The best advice I can give anybody is to try to understand who you are and what you want to do, and don't be afraid to go down that road and do whatever it takes and work as hard as you have to work to achieve that.

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

On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.

Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It's posing questions and coming up with a method. It's delving in.

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.

We need to make science cool again.

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