NASA's myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation.

Everything looks nonsensical before it works.

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.

We'll go back to the moon by not learning anything new.

I don't see anything beneficial about the US spending 100 billion dollars to go back to the moon unless we learn something new that will help us go to the moons of Saturn okay and so we ought to use that to breed new breakthroughs and to test new breakthroughs and to fund it.

America was good enough to make a small compact lighter weight nuclear weapon. The Russians still had these big clunky heavy ones, so they had to build the big boosters in the arm's war, so now all of the sudden Russia could take off the shelf and put into orbit much heavier things than we could, so that's why they had the original leadership.

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