My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.

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.

So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.

Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.

When you can feel that close to something you're used to seeing from this great distance, well, it changes a person.

I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.

All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.