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

So I decided on science when I was in college.

The experience of being in space didn't change my perspective of myself or of the planet or of life. I had no spiritual experience.

It's too bad our society isn't further along.

I've discovered that half the people would love to go into space and there's no need to explain it to them. The other half can't understand and I couldn't explain it to them. If someone doesn't know why, I can't explain it.

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.

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.