Daily Inspiration Quote by Linda M. Godwin

Godwin is doing two jobs at once: recounting a technical reality and selling the culture that makes that reality survivable. On the surface, she is talking about “arm training flow” and “the arm on orbit” - the robotic arm as a skill that has to be drilled until it becomes muscle memory. Underneath, she is describing how NASA manufactures confidence in an environment where improvisation is expensive and fear is rational.

The repetition of “and” matters. It mimics a checklist cadence, that steady accumulation of steps that keeps panic out of the room. The phrasing “helps to have been through” is modest, almost conversational, but it smuggles in a hard-won principle: in spaceflight, competence is not inspiration, it is rehearsed familiarity. When she says the facilities are “really good,” she’s not reviewing a gym. She’s vouching for an entire simulation ecosystem - mockups, procedures, instructors, failure scenarios - designed to collapse the distance between Earth and orbit.

The key line is psychological: “when you get up there, you feel like you’ve been there.” That’s the point of training at this level: to preempt the alienness of orbit by making it narratively recognizable. Godwin frames confidence not as bravado but as institutional trust, earned by repetition and prior experience. It’s a subtle endorsement of NASA’s post-Apollo, post-Challenger emphasis on process and preparation: the agency trying to ensure that the first time you truly are weightless and responsible for a multimillion-dollar machine, your brain doesn’t treat it as the first time.