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...