Being Italian, I have a very special relationship with the culinary arts. One my projects was to share Italian cultural food with my colleagues.

Is there any other job that beats being an astronaut? Who didn't want to be an astronaut? That is my question.

It is an incredible treat and certainly one of the highlights of any astronaut's career to do a spacewalk.

I grew up and I kind of took the road of becoming a pilot, which was another dream I had of flying, and once I did attend the air force academy, that dream of flying became more like a project, and I wanted to be a fighter pilot, which I did. I became a fighter pilot.

My memories of my childhood are wonderful memories. I feel that I was privileged because I grew up in a beautiful city. It is Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily. It's a place filled with sun, close to the beach.

So one thing that I want to do is to make people realize that astronauts in general are very normal people. They are down to Earth, so to speak. I know it sounds contradictive, but we are very normal people. We are very normal people with a fantastic privilege and opportunity to do something that is extraordinary.