Time & Perspective Quote by Linda M. Godwin

Godwin’s understatement is doing a lot of work. “It’s really kind of a challenge” reads like casual workplace talk, but the subject is orbital choreography: aligning people, hardware, and timelines across multiple crews traveling 17,000 miles per hour. The sentence compresses spaceflight’s most persistent truth into a disarmingly human register: the hard part isn’t just rockets, it’s coordination.

The phrase “keep coordinated” signals a professional anxiety that’s familiar in any complex operation, then quietly escalates it. In space, “coordinated” means shared procedures, compatible equipment, synchronized schedules, and a common mental model of risk. Godwin frames it as interaction with “two station crews,” not as a heroic solo mission. That’s a cultural shift in astronaut rhetoric: from lone-edged conquest to networked, interdependent labor. The mission becomes less a singular feat than a relay.

“And of course” is the tell. It’s the verbal shrug astronauts use to normalize extraordinary constraints. The kicker - “one of them launched quite some time before our mission” - carries subtext about asymmetry. One crew has institutional memory in orbit: they’ve already adapted to microgravity, already debugged the quirks of their station, already formed routines and shorthand. The incoming team has to plug into a living system without slowing it down.

Contextually, this is the era when spaceflight is becoming modular and continuous - stations with overlapping expeditions, handovers, and international coordination. Godwin’s intent isn’t to dramatize; it’s to prepare an audience to appreciate the invisible work: the meetings, checklists, and cross-crew trust that keep the romance of space from turning into an avoidable incident report.