The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.
I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.
It's easy to sleep floating around - it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!
Studying whether there's life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there's something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That's something that is almost part of being human, and I'm certain that will continue.
The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.
So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.
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 felt very honored, and I knew that people would be watching very closely, and I felt it was very, very important that I do a good job.
I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps - space stamps and Olympics stamps.
The women's movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming.
For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.
I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.
Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It's posing questions and coming up with a method. It's delving in.
It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.
I've discovered that half the people would love to go into space and there's no need to explain it to them. The other half can't understand and I couldn't explain it to them. If someone doesn't know why, I can't explain it.
We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.
But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.
