I feel uncomfortable being the spokesperson or face of athlete mental health as it's still so new to me and I don't have all the answers. I do hope that people can relate and understand it's O.K. to not be O.K., and it's O.K. to talk about it. There are people who can help, and there is usually light at the end of any tunnel.

Life doesn't offer you the perfect opportunity at the perfect time. Opportunities come when you least expect them ... Rarely are opportunities presented to you in a perfect way. In a nice little box with a yellow bow on top. ‘Here, open it, it's perfect. You'll love it.’ Opportunities -- the good ones -- are messy, confusing and hard to recognize. They're risky. They challenge you.

so I sometimes think, why should I talk young women into being a scientist if they then end up being sort of disliked or not accepted by their contemporaries and so it’s a tricky business actually.

Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you. […] Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

It would have to be that one lady teacher in grade school. All six grades, one room, 25 students. She was about nine feet tall as I recall and a very tough disciplinarian. Always had the ruler ready to whack the knuckles if somebody got out of hand. She ran a very well-disciplined group. I think most of the youngsters responded to that. There were one or two that couldn’t handle it and obviously they dropped by the wayside. But that still sticks out in my mind.

No, I didn’t. Certainly when I was in the one-room country school you described, I guess my ambition at that point was to get through with a creditable performance. Really, of course, nobody thought about astronauts in those days, but I didn’t really even start thinking about airplanes very much when I was in grade school. So that interest sort of came later on.

No. I think all of us had such confidence in the technology that it was not a question. It was just a question of scheduling and a question of the funds to do it. I think one has to have that kind of an attitude, particularly when you are involved in research and development. You’ve got to believe it’s going to be done eventually.

That’s always been a good lesson to me that you’ve got to do the very best you can all the time. Now, you can’t always do that. But you can recognize when you’re goofing off, and get back on track.

I think all of us certainly believed the statistics, which said that probably 88 percent chance of mission success and maybe 96 percent chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.

Those are important, but there is still a need for any youngster who has any scientific interest at all to continue the lead that we have on technology in the world today, if we are interested in the future of the United States.