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...

Eventually we want to have six or seven people up there, and as soon as we get a third person up there we can multiply the amount of science up there.

I will have a one-hour program called the Mission Watch, where I will describe details of the mission and give additional information about the lessons from space.

Since the Columbia accident, the Russian space agency, or the Russian space program, has been literally carrying the load bringing us all the supplies we need on the Progress vehicle, smaller amounts on the Soyuz...

When I’m 60, maybe, I’ll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year?

If you look at the whole thing, I think the most gratifying thing is my kids, without a doubt.

NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.

Ever since I’ve been an astronaut I knew I wanted to do a spacewalk, and it’s really comforting to go out with a guy who’s done it a lot of times.

If anything happened, I think my husband would have to deal with that as the time came.

Small samples in the centrifuge will spin at varying rates to create synthetic gravity, like the gravity of Mars or the gravity of the moon, and measure how the specimens respond within the centrifuge.

Space is going to be commonplace.

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...

We sat around one night and thought that people are going to look back and say, I can’t imagine there was a lot of excitement about HER going up!

I never made a career decision based solely on my desire to be an astronaut. I attended the Naval Academy because I wanted to be a Navy pilot. I majored in math because math had...

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...