I've spent my whole life not talking to people, and I don't see why I should start now.

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

You can picture pretty easily if there were a paying passenger aboard a rocket that failed, like Challenger failed. Certainly it would be a tragedy, and a tragedy for the company. They would have a hard time recovering from it.

For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.

Some astronauts sleep in sort of beds - compartments that you can open up and crawl into and then close up, almost like a little bedroom.

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.

Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.