I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies. |
It's not the Olympics. It's Concord, New Hampshire, and a homecoming should reflect the community I'm part of. |
If anything happened, I think my husband would have to deal with that as the time came. |
If I can get some student interested in science, if I can show members of the general public what's going on up there in the space program, then my job's been done. |
NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space. |
Every shuttle mission's been successful. |
Sometimes when things get kind of frantic, it helps to call my husband Steve, because I think he's got a real good sense of where everything's gonna be in a few years. |
Reach for the stars. |
I touch the future. I teach. |
The Twilight Zone' wasn't around with the kids. They think going up in space is neat. Within their lifetime, there will be paying passengers on the shuttle. |
My sympathies have always been for working-class people. |
I have the LIFE magazine of the men walking on the moon. |
Space is going to be commonplace. |
I will go around the space shuttle and give a guided tour of the major areas and describe what is done in each area. This will be called The Ultimate Field Trip. |
I can remember in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite. There was still so much unknown about space. People thought Mars was probably populated. |
We haven't sat down with Scott and Caroline and said, Now you realize that there's X amount of pounds of thrust. And this can happen and that can happen. |
When I'm 60, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year? |
I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men had landed safely on the moon, and how jealous I was of those men. |
We sat around one night and thought that people are going to look back and say, I can't imagine there was a lot of excitement about HER going up! |
Reach for it. Push yourself as far as you can. |