We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.

For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.

There's a huge amount of pressure on every astronaut, because when you get right down to it, the experiments that are conducted on a space flight, or the satellites that are carried up, the work that's to be done, is important and expensive work, and you are up there for a week or two on a Space Shuttle flight. The country has invested a lot of money in you and your training, and the Space Shuttle and everything that's in it, and you have to do things correctly. You can't make a mistake during that week or two that you're in space.

The pressure suit helps if something goes wrong during launch or re-entry - astronauts have a way to parachute off the shuttle. The suits protect you from loss of pressure in case of emergency.

So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.

I've discovered that half the people would love to go into space and there's no need to explain it to them. The other half can't understand and I couldn't explain it to them. If someone doesn't know why, I can't explain it.

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