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I had both male and female heroes.
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I have a lot of common sense. I know what needs to be done and how to approach it. I have an ability to work with people on large enterprises.
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I felt very honored, and I knew that people would be watching very closely, and I felt it was very, very important that I do a good job.
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When the space shuttle's engines cut off, and you're finally in space, in orbit, weightless... I remember unstrapping from my seat, floating over to the window, and that's when I got my first view of Earth. Just a spectacular view, and a chance to see our planet as a planet.
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The women's movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming.
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All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.
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I think 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.
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For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.
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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!
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There are aspects of being the first woman in space that I'm not going to enjoy.
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The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.
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So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.
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The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
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But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.
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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.
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On both of my flights, everything went very well.
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The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.
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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.
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Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
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Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It's posing questions and coming up with a method. It's delving in.
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But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.
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For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.
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The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.
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For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.