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.

You know, I go around the country a lot.

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.

After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.

Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.

It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.

I think eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it's going to have to be with NASA's help.