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Sometimes people ask me how difficult the astronaut program was, but being in Sierra Leone, being responsible for the health of more than 200 people, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at age 26 - that prepared me to take on a lot of different challenges.

Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.

I've been lucky enough to do theatre, film, and television for a career. Unless I get offered a job as an astronaut, I won't stray too far from it.

As an astronaut, when you're getting ready to go out of that hatch, you know that's the pinnacle of both your career and your life. The view completely blows you away. The real challenge is getting past the excitement and getting focused and down to work.

So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.

Astronauts working for the government will always need to be either pilots or mission specialists. Those who want to be pilots should have military experience - ideally, a test pilot background.

I progressed through my schooling, undergraduate and graduate degrees, excited about math and science and engineering, but really didn't think about being an astronaut at that point. It was kind of unreachable.

To become an astronaut, someone has to have a dream of his own to do something that he or she has always wanted to do, then commit himself to making that dream come true.

In the Astronaut Office we're never totally out of training, we always keep our hand in it. But after five years, things have changed and so it's been good to get back into the flow and relearn a lot of things.

Being an astronaut is a wonderful career. I feel very privileged. But what I really hope for young people is that they find a career they're passionate about, something that's challenging and worthwhile.