My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.

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.

I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.

On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.

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

For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.