The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space.
And everything stopped quite rapidly because I knew that nobody in Europe was able to go to space. It was the privilege of being either American or Russian.
Being an American is something I wanted to be for a very long time, probably since I saw the moon landing when I was a child.
There are so many women who contributed in a very real way in pushing for the space program during the time in which there was a lot of competition to get into space first, and to know that there were African-American women who were integral in that success is pretty phenomenal.
I always knew I'd go to space.
I've wanted to go to space, really, since I was a little girl.
So everything turned out fine, and we were given the opportunity to go to Washington and be briefed on the project of man in space, and given the opportunity to choose whether we wanted to get involved or not.
I always wanted to be an astronaut.
I've always hankered after going into space and walking on the moon and Mars. I did want to be an astronaut, and had there been a manned space flight programme in the U.K., I would have been knocking on the door.
I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men had landed safely on the moon, and how jealous I was of those men.