When you can feel that close to something you're used to seeing from this great distance, well, it changes a person.

I think eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it's going to have to be with NASA's help.

It's no secret that I've been reluctant to use my name for things.

I find myself looking around for other new, interesting opportunities to dive into.

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.

After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.

It was a real honor for me to get to be the first woman astronaut. I think it's really important that young girls that are growing up today can see that women can be astronauts too. There have actually been a lot of women, who are astronauts, that that's a career that's open to them.