Linda M. Godwin

There's a lot of interest from the medical community on how things develop in microgravity, and the hope, later, that is expected to apply to what the changes are in humans as well.

It is a very busy mission: every day has some major goals that we have to get through, but my experience before has been that at least in the evening, you kind of take a deep breath and look around where you are and have some downtime.

I grew up watching a lot of the coverage of the early U.S. space program, all the way back starting with Mercury and then through Gemini and Apollo and of course going to the moon as the main part of the Apollo program.

A lot of these things will fly in later forms on the space station themselves, or a later form of that research will, once they kind of find out some of the basics from flying it on shuttle.