Having the opportunity to fly the first flight of something like a space shuttle was the ultimate test flight.

This vehicle is performing like a champ. I've got a super spaceship under me.

The real pleasure was having the chance to enjoy being weightless, and the other was to... spend some time looking out at this beautiful spaceship Earth that we're all lucky to inhabit.

We were on the dark side of the Earth when we started to see outside the window this soft pink glow, which is a lot of little angry ions out there going very fast. We were hitting them very fast.

Looking down at the Earth, you started to pick up a sense of speed much more than I had noticed on orbit.

We were only on orbit a little over two days so we had no adverse effects from being weightless...

Living inside the shuttle was a little like camping out. We ended up sleeping in our seats. You had to pay attention to housekeeping, not get things too dirty.