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

Confidence in nonsense is required.

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.

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.

A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.

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.

I like to call the difference between research and development. Some people use that interchangeably. They'll say R&D. They're two totally different things.