Basically, all my life I'd been told you can't do that because you're female. So I guess I just didn't pay any attention. I just went ahead and did what I could and then, when the stars aligned, I was ready.
I remember sitting in one of my graduate classes when the smoke was so bad, and my friend was sitting there. She could hardly breathe, and she said, I'm going to fight smoking. And I thought, Jan, that's crazy. Why go do something that's so crazy? And lo and behold, it did change.
I think that over the years, whether they want to admit it or not, people have to admit that the women astronauts have performed just as well as the men astronauts.
I try to tell the people that are sort of new here when they come in and do their flights and whatever, the things that you remember most after your flights are the interactions you've had with your crew. Those are the most satisfying things you take away from a flight.
I was really desperate. I don't know if you can remember back that far, but when I went to graduate school they didn't want females in graduate school. They were very open about it. They didn't mince their words. But then I got in and I got my degree.
If you look at the whole thing, I think the most gratifying thing is my kids, without a doubt.
It was just really, really tough getting anything when you were a female. Basically, I just took advantage of everything I could. But when people are going to flat out tell you they're not going to hire anyone that's female, there's not much you can do about it.
It was just using the liquid shampoo - the Russians have one very similar to the stuff we use on the Shuttle - you just wet your hair with it and then wipe it out.
Sometimes people here can get so focused on, Oh, I've got to get a flight, that it becomes the end all of everything. Then they go off and fly a couple of flights and they think, Okay, is that all there is in life? No, it's not. There's a whole big life out there.
Well you didn't like take a bath, you just had a wet rag and you wiped yourself off.
What was really funny is Yuri Usachev liked to read quite a bit, and on an afternoon we had off, I was floating around by the table reading my book and he was floating by the table reading his Russian newspaper.
When I got my PhD, it was a time when there were just no jobs for PhDs. Period. PhDs were getting the lowest paid technician jobs, if they were lucky, in any kind of science.
Her first space mission was on board Discovery/STS-51G, June 17-24, 1985.
Her second space mission was on board Atlantis/STS-34, October 18-23, 1989.
Her third space mission was on board Atlantsi/STS-43 August 2-11, 1991
Her fourth space mission was on board Columbia/STS-58, October 18 to November 1, 1993
Currently holds the United States single mission space flight endurance record on the Russian Space Station Mir. Her journey started with liftoff at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida, on March 22, 1996 aboard STS-76 Atlantis. Her return journey to KSC was made aboard STS-79 Atlantis on September 26, 1996.
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