With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.

Confidence in nonsense is required.

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding

When you have a transportation system that the price of propellant is essentially negligible something is very wrong. If you look at any other transportation system, a car, a motorcycle, a train, an oil tanker, an airliner, you name it; about a quarter to a third of the operating cost is buying the propellant.

At various times over 20 years, I did preliminary designs for aircraft like the Stratolaunch. For that whole time I was encouraging us to do something that almost everyone else felt you could not do.

It's not good enough for us to have generations of kids that ... look forward to a better version of a cell phone with a video in it. They need to look forward to exploration.

No one knows how to make going to orbit orders of magnitude safer and orders of magnitude more affordable.