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.

You know, I go around the country a lot.

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!

So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.

Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same - it's not even close to the same.

When you can feel that close to something you're used to seeing from this great distance, well, it changes a person.

If we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys.