It's easy to sleep floating around - it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!

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 view of Earth is spectacular.

I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.

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

No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.

The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had 29 men and 6 women - those men were all very used to working with women.