Having the opportunity to fly the first flight of something like a space shuttle was the ultimate test flight.

Looking down at the Earth, you started to pick up a sense of speed much more than I had noticed on orbit.

We were only on orbit a little over two days so we had no adverse effects from being weightless...

You're going very fast when you're on orbit, going around the world once every hour and a half.

We were on the dark side of the Earth when we started to see outside the window this soft pink glow, which is a lot of little angry ions out there going very fast. We were hitting them very fast.

I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67 and that program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us...

The nature of the shuttle was, we couldn't put a crew escape system in it.

Living inside the shuttle was a little like camping out. We ended up sleeping in our seats. You had to pay attention to housekeeping, not get things too dirty.

The real pleasure was having the chance to enjoy being weightless, and the other was to... spend some time looking out at this beautiful spaceship Earth that we're all lucky to inhabit.

When you work really hard for something for a long time it's almost impossible to believe that it's coming true.

Selection of crews is always been somewhat of a mystery.

You were meant to be right here right now...so make the most of it!

Educate yourself. Learn everything you can and then let knowledge yield to kindness.

I saw a dead bird flying through a broken sky. I heard it, and it said, "The world will never understand.

In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and unhap-piness - otherwise how would you know when you're happy?

I see no difference between Islam and Islamism. Islam is defined as submission to the will of Allah, as it is described in the Koran. Islamism is just Islam in its most pure form.

Sure, I have a job now, but the acting business isn't always that solid, and so I wanted something to fall back upon.

I would love to do a dramatic comedy. All of that, it all interests me. At some point I want to do my 'Monster,' like Charlize Theron, so I'm buckling up for that.

Growing up I was as big a tomboy as you can get.

Every time you slip, you owe me a kiss.

The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.