archives

Question:

What did you like best about being in space?

Answer:

The thing I liked best was being weightless! There's really nothing like it on Earth.  When we first reached orbit, I did what lot's of astronauts do: while I was still strapped in my seat, I held my pencil in front of my face and let go of it.  It floated!  Once I got used to weightlessness, I could do 30 somersaults in a row and slither like a seal from one side of the cabin to the other with just a gentle push.

And of course we couldn't resist playing a little bit with our food -- floating a blob of orange juice in the middle of the room, and sending peanuts drifting into each others' mouths from across the room.  Fun!

Question:

What was your most memorable sight from space?

Answer:

I'll never forget floating over to the window for the first time, looking toward the horizon, and seeing a very, very thin royal blue line all the way across the horizon. It looked like someone had taken a blue pencil and outlined the Earth. Then I realized that the blue line was Earth's atmosphere. It was memorable because it was obvious then how fragile and delicate our atmosphere is. There just isn't very much of it
— but it sure is important!

Question:

Did you ever want to be anything else besides an astronaut?

Answer:

Yes!

When I was growing up I wanted to be a scientist and a tennis player. When I was in school, I loved math and science. When I was outside, I played lots of different sports but particularly focused on tennis. I played competitive tennis at a national level before I went to college, and played on Stanford's tennis team while I was in college. But I studied science—particularly physics—at the same time. All through college and graduate school, I planned on being a physicist—being a professor at a university and conducting physics research.

Though all the time I dreamed of flying in space, I didn't set it as a goal until I was in graduate school and saw an announcement that NASA was accepting applications for astronaut.