I find myself looking around for other new, interesting opportunities to dive into.

It was a real honor for me to get to be the first woman astronaut. I think it's really important that young girls that are growing up today can see that women can be astronauts too. There have actually been a lot of women, who are astronauts, that that's a career that's open to them.

Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.

You can picture pretty easily if there were a paying passenger aboard a rocket that failed, like Challenger failed. Certainly it would be a tragedy, and a tragedy for the company. They would have a hard time recovering from it.

I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.

The rockets light! The shuttle leaps off the launch pad in a cloud of steam and a trail of fire.

The most important steps that I followed were studying math and science in school. I was always interested in physics and astronomy and chemistry and I continued to study those subjects through high school and college on into graduate school. That's what prepared me for being an astronaut; it actually gave me the qualifications to be selected to be an astronaut.