Anything we can do in the near future that begins to stimulate the interest of people - seeing somebody down the street have an opportunity to go into space - buoys up the whole neighborhood.

Instead of planning the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, America should be preparing the shuttles for their next step in space: evolving, not shutting them down and laying off thousands of people.

I think the people who experienced the Apollo missions came away from that experience wondering to themselves, 'When can we get a chance to experience spaceflight?' I've heard that many, many times: that people got into a new career field hoping that they would be able to experience spaceflight.

There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.

We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way.

I think humans will reach Mars, and I would like to see it happen in my lifetime.

There's no guarantee that the United States will be around 200 years from now.