My husband and I don't worry about each other the way we might if we didn't have similar jobs. I sometimes get an email where he tells me he's heading off on a mission to do terrain avoidance 50 feet above the ground at 500 knots. And I just say, "Okay, have a good flight."

If anything, when you're up in space and you're inside a space ship, which is your home, and without which you would not survive, you know that Earth is your home. This is the only place you can return. In fact we're very meticulous. Part of our job is to maintain the spaceship. If we apply the same kind of model to Earth maybe we'd have a different outlook.

I'm 45, and I'm still at school, essentially. Even after being assigned to the mission, I had to write a number of exams, with people commenting on my performance.

I really believe that, in 500 years, we will still remember the International Space Station, because it will have been the first time, really and truly, that nations put a lot of money, brains, resources, and effort together to build something peacefully, and to work together for the sole and unique purpose of furthering our knowledge and bringing it back to Earth for our mutual good.

Most astronauts are very down-to-earth people. Many of us, three-quarters, have an engineering degree, and we have a very Cartesian, rational approach to things. You don't go and get swept off your feet. That's not your job and that's not why you're hired. So if you get so mesmerized that you forget to do what you're supposed to do, whether it's to open the cargo door of the space shuttle or configure something inside, then you should not be there as a professional operator.

The science behind Interstellar is interesting, because some of it is absolutely real astrophysics and orbital mechanics, some of it is theoretical physics, and some of it is completely Hollywood. When a science fiction movie is based on plausible science, it's really good.

I think it's the entire privilege I had to represent my country. It's not the going to space alone; it's to be part of that endeavour and to contribute a very small part to a very important step toward pushing the frontier.