When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.

I love the John Glenn model... I may call NASA in 25 years or so, and see if they'd like to send me to Mars.

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.

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.

But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.

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

I think maybe it's too bad that our society isn't further along and this is such a big deal. I think it's time...that people realize that women in this country can do any job they want to do.