Because now, you know, it's going to be a number of years yet before we have our own new boosters and new spacecraft to go to our own International Space Station and proceed with all the research that we spent $100 billion putting up there to give us that research capability for the future for people right here on Earth.

On K-12 education America has gone down, down, down compared to the other nations. It doesn't mean that we have gotten dumber. It just means that we have not advanced as fast in those areas as other nations have done, and we're way down right now.

We had a lot of confidence that there was going to be a successful mission. We weren't off on some suicide effort, certainly [with Friendship 7].

I think no matter where we go in space to me the important thing is not only getting there and getting back, but it's also doing research, because that opens up as a possibility with that new distance of travel in space.

There are times when you devote yourself to a higher cause than personal safety.

I was sold on flying as soon as I had a taste for it.

As far as actually setting up colonies of people who would live their whole lives in space, I think we're a long ways from doing that yet, and I think we have many, many decades before we could be able to even consider something like that.