"I worked for some very good people who have helped me along the way and actually enabled me to have the opportunity to be selected to join the Astronaut Corps"
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Carey’s line has the careful, almost procedural humility of someone trained to treat luck as a variable you plan around. An astronaut doesn’t get picked by sheer grit alone, and he refuses the lone-hero script. By foregrounding “very good people” and the institutional chain of help, he’s doing two things at once: paying sincere tribute and quietly insisting on how the system actually works.
The phrase “enabled me to have the opportunity” sounds bureaucratic, but that’s the point. It acknowledges that selection isn’t just a merit badge; it’s an access story. Somebody opened doors, advocated in meetings he wasn’t in, gave him assignments that built the right flight hours, the right credibility, the right narrative. “Along the way” compresses years of evaluations, teamwork, and near-misses into a modest blur, a rhetorical move that keeps focus on the ecosystem rather than the individual.
There’s also an unspoken code in NASA culture here: don’t oversell yourself, don’t imply you’re exceptional in a way that threatens the team. In a profession where ego can be a safety hazard, competence gets expressed as restraint. Carey frames the Astronaut Corps not as personal destiny but as a collective outcome, the product of mentorship and institutional trust.
Read as subtext, it’s a quiet argument against mythology. Spaceflight is often marketed as audacity; Carey’s sentence insists it’s apprenticeship, sponsorship, and a long chain of people doing their jobs well enough that one person can safely leave Earth.
The phrase “enabled me to have the opportunity” sounds bureaucratic, but that’s the point. It acknowledges that selection isn’t just a merit badge; it’s an access story. Somebody opened doors, advocated in meetings he wasn’t in, gave him assignments that built the right flight hours, the right credibility, the right narrative. “Along the way” compresses years of evaluations, teamwork, and near-misses into a modest blur, a rhetorical move that keeps focus on the ecosystem rather than the individual.
There’s also an unspoken code in NASA culture here: don’t oversell yourself, don’t imply you’re exceptional in a way that threatens the team. In a profession where ego can be a safety hazard, competence gets expressed as restraint. Carey frames the Astronaut Corps not as personal destiny but as a collective outcome, the product of mentorship and institutional trust.
Read as subtext, it’s a quiet argument against mythology. Spaceflight is often marketed as audacity; Carey’s sentence insists it’s apprenticeship, sponsorship, and a long chain of people doing their jobs well enough that one person can safely leave Earth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Career |
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