This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Now here's a highlight from coast-to-coast AM on IHeart Radio.

At what point did you go from being an Air Force pilot to being interested in space shuttle missions and NASA?

Well, I was always interested in being an astronaut as far back as I can

remember, which was fourth grade. And way back then, I remember reading an article in a science

magazine in school on the Gemini astronauts. And it didn't matter to me that they were all men. I

wanted to be one of them. I wanted to be an astronaut because they were,

to me, they were an extension of pilots

because these guys were, they were all pilots,

they were military pilots and they were test pilots.

And some of them were engineers.

And you know, I thought that's what I wanna do. I to go explore space. And part of that came from some of the books I read. Some of it came from some of the goofy shows I watched on television as a kid. So that was always stewing in the back of my mind. Now, it became a reality in 1978 when NASA started the space shuttle program.

Now prior to the space shuttle, there were no women astronauts, but in 1978, first class,

in the space shuttle program, NASA decided they were going to hire women as mission specialists.

Now in the shuttle program, the pilots eventually became commanders,

and then the mission specialists did the science experiments,

they did spacewalks, they operated the robot arm.

So NASA hired six women in that first class of 35 astronauts.

And they were great.

Those women, I got to know most of them. They became my role models.

And the years went by, but NASA never hired a woman to be a pilot because there just weren't any women

...