The president felt that it was important to send an ordinary citizen to experience the excitement of space travel as a representative for all Americans.

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.

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.

If anything, the overriding emotion is gonna just be excitement.

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

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

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!