I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.

I suggest taking the high road and have a little sence of humour and let things roll off your back. I think that's very important.

I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of 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.

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

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 view of earth is spectacular from space. Most people imagine that when astronauts look out the window of the shuttle they see the whole earth like that big blue marble that was made famous by the flights that went to the moon. But the shuttle is much, much closer than those astronauts were. So we don't see the whole planet, the whole ball at once, we just see parts of it.