Time & Perspective Quote by Duane G. Carey

Carey’s line reads like the astronaut’s version of a startup pitch, minus the bravado: aim at something so large it borders on absurd, then design your life so the chase itself is worth the cost. The sentence is deliberately overstuffed with “even if I didn’t reach it,” a verbal safety tether that tells you how NASA culture actually works. This is a profession built on contingency plans, redundancy, and accepting that the mission might scrub. He’s applying that mindset inward, to ambition.

The specific intent is quietly instructional. Carey isn’t romanticizing exploration as destiny; he’s framing it as a career strategy. Set the bar high enough to pull you out of the gravitational well of ordinary options, but don’t make the goal a single point of failure. “Exploration” here is less a heroic flag-planting than a permission structure: a way to justify years of training, technical work, and waiting without needing a guaranteed splashy payoff.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the myth that astronauts are pure daredevils or chosen ones. He’s talking about satisfaction as a system you can engineer: find a field where the day-to-day is inherently meaningful, so the headline achievement is a bonus, not the only reason you get out of bed. In the post-Apollo, long-program era Carey came up in, that’s not just motivational. It’s survival. When the pinnacle is “almost impossible,” you either learn to love the process or you burn out long before the launchpad.