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.

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

If you want to go into space first time on a new vehicle that's never been flown, you want to go with a pro.

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.

The nature of the shuttle was, we couldn't put a crew escape system in it.

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

I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67 and that program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us...