Some people will always be volunteers to explore, and it is, in my mind, a privilege.

I am definitely a little more nervous for my colleagues when I'm working at mission control than I am myself, on the shuttle.

The prerequisite that people have a scientific or engineering degree or a medical degree limits the number of female astronauts. Right now, still, we have about 20 per cent of people who have that prerequisite who are female. So hey, girls: Embrace the very fun career of science and technology. Look at computer science. That's what I did.

A lot of people, I think, would love to see the earth from above, wear a spacesuit. Certainly, when I was a kid, I wanted to wear a spacesuit.

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."

Some people will always be volunteers to explore, and it is, in my mind, a privilege.

The one thing we can't really train for is weightlessness, real weightlessness. It's a ton of fun. It's pure Newtonian physics. You push in one direction, you go in the opposite direction with an equal force.