Being first outside the spacecraft would bring much more responsibility, and I really wasn't looking for that.

I think there would be no shortage of applicants to the government astronaut corps to be settlers on the planet Mars. And I think this would be very inspiring.

Every couple of years, we could dispatch people from Earth to Mars.

Computers allow us to squeeze the most out of everything, whether it's Google looking up things, so I guess that tends to make us a little lazy about reading books and doing things the hard way to understand how those things work.

As a student, I wrote English reports on science fiction.

It's real easy to manufacture what you think the people want to hear. But that's not very honest.

I suggest that going to Mars means permanence on the planet - a mission by which we are building up a confidence level to become a two-planet species.