We always had National Geographic and Astronomy magazines and Popular Mechanics lying around the house. I got interested in exploration and different parts of the world and different parts of the universe just from seeing those things around the house and the different discussions we had as a family.

My mom studied biology and my dad studied chemistry and some physics and he is a physician, but he had a very strong interest in astronomy and astrophysics and exploration in general.

To do things that are as complicated and challenging as spaceflight, you have to have all disciplines represented to get the job done.

So here in space, obviously, in microgravity, we have to use our hands to get ourselves around, to float around the modules, because our feet, we don't necessarily walk around, we just grab hand holds and move ourselves around, which means that we need our hands free to do just that.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

My family comes from Panama, and I grew up in a single parent household with my mother, who barely spoke English. She couldn't get a good job, yet there were four of us for her to raise.

There are so many ebbs and flows in life, but when you're raising small children, your family means everything.

As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.