I think it's perfectly OK to exploit the moon. Largely for two reasons: there's no life there, and it is close enough and rich enough in resources to be economically useful to Earth. In the final analysis, everything we do in space, if it does not help the people of Earth, all the people, it's not going to happen.

Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

When I started understanding how science works, it occurred to me that there just is no evidence that there is a God.

Up here [in space], you're free. Really free, for the first time in your life. All the laws and rules and prejudices they've been dumping on you all your life . . . they're all down there. Up here it's a new start. You can be yourself and do your own thing . . . and nobody can tell you different.

The problem is that Americans would like to be independent of the rest of the world ... Except the world ain't that way. Trying to be independent of the rest of the world is to commit suicide.

A new space race has begun, and most Americans are not even aware of it. This race is not [about] political prestige or military power. This new race involves the whole human species in a contest against time.

In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.