The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.
Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.
My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps – space stamps and Olympics stamps.
But when I wasn’t working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.
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!
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 didn’t really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.
Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.
Different astronauts sleep in different ways.
I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.
My parents must have done a great job. Anytime I wanted to pursue something that they weren’t familiar with, that was not part of their lifestyle, they let me go ahead and do it.
Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight.
I think eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it’s going to have to be with NASA’s help.
I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.
I did not come to NASA to make history.
For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.
For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.
Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it’s not the same – it’s not even close to the same.
Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It’s very busy up on the shuttle.
If they asked me if I wanted to go into space tomorrow, I’d do it in a heartbeat. On the other hand, if they asked me if I wanted to go into training for three years and then go into space again, I’d probably say no.