“I'm not going into infinity. I'm going into low earth orbit.” — Helen Sharman

As the craft re-entered earth's atmosphere, it was coming in so fast, it heated up the surrounding atoms and molecules, and they became positively and negatively charged, and highly reactive, and began luminescing all around us.

Because we were orbiting the earth faster than earth spins on its axis, we went around the earth 16 times a day, an earth day, which meant 16 periods of lightness and 16 periods of darkness in 24 hours. Every so often you'd look towards the earth, and often you could see lightness and darkness together, and dawn and sunset were spectacular.

You can do more science on the ground than you can in space for the same amount of money. But there is some science you can not do on the ground.

I had been lucky that my physiology is well suited to space training.