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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All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.
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And during my flight, and the first 25 flights of the shuttle, astronauts just wore normal flight suits, not pressure suits.
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And the early astronauts, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, were heroes of mine as well.
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Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.
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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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But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.
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Different astronauts sleep in different ways.
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Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same - it's not even close to the same.
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For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.
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I also operated several experiments and launched two communications satellites.
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I did not get to go outside on a space walk.
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I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.
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I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps - space stamps and Olympics stamps.
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I don't have any nicknames.
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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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I had both male and female heroes.
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I liked launch better. It's much more exciting. And it's very different from any experience you can have on earth.
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I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
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I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.
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I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.
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It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.
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It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.
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It's always the mission specialists that do it, and the other two mission specialists got to go outside and work on some planned experiments on one of my flights.
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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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Landing is very exciting, too, but during landing the space shuttle acts very much like an airplane.
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Later this year - probably in April - we're going to have the first woman commanding a space shuttle, Eileen Collins.
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Many airplane crews have three people - pilot, copilot, and the flight engineer, and the flight engineer sits just behind and between the pilot and the copilot, and that was my position during launch and re-entry.
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My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
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NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like space shorts - we wear those a lot - and NASA T-shirts.
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No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.
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On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
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On both of my flights, everything went very well.
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On one flight, the experiments were mostly ones to study the earth.
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On one of my flights, two astronauts were able to go on space walks.
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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.
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Probably the biggest difference since my flight is that astronauts now wear pressure suits during launch and re-entry.
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So I decided on science when I was in college.
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So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.
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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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So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.
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So we carried high-resolution cameras, radar, and experiments to study the earth's atmosphere.
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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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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.
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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.
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The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
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The pressure suit helps if something goes wrong during launch or re-entry - astronauts have a way to parachute off the shuttle. The suits protect you from loss of pressure in case of emergency.
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The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.
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The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.
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The view of Earth is spectacular.
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Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.
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There have been some small changes - ones that allow it to dock to the Russian space station, Mir. And the laptop computers onboard are more powerful.
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We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.
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We didn't have any animals on either of my shuttle flights.
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Well, I'm not sure that I had any really scary moments.
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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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When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.
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Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space.
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2007-03-17 01:38:28
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answer #1
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answered by cmhurley64 6
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