If anything, the overriding emotion is gonna just be excitement.

The Space Shuttle will stop directly below the Space Station and Sergei and I will be looking out two different windows looking straight down at the Space Shuttle.

This is a day we have managed to avoid for a quarter of a century.

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...

I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to...

I think it’s going to be a very important, unique data set in terms of measuring the behavior of your lower body in space and trying to figure out what we can do to preserve...

If I can get some student interested in science, if I can show members of the general public what’s going on up there in the space program, then my job’s been done.

There weren’t any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.

The most important thing we can do is inspire young minds and to advance the kind of science, math and technology education that will help youngsters take us to the next phase of space travel.

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.

Reach for it. Push yourself as far as you can.

I’m really looking forward to this great adventure of going to a place halfway around the world and launching on a Russian rocket.

It’s not the Olympics. It’s Concord, New Hampshire, and a homecoming should reflect the community I’m part of.

We would like to carry out 100 percent, or maybe more, of our scientific program; I would like to devote some of my spare time toward extra scientific work.

I don’t know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets.

I touch the future. I teach.

If I wasn’t doing this kind of exploration, I’d like to be doing some other kind of exploration. It might be more risky, or less risky, but, in the business of exploration, risk is part...

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

We’re going to be focusing our science on things that will take us farther and longer into space. For many of those experiments, the crew members are human guinea pigs, which is fine; that’s part...

What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background, but motivation, perseverance, and desire – the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.

I felt the power of God as I’d never felt it before.

Every shuttle mission’s been successful.

In the 19th Century people were looking for the Northwest Passage. Ships were lost and brave people were killed, but that doesn’t mean we never went back to that part of the world again, and...

Reach for the stars.

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...

I tell students that the opportunities I had were a result of having a good educational background. Education is what allows you to stand out.

The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble,...

I have the LIFE magazine of the men walking on the moon.

It so happened that my goals kind of matched my career progression toward becoming an astronaut.

The president felt that it was important to send an ordinary citizen to experience the excitement of space travel as a representative for all Americans.

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.

I can remember in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite. There was still so much unknown about space. People thought Mars was probably populated.

A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression.

I really don’t want to say goodbye to any of you people.

It took me a long time to get selected as an astronaut. In fact, I applied for 20 years before I was selected.

The Twilight Zone’ wasn’t around with the kids. They think going up in space is neat. Within their lifetime, there will be paying passengers on the shuttle.

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...

I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men...

After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we’ll have room for specialists. But right now we don’t.

I touch the future. I teach. That’s going with me.

My dad served in two wars has been flying airplanes for 60 years now. He was certainly quite an inspiration.

This is a kind of a personal message from me, and that is that teachers are good communicators, they do an important job in our society.

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 was a little concerned with how the crew was going to view me because I didn’t know whether this program had been kinda forced down their throats. But they were wonderful.

Even with only two people on board, where maintenance is a large piece of our working day, we still have time to do scientific research. We have to be ready to support those Shuttle visits...

I will go around the space shuttle and give a guided tour of the major areas and describe what is done in each area. This will be called The Ultimate Field Trip.

Researchers can measure what kind of angles your legs take up during the day when they’re just trailing around behind you in weightless conditions, and what kind of impacts you feel during your exercise. They’re...

We haven’t sat down with Scott and Caroline and said, Now you realize that there’s X amount of pounds of thrust. And this can happen and that can happen.

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...

My job in space will be to observe and write a journal. I am also going to be teaching a class for students on earth about life in space and on the space shuttle and...