Science & Tech Quote by Linda M. Godwin

There’s a particular kind of astronaut candor in Godwin’s line: plainspoken, procedural, and quietly loaded with stakes. “We didn’t use the shuttle robot arm before” is the understatement doing the heavy lifting. In another profession you’d call that a lack of experience; in orbit, it’s a risk factor. The sentence frames that risk not as drama but as workflow, turning what could sound like anxiety into a manageable sequence: train, rehearse, execute.

The phrase “training flow” is telling. It’s jargon-y, yes, but it signals culture more than technique: NASA’s obsession with process as a moral value. A “flow” isn’t just practice; it’s choreography under constraints, a scripted routine built to anticipate human error and mechanical surprise. Godwin is implicitly reassuring an audience that might be tempted to fixate on the spectacular (a robotic arm grabbing payloads in space) that the spectacle is the end product of repetition, checklists, and controlled exposure to novelty.

“Get ready for that” lands with an almost casual deictic shrug, as if the robot arm were simply the next item on a clipboard. Subtext: spaceflight success depends on refusing to mythologize your own mission while you’re still inside it. The context here is the shuttle era’s hybrid identity - part frontier narrative, part industrial operation. Godwin’s quote leans hard into the latter, offering a quiet corrective to the public’s appetite for heroics: competence is built, not conjured, and the most consequential moments are rehearsed until they feel almost boring.