 Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine. |
| The view of Earth is spectacular. |
| Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle. |
| I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science. |
| 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. |
| Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit. |
| I don't have any nicknames. |
| I had both male and female heroes. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth. |
| The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident. |
| My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane. |
| 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! |
| So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight. |
| Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space. |
| 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. |
| The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter. |
| On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot. |
| I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis. |
