I believe the biggest impediment we have right now with going to Mars is public commitment. More people need to see themselves as a part of space travel; we need to see more inclusiveness.

A big part of engaging kids in science is not getting the single, correct answer; it's being willing to work with students to discover the correct answer.

The drills we do, where you're telling kids to memorize things, don't actually work. What works is engaging them and letting them do things and discover things.

When I left NASA, I was looking at how you could use space technologies for developing countries' work.

Everyone in the astronaut program has a degree in a science field. The crew are the ones who do the experiments, help to design some of the experiments that come from other primary researchers. So it becomes very important that you have a science background.

I wanted to be a scientist, but I wanted to go into space. They are not mutually exclusive.

We have to change the way people look at scientists. Today, they are the nerds, the geeks. Instead, we want some of the cool kids to say, 'Hey, this is all right.'

People like space. But they sometimes have been left out. People are much more open to that if you invite them in.

When I was a little girl, I thought when I had an opportunity to go into space, I thought I would at a minimum be working on Mars or another large planet because we were doing all of these incredible things.

The fact we don't have a lunar base has nothing to do with the technology. It has to do with public commitment and societal support.