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

There's a huge amount of pressure on every astronaut, because when you get right down to it, the experiments that are conducted on a space flight, or the satellites that are carried up, the work that's to be done, is important and expensive work, and you are up there for a week or two on a Space Shuttle flight. The country has invested a lot of money in you and your training, and the Space Shuttle and everything that's in it, and you have to do things correctly. You can't make a mistake during that week or two that you're in space.

Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same - it's not even close to the same.

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.

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

I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.

Different astronauts sleep in different ways.