“She always said I was gonna be OK,” Gayle added. “And Oprah knows things.”
Meanwhile, Gayle’s initial hesitation about the voyage was well-known—so much so, in fact, that her facial expression as she boarded the spacecraft spawned a viral internet meme.
“At that moment I was so afraid, I just wanted to get into my seat because I just wanted to let the training kick in,” she explained at a news conference after the short flight. “I just wanted to get inside the capsule and sit down, so the process of walking up there was a little daunting for me.”
But a little apprehension wasn’t enough to deter Gayle from blasting off.
“I knew that I was always going to do it,” she said during an Oprah Daily interview April 14. “Although, we were told, ‘If you’re going to back out, you have to do so before 2 minutes and 30 seconds. You have to say, ‘I’m not going to fly.’ But getting on, it was a little scary. So the memes show that I was apprehensive.”
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