Time & Perspective Quote by Linda M. Godwin

The glamour people project onto spaceflight gets punctured here, in the most revealing way: by logistics. Linda M. Godwin’s sentence is almost aggressively procedural, and that’s the point. Astronauts don’t narrate heroism; they narrate systems. “As always” quietly normalizes the extraordinary, turning a once-unthinkable act into repeatable work. That phrasing carries a cultural message NASA has long depended on: space is safest when it feels boring.

Godwin’s real emphasis isn’t launch, the cinematic beat, but the anticlimax after it: “the first few days ... are all spent really in the rendezvous.” In other words, the mission’s opening act is waiting, calculating, adjusting. The subtext is a rebuttal to disaster mythology. Yes, you prepare for “all sorts of contingencies,” but preparedness is not panic; it’s protocol, drilled into muscle memory. She’s signaling competence without swagger, which is its own kind of authority.

The most telling line is the one that sounds almost like commuting: launching “at a time that puts us in an optimal position to catch up to station.” “Catch up” is wonderfully plain, even a little domestic, shrinking orbital mechanics into an everyday verb. It reframes space not as a frontier but as an appointment you make with precision. Contextually, it reflects an era of routine shuttle-and-station operations: spaceflight as infrastructure, where success is measured less by spectacle than by the calm, relentless orchestration of time.