It was hard telling those kids...that I wasn't going to be there this year. And I knew I was going to miss them. I won't have an opportunity to see them again, unless they stop by the house. Now during the summer, I got lots of notes; kids would stop by the house. I'd be pulling weeds or something and they would come up and give me a hug and say, 'Oh, I can't believe it, this is so wonderful!' and just get very excited about it. It was hard not being in school. I would have loved to have gone back to school.

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.

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

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.

I really don't want to say goodbye to any of you people.

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.

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.