You can picture pretty easily if there were a paying passenger aboard a rocket that failed, like Challenger failed. Certainly it would be a tragedy, and a tragedy for the company. They would have a hard time recovering from it.

The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.

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

The view of Earth is spectacular.

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.

No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.

On both of my flights, everything went very well.