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.

If we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys.

Three Secrets to Success: Be willing to learn new things. Be able to assimilate new information quickly. Be able to get along with and work with other people.

All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.

Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.

There are lots of opportunities out there for women to work in these fields, ... Girls just need support, encouragement and mentoring to follow through with the sciences.

Our future lies with today's kids and tomorrow's space exploration.

The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.

When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.

We need to make science cool again.

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.

Well, laddie, if you've let an old buzzard like me hurt you confidence, you couldn't have had much in the first place.

You were always the Harry to my Hermione, flushing away my erratic anxiety with the rudest sense of realism.

My favorite sport is football. I'm a die hard Steelers fan. Favorite players were Hines Ward and Greg Lloyd.

Your guess is as good as mine.

Guy on the plane I'm on has a text alert that sounds like a gunshot... And he isn't putting it on vibrate.

A singer for me is more like someone who is standing alone with a microphone like Scott Walker, rather than someone who is bashing a plank and is spitting all over a microphone.

Of course it's nice to be connected, but the nicest thing, I think, is someone you can look in the eye and talk to.

Sustainable development: Holding our world in trust for our children

Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.

I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.