Did you know that I donated my body to science…twice? I became an Astronaut because I was interested in understanding what happens to humans when they venture away from gravity. We experience gravity from the time we are conceived. When the opportunity came for me to fly aboard two unique Shuttle flights that would gather information on human adaptation to space, I volunteered to be a subject. Little did I know what that would entail. In...

I am frequently asked whether astronauts could take personal items with them on their Shuttle flights.  Yes – within the rules.  The rules were created after the Apollo 15 crew took a stack of envelopes to the moon and postal stamped them there, intending to sell them after the flight.   Afterwards NASA made that strictly against the rules.  No astronaut could personally profit from the sale of items flown in space, but that wasn’t to say...

The most challenging thing I had to do after I became an astronaut was to become SCUBA qualified.  Why would astronauts need to do that?  If I was ever tasked with doing a spacewalk (called an EVA, or Extravehicular Activity), I’d have to train for it in the huge water tank at the Johnson Space Center.  The spacesuits used were specially made for practicing tasks in the water and were extremely heavy – too heavy and bulky to swim to the...

The Russians were coming!  It was 1957, and their Sputnik satellite was orbiting the Earth.  Would they attack us from space?  We were scared. The Space Race…it was on. Could I ever be a part of it? In April 1961, the Russian Yuri Gagarin orbited above us.  In May of that year, President John Kennedy set the audacious goal for the United States to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade – which most of us...

When I got to NASA in 1978, I had a lot to learn. Being a good flight crew member was one of the most important things I would need to know. Shortly after we got to Houston, we began training to fly in the back seat of the NASA T-38 jets. We knew that if we mastered that kind of flying, we might someday train to fly as a crewmember on the Space Shuttle. How was it going to feel flying with some of the best pilots in the nation? Many of my pilot...

Launch day was always exciting when I was about to board the Space Shuttle. There was a different kind of excitement when I was the “supporting spouse.” Hoot and I had a lot of experience doing both of these things. He flew before me in 1983, and I played the supporting role. Our firstborn son—and the world’s very first Astrotot—Paul was only 18 months old and a handful! He was learning to walk and wanted to toddle everywhere. In the early days...