Joan Higginbotham

"That wasn’t my best engineering moment"

"So after my parents went to bed, I'd go grab the phone and I'd wire it up and I’d call my boyfriend. Then I’d unhook it and take it back downstairs,"

"And my parents, for the life of them, could not figure out why the phone bill was so high. I finally told my mother, like five years ago, that it was me who did that."

"You are competing with some wicked smart people from all over the world, literally all over the world. So that is like… the floor as you're going in. Just be very, very mindful of your education."

"That's because you have seven million pounds of thrust that is lifting you off the launch pad"

"It feels like there's an elephant sitting on your chest,” she said. “So breathing out is very labored. You have to be very deliberate about exhaling and that lasts for about 45 seconds to a minute. And then after that, you have left earth's atmosphere and you're in space"

"You eat just about any type of food that you want,” Higginbotham said. “So my commander, who was a big shrimp guy, had shrimp cocktail at every single meal — breakfast, lunch and dinner."

"And what that means is that we go around the world one time every 90 minutes. And in that 90 minutes, we get to see one sunrise, about 45 minutes and then a sunset. So if you were just to plaster yourself at the window for a full day, you would see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. Pretty cool"