Our family was very fond of the University of Iowa. We thought it was a good place to go.

Our family was very fond of the University of Iowa. We thought it was a good place to go.

I think we need someone in a responsible political position to have the courage to say, 'Let's terminate human spaceflight.'

My position is that it is high time for a calm debate on more fundamental questions. Does human spaceflight continue to serve a compelling cultural purpose and/or our national interest? Or does human spaceflight simply have a life of its own, without a realistic objective that is remotely commensurate with its costs? Or, indeed, is human spaceflight now obsolete?

I am never as clear about any matter as when I have finished writing about it.

In a dispassionate comparison of the relative values of human and robotic spaceflight, the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure. But only a tiny number of Earth's six billion inhabitants are direct participants. For the rest of us, the adventure is vicarious and akin to that of watching a science fiction movie. At the end of the day, I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable.

These days, it's really been uninteresting except when disasters occur.