The first thing I'm going to ask you to get us started is why did you put me into dance? What made you want to put me into dance and how did it come about?

Well, it started from the very beginning.

I was blessed to have two youthful children, a girl and a boy, which is a blessing in itself.

And then, as you were very young, you know, it was a bit difficult because, you know, we lived in a masonette before we got a ground floor place, you know, and that.

So that was at the time on Stockbridge Village.

It used to be called Cantrell Farm.

Yeah.

And often the classes would go over, wouldn't they? And my dad would be outside in the back.

Yeah,

well, he reached out to me.

His name is Keith Haviland.

He he's a producer.

He has done a lot of space documentary films and aviation type films.

But he read my book.

So I had published a book.

And isn't it there where you like through their ROTC program, that's how you got commissioned to be an officer in the Air Force? Is that how it came about?

Mm-hmm.

I wanted to be an astronaut because they were, to me, they were an extension of pilots, because these guys were, they were all pilots.

They were military pilots, and they were test pilots, and some of them were engineers.

And, uh, you know, I, I thought, "That's what I wanna do.

I wanna go explore space." And part of that came from some of the books I read, some of it came from some of the goofy shows I watched on television as a kid.

So that was always stewing in the back of my mind.

Now, it became a reality in 1978 when NASA started the space shuttle program.

Yes, and so you had to have specific qualifications as the same with everybody else, and you were accepted into this program to eventually knowing that you would eventually be traveling to space.

How do you just stay calm and compartmentalized in a really tough situation like that?

Yeah, well, without a doubt, it's the training, and I believe in the astronaut office, in, in the shuttle program, and at NASA overall, the investment that we put into training, not just building the best simulators.

That costs money, you know, but building the best simulators.

We had a motion-based simulator that we used for ascent and entry with all the noise and the shaking and the lights flashing, and it, during an ascent into space, a, you have got to stay focused on your instruments, your performance, are, how the engines operating, are we going where we're supposed to go, what's our energy level.

And if you're distracted by all of these external cues like the shaking, the lights flashing, the noise, you know, it sounds like you're in a room on, on fire, and those external cues need to be filtered out of your thinking, and the way we do that is by simulator after simulator, years and years of this before I...

I mean, five years of simulators before my first flight, and the motion base helped me screen all that out and just pay attention to what's changing, what's different that I haven't seen in my training.

And I would say the fact that we trained malfunctions, and as astronauts, we knew how to identify what is the problem and then what procedure do I go to, and once you find the procedure, how do I execute that, going through the steps quickly but not making a mistake.

[laughs]

So talk to us, if you would, about how motherhood changed your relationship to risk and how you spoke with your daughter about the dangers ahead.

Well, I love being a mom, first of all.

Now, I was, [chuckles] I was a lot older when I had my first child.

I don't recommend people wait that long, but I was thirty-eight years old when my daughter was born.

And then, um, I flew a mission, and then my son was born, so I actually had two children by the time I flew that return to flight mission.

Now, you asked about risk.

So my husband is an airline pilot, and he was a military pilot also, so he really understands what I'm doing, so I think it's important that we had that relationship.

Miss you.

Can you talk a little bit about what happened there?

Yeah, so that was one of the mistakes that was made on the flight.

I mean, our flight, the return to flight mission was basically perfect with that one major exception.

So the cause of the Columbia accident was this piece of debris that fell off the fuel tank during the launch and it hit the wing.

Well, nobody knew about that.

Well, you say nobody, but the vast majority of people did not know about that.

until the crew came home, they had a hole where the debris hit and those hot gases got in and it broke the wing off and they tumbled out of control.

What do you want young aspiring astronaut and females to know? And maybe any sort of don't give up kind of thing, because I'm sure there were weeks and months where you thought, what am I doing? Why am I here?

And this is all with the goal to become an astronaut? Or did you start as a pilot and then start jumping up from there? Or was the end game always astronaut?

Well, I th- I would say yes and no to that.

So I, yes, the end game was always to become an astronaut, but I also wanted to be a military pilot.

I read books about military pilots back when I was in mostly high school and also college, and I read about World War I.

You know, Eddie Rickenbacker was an ace.

If you shoot down five or more any enemy aircraft, you become an ace.

So I read about him.

Mm-hmm.