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\h        Music.

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\h        It's a challenge, because it's one of those things, it's hard to explain if you haven't been there.

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\h        But the main things are the view. I mean, the view of the Earth from space is just astounding and amazing.

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\h        It's more beautiful than the highest mountaintop you have ever seen. But you're also,

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\h        you're up in the space environment where everything above you is blackness.

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\h        And you can see the Earth below you and the atmosphere, and it looks so beautiful and green and blue.

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\h        Well, I think the moment that stood out for me was my first real look at the Earth on my first mission.

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\h        You launch and you're very busy for 8 to 10 minutes as the engines are going and getting you safely into orbit.

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\h        And then you're still quite busy for the next whole orbit,

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\h        basically, as you get the orbiter changed around from being a rocket on launch to being an orbital vehicle.

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\h        We're busy in the front, we've got our suits on, it's kind of uncomfortable.

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\h        And then there was a moment about an hour into the flight where I happened to look out to my right,

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\h        out my right window, and I looked down, we were over the Pacific, and there was

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\h        Hawaii right below us and it looked just huge. We were only about 90 miles up at that point,

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\h        which seems like a long way up, but the Earth looks pretty big from there.

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\h        And I just saw the beautiful Hawaiian Islands passing underneath as we

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\h        went over at five miles a second. And that was a really amazing sight.

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\h        That really burned into my memory from my first mission.

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\h        It varies very much from one person to the next. For me, it was about a day. You know,

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\h        you spend your whole life down here at 1 G and then you're

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\h        thrown into this zero-G microgravity where you're just floating and everything's floating.

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\h        It takes awhile for your body to get used to that. But after about a day,

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\h        you're kind of back to normal and you can do your work for the rest of the mission.

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\h        And it's the same in reverse when you come home.

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\h        You've spent almost two weeks up in zero G and you come back on entry and into land,

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\h        and it takes your body a couple days to kind of get used to being back down here in this 1 G environment. But that's about all.

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\h        After that, you're back to normal.

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\h        It's a very different experience. I mean, the shuttle's coming in as a glider,

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\h        so we're very interested after we do our deorbit burn on the other side of the

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\h        world, basically, of tracking our progress very carefully across the Pacific and then across

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\h        Mexico and the Caribbean as we come into the Kennedy Space Center.

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\h        And then once you get close to the Kennedy Space Center, coming in on that steep dive, lining up with the

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\h        runway and getting it touched down much faster than an airliner or even a tactical jet would touch down.

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\h        We spend a lot of time practicing, a lot of practice approaches, all have well over

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\h        1,000 by the time we get to do it for real. So it's an interesting task, but we get a lot of practice for it.

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\h        Probably all of the folks that are currently astronauts, you know,

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\h        we didn't think we were going to be astronauts when we grew up.

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\h        We just decided to do something that we really loved and were really interested in.

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\h        And we went down a path that eventually we found out, hey,

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\h        I can go fly to NASA with this resume. So we did, and then we were very lucky to be picked.

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\h        So if someone's interested in spaceflight, and I hope most people are because it's an amazing experience,

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\h        the best way to get there is to do what you're really interested in.

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\h        Do what you love and that'll give you the motivation to really do

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\h        well and to excel, and that's really what NASA's looking for.