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

By 1931, after a few years' experience of flying scheduled airlines, those planes were operating at roughly 600 times the safety of the space shuttle. I look at safety not in terms of fatalities per passenger-mile, but when you get in and close the door, what is the risk of dying on this flight?

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

We didn't have practical model rockets in the '50s. The ones we made were very dangerous and the kids that played with them didn't have all their fingers, and sometimes were blind in one eye.

I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.

Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The smart people dont.

When theres ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was 'well, thats nonsense!', so what that means is that a true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.