My parents must have done a great job. Anytime I wanted to pursue something that they weren't familiar with, that was not part of their lifestyle, they let me go ahead and do it.

It's easy to sleep floating around - it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!

I can't remember a single time [my parents] ever told me not to do something I wanted to do.

We need to make science cool again.

The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had 29 men and 6 women - those men were all very used to working with women.

So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.

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