We haven't sat down with Scott and Caroline and said, Now you realize that there's X amount of pounds of thrust. And this can happen and that can happen.

I touch the future. I teach.

I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men had landed safely on the moon, and how jealous I was of those men.

I really don't want to say goodbye to any of you people.

Reach for it. Push yourself as far as you can.

If I can get some student interested in science, if I can show members of the general public what's going on up there in the space program, then my job's been done.

NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.

Every shuttle mission's been successful.

I have the LIFE magazine of the men walking on the moon.

If anything happened, I think my husband would have to deal with that as the time came.

If anything, the overriding emotion is gonna just be excitement.

It's not the Olympics. It's Concord, New Hampshire, and a homecoming should reflect the community I'm part of.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

Reach for the stars.

Space is going to be commonplace.

We sat around one night and thought that people are going to look back and say, I can't imagine there was a lot of excitement about HER going up!

When I'm 60, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year?

I can remember in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite. There was still so much unknown about space. People thought Mars was probably populated.

I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies.

I was a little concerned with how the crew was going to view me because I didn't know whether this program had been kinda forced down their throats. But they were wonderful.