Knowledge of the past and an optimistic view of the present give you great opportunities.

What are you going to do with astronauts who first reach the surface of Mars and then turn around and rocket back home-ward? What are they going to do, write their memoirs? Would they go again? Having them repeat the voyage, in my view, is dim-witted. Why don't they stay there on Mars?

There are always door openings. And gradually, it accumulates. The opportunities open up in front of you.

I would rather people understand that there is a very, very fortunate American who was given the opportunity, and was in the right place at the right time to have the moment of a lifetime. My mother was born - her name was Marianne Moon. And she was born in 1903, the year that the Wright Brothers first flew.

Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon. I am the first man to piss his pants on the moon.

Mars is far more attractive as an outpost colony for earthlings than the moon is.

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.