About Laurel Clark: Laurel Blair Salton Clark was a medical doctor, United States Navy Captain, NASA astronaut and Space Shuttle mission specialist who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
Certainly my parents were a huge influence. They always expected the most out of all of us. And expected us to do our very best. I'm thankful to them for allowing me to do what I wanted to do.
Gravity is one variable in a lot of scientific processes. If you can remove gravity or minimize its effect, then you can understand the other processes that are going on.
Hello from above our magnificent planet Earth.
I can't think of anything specific growing up that pointed me toward NASA at all. I was interested in the Moon landings just about the same as everyone else of my generation. But I never really thought about being an astronaut or working in space mys...
I can't think of anything that's as exciting as I'm sure this mission will be, and actually being in space. But, we did some training as a crew together.
If you're trying to get someone who's sick with a fever off of a submarine and it's cold and raining outside, the only way in and out of a submarine, generally, is through a fairly narrow hatch.
Other than motherhood, the eight years that I spent at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I have incredibly fond memories of. It's a beautiful place, with four seasons up in Wisconsin. And really wonderful people.
Some things are only capable of being done in space. Examples of that are looking at our Earth from that far away, and understanding the entire processes of storms and weather patterns, and oceans, and coastlines.
The microgravity or the very, very low amount of gravity that we have up in space forces some changes in different processes. It forces changes in us as human beings.
There are some very significant changes in the way the fluids are distributed in our body, the way our heart functions initially, and as well as our bone and muscle.
Things are going very smoothly. As expected, there are some minor glitches, and the eight minutes that it took us to get to orbit, we trained months and months for, and didn't have to use any of that preparation, other than being aware and ready.
We trained for a lot more malfunctions than any ever happen.
We'd like to have immediate answers to all of our questions. I think medicine in particular. I found it frustrating as a physician sometimes to not be able to tell someone exactly why something was happening to them. There are still so many mysteries...
We've had such thorough training, we've had an excellent team on the ground. With the minor glitches that have occurred, we've been able to take care of them. And the teams on the ground are getting tons of incredible data.
When you talk to crews that went to Mir or have gone up to International Space Station, they say that you go through different phases of adaptation or getting used to the space environment.
Everyone that I've talked to who's been to space has thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and what you often hear them say is: It was great, but we just had to come home.
I've always enjoyed traveling and having experience with different cultures and different people. But it's also a wonderful thing to be able to benefit and enable research, not only in our country but around the world.
This has been a great experience for me. The first couple of days you don't always feel too well. You adjust to the fluid shifting, how to fly through space without hitting things or anybody else. But then you get in a groove.
I have a computer screen near my seat where I monitor the overall health of the vehicle and pick up any problems that might be occurring early on or once we see any kind of a malfunction or anything unusual that's happening, we can look at the data a...
I feel blessed to be here representing our country and carrying out th research of scientists around the world... I hope you could feel the positive energy that beamed to the whole planet as we glided over.
