Daily Inspiration Quote by Philippe Perrin

The charming clunkiness of Perrin's sentence is the point: you can hear an astronaut thinking aloud inside a system that punishes poetic phrasing and rewards operational clarity. "And, you run also video" lands like a checklist item, because in orbit language isn’t meant to impress; it’s meant to keep hardware, timelines, and bodies intact. The line is essentially a tiny manifesto of modern space work: you don’t "pilot" a robotic arm by feel or instinct, you pilot it through mediated sightlines.

The subtext is dependency. Perrin stresses that to "fly" the arm - a telling verb that borrows glamour from aviation - you’re actually relying on external camera views, possibly mounted on the arm or the station. That’s a quiet admission that human presence in space is often indirect. Your hands are on controls, but your eyes are outsourced to lenses. The astronaut becomes a remote operator inside the very environment they traveled to inhabit.

Contextually, this reads like shuttle/ISS-era operations, when Canadarm-style robotics were central to docking, payload handling, and spacewalk support. In that world, video isn’t documentation; it’s navigation. The sentence also hints at the politics of perspective: "may be coming from the arm itself or from the station" is a reminder that every action depends on what the system chooses to show you. Space, in practice, is less a frontier than a surveillance problem you must solve in real time.