Parenting & Family Quote by Duane G. Carey

Carey’s line does the quiet, very astronaut thing: it sells science as moral labor without ever sounding like a sermon. The phrase “what I truly believe” isn’t decoration; it’s a hedge that signals experience. People who’ve worked inside big, expensive systems (NASA, the military, government science) know progress is rarely clean or linear. So he plants the claim in conviction rather than certainty, inviting trust without pretending science is a guarantee machine.

The sentence structure is telling: “we’re doing” repeats like a mantra, pulling “advancing scientific knowledge” down from abstraction into a collective daily practice. This isn’t the lone-genius myth. It’s a team ethic, the same one that keeps spacecraft functioning: incremental steps, shared responsibility, long timelines. “Someday making the world better” sidesteps the impatient demand for immediate payoff, a subtle defense against the perennial question: why spend money up there when problems are down here? His answer is intergenerational ROI.

Then he widens the circle. “Not only for our children” taps a familiar civic trope, but “for all people after that” pushes beyond national pride and beyond family sentiment. Coming from an astronaut, that universalism has implied visual evidence: you’ve seen Earth as a single, borderless system. The subtext is stewardship. Scientific knowledge isn’t framed as power or dominance, but as a way of reducing future suffering for strangers you’ll never meet.

Context matters: astronauts are public-facing symbols of “peaceful” high technology, often adjacent to defense and geopolitical competition. Carey’s phrasing works like a reputational bridge, keeping the romance of exploration while justifying the bureaucracy behind it.