Daily Inspiration Quote by Duane G. Carey

It is almost aggressively ordinary: a sentence built to drain spaceflight of myth and refill it with workplace reality. Duane G. Carey, speaking as an astronaut and therefore as a trained manager of risk, frames “being in space” not as personal transcendence but as a job site. The thrill is there, but it’s routed through the safest channel available: teamwork. That’s not accidental; it’s a cultural survival skill in an institution where swagger can get people killed.

The wording does quiet work. “Really looking forward” signals excitement while staying inside NASA’s emotional speed limit. “Working” is the key verb, an insistence that space is labor, not spectacle. And “this team of folks that I’m with” is notably clunky, almost redundant. That redundancy reads like deliberate humility: he refuses the lone-hero narrative by making himself grammatically dependent on the group. The phrase also softens hierarchy. “Folks” is homespun, not militarized; it suggests cohesion and familiarity in an environment that is, by design, hostile to human life.

The subtext is reassurance aimed outward and inward. Outward, it tells the public: these are steady professionals, not thrill-seekers. Inward, it’s a ritual of trust-building: naming the team as the thing he anticipates most is a way of reaffirming the social contract that keeps a crew functional under pressure. In the post-Challenger, risk-conscious era of human spaceflight, this kind of plainspoken collectivism isn’t blandness; it’s a signal flare for competence.