The most important steps that I followed were studying math and science in school. I was always interested in physics and astronomy and chemistry and I continued to study those subjects through high school and college on into graduate school. That's what prepared me for being an astronaut; it actually gave me the qualifications to be selected to be an astronaut.

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

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.

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

Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It's posing questions and coming up with a method. It's delving in.

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

The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.