NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like space shorts - we wear those a lot - and NASA T-shirts.
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No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.
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On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
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On both of my flights, everything went very well.
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Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight.
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So I decided on science when I was in college.
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So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.
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So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.
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So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.
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Some astronauts sleep in sort of beds - compartments that you can open up and crawl into and then close up, almost like a little bedroom.
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The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had 29 men and 6 women - those men were all very used to working with women.
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The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.
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The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
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The pressure suit helps if something goes wrong during launch or re-entry - astronauts have a way to parachute off the shuttle. The suits protect you from loss of pressure in case of emergency.
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The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.
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The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.
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The view of Earth is spectacular.
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Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.
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We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.
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Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
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