NASA is doing nothing but development. They're not doing research in manned spaceflight at all and I see no reason for them to do that because we already know that it will work and we already know exactly how it will work.

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.

Flight out of the atmosphere is a simple thing to do and should have been available to the public twenty years ago. Ten years from now, we will have space tourism where you will be able to see the black sky and the curvature of the earth. It will be the most exciting roller coaster ride you can buy.

There will be a new industry, and we are just now in the beginning. I will predict that in twelve or fifteen years there will be tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, that fly and see that black sky.

A NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut can't be creative. He has to follow a predetermined detailed checklist written by an engineer and if he gets a little creative he'll never fly again.

Space travel is the only technology that is more dangerous and more expensive now than it was in its first year. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin, the space shuttle ended up being more dangerous and more expensive to fly than those first throwaway rockets, even though large portions of it were reusable. It's absurd.

The criticism is, once I get something flying, I lose interest in it.