"When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen."

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More quotes from: Sally Ride

• "After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety ..."
• "All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary. "
• "And during my flight, and the first 25 flights of the shuttle, astronauts just wore ..."
• "And the early astronauts, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, were heroes of mine as well. "
• "Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine. "
• "But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and ..."
• "But NASA does sometimes send animals up in the crew cabin of the shuttle as ..."
• "But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth. "
• "Different astronauts sleep in different ways. "
• "Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the ..."
• "For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds. "
• "I also operated several experiments and launched two communications satellites. "
• "I did not get to go outside on a space walk. "
• "I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the ..."
• "I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps - space ..."
• "I don't have any nicknames. "
• "I felt very honored, and I knew that people would be watching very closely, and ..."
• "I had both male and female heroes. "
• "I liked launch better. It's much more exciting. And it's very different from any experience ..."
• "I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested ..."
• "I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of ..."

• "I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was ..."
• "It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you ..."
• "It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission. "
• "It's always the mission specialists that do it, and the other two mission specialists got ..."
• "It's easy to sleep floating around - it's very comfortable. But you have to be ..."
• "Landing is very exciting, too, but during landing the space shuttle acts very much like ..."
• "Later this year - probably in April - we're going to have the first woman ..."
• "Many airplane crews have three people - pilot, copilot, and the flight engineer, and the ..."
• "My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of ..."
• "NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like ..."
• "No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and ..."
• "On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background ..."
• "On both of my flights, everything went very well. "
• "On one flight, the experiments were mostly ones to study the earth. "
• "On one of my flights, two astronauts were able to go on space walks. "
• "Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same ..."
• "Probably the biggest difference since my flight is that astronauts now wear pressure suits during ..."
• "So I decided on science when I was in college. "
• "So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they ..."
• "So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to ..."

• "So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried ..."
• "So we carried high-resolution cameras, radar, and experiments to study the earth's atmosphere. "
• "Some astronauts sleep in sleeping bags that are velcroed into one of the walls in ..."
• "Some astronauts sleep in sort of beds - compartments that you can open up and ..."
• "The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had ..."
• "The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate ..."
• "The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic. "
• "The pressure suit helps if something goes wrong during launch or re-entry - astronauts have ..."
• "The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger ..."
• "The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter. "
• "The view of Earth is spectacular. "
• "Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a ..."
• "There have been some small changes - ones that allow it to dock to the ..."
• "We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers ..."
• "We didn't have any animals on either of my shuttle flights. "
• "Well, I'm not sure that I had any really scary moments. "
• "Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very ..."
• "Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space. "