Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.

The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.

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.

I don't have any nicknames.

Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.

After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.

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