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.

It was challenging to understand what was necessary to successfully carry out all the training simulations that we, as crewmen, would experience, and make a very successful use of that training and education.

I think we need to move to the moons of Mars and learn how to control robots that are on the surface. It's not the impatient way of getting there, but Mars has been there a long time.

For a million dollars, the Russians would take two people, a million apiece, around the moon and back. However, stories, videos that come from the space station, and other people, are a great inspiration to young people for an exciting career field.

I'm in favor of changing the destination of humans. There are a lot of manned missions that can be done, but not in the direction of the moon.

Unless we are able to commit to a permanent growing settlement [on Mars], then I don't think just going there with humans and coming back is worth doing. The expense of planning to come back is like the people who left Europe to come to America and then to turn around and go back to Europe, it really doesn't make any sense at all.

The guys who walk on Mars are going to be historic.