The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.

It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.

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.

For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.

We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.

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 don't have any nicknames.