But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.
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.
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!
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.
So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.
I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.
Eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it's going to have to be with NASA's help. Whether it's going to be a consortium or one entity remains to be seen. I could be wrong. I could be one of the old fogies! Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing. It happens. A company has to be willing to bear the risk of its rocket failing. It's a very large capital investment.
On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
You know, I go around the country a lot.
Ever been to Disneyland? That was definitely an E ticket!
The experience of being in space didn't change my perspective of myself or of the planet or of life. I had no spiritual experience.
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.
Different astronauts sleep in different ways.
The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
It's no secret that I've been reluctant to use my name for things.
It's well known that many girls have a tendency to dumb down when they're in middle school.
I had both male and female heroes.
I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life.
Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.
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.
It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.
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.
