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.
All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.
And during my flight, and the first 25 flights of the shuttle, astronauts just wore normal flight suits, not pressure suits.
And the early astronauts, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, were heroes of mine as well.
Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.
But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.
But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.
Different astronauts sleep in different ways.
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.
For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.
I also operated several experiments and launched two communications satellites.
I did not get to go outside on a space walk.
I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.
I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps - space stamps and Olympics stamps.
I don't have any nicknames.
I felt very honored, and I knew that people would be watching very closely, and I felt it was very, very important that I do a good job.
I had both male and female heroes.
I liked launch better. It's much more exciting. And it's very different from any experience you can have on earth.
I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.
I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.
It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.
It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.
It's always the mission specialists that do it, and the other two mission specialists got to go outside and work on some planned experiments on one of my flights.
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!
Landing is very exciting, too, but during landing the space shuttle acts very much like an airplane.
Later this year - probably in April - we're going to have the first woman commanding a space shuttle, Eileen Collins.
Many airplane crews have three people - pilot, copilot, and the flight engineer, and the flight engineer sits just behind and between the pilot and the copilot, and that was my position during launch and re-entry.
My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like space shorts - we wear those a lot - and NASA T-shirts.
No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.
On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
On both of my flights, everything went very well.
On one flight, the experiments were mostly ones to study the earth.
On one of my flights, two astronauts were able to go on space walks.
Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight.
Probably the biggest difference since my flight is that astronauts now wear pressure suits during launch and re-entry.
So I decided on science when I was in college.
So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.
So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.
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.
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.
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.
The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.
The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
The pressure suit helps if something goes wrong during launch or re-entry - astronauts have a way to parachute off the shuttle. The suits protect you from loss of pressure in case of emergency.
The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.
The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.
The view of Earth is spectacular.
Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.
There have been some small changes - ones that allow it to dock to the Russian space station, Mir. And the laptop computers onboard are more powerful.
We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.
We didn't have any animals on either of my shuttle flights.
Well, I'm not sure that I had any really scary moments.
Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.
Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space.
In 1987 & 88 she worked at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control.
She served as CAPCOM for STS-2 & STS-3, the second and third Space Shuttle flights.
She founded NASA’s Office of Exploration.
She received bachelor’s degrees in English and Physics from Stanford University.
She went to high school at Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles.
She earned a master’s degree and a PhD in physics.
She was a Physics professor at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD).
She is the only person to serve on both Space Shuttle accident investigation panels (Challenger and Columbia).
She attended Swarthmore College.
You can share a link to this page with your friend!