era of NASA sits between heroic mythology and routine operations, when spaceflight became both extraordinary and bureaucratic. His sentence meanders with “you know” and “etc,” mimicking spoken recollection rather than polished rhetoric. That looseness signals authenticity. The subtext is a quiet argument for curiosity as a legitimate motive - not just as a public virtue, but as an individual appetite. Exploration, in his telling, isn’t a poster; it’s a lived, sensory experience, and the honesty is the point.