They were very excited about the whole process. I liked launch better. It's much more exciting. And it's very different from any experience you can have on earth. It's a very exciting experience.
Landing is very exciting, too, but during landing the space shuttle acts very much like an airplane.
So although it's different in many ways from landing on an airplane, in some ways the feeling is familiar. No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents. After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong. The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident. I knew five of them very well.