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.

When I'm 60, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year?

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.

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.

You have to dream. We all have to dream. Dreaming is OK. Imagine me teaching from space, all over the world, touching so many peoples lives. Thats a teachers dream! I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries. Imagine a history teacher making history!

Reach for it. Push yourself as far as you can.

Space is for everybody. It's not just for a few people in science or math, or for a select group of astronauts. That's our new frontier out there, and it's everybody's business to know about space.