I think a mentor gets a lot of satisfaction in a couple of ways. They're doing something constructive, so they feel good about that. And when they see the results of this, with the young people they're working with, it's very, very rewarding.

When others kid me about being bald, I simply tell them that the way I figure it, the good Lord only gave men so many hormones, and if others want to waste theirs on growing hair, that's up to them.

I still have my [flight] license and I can still pass a flight physical.

A lot of people ask...why a man is willing to risk... Well, we've got to do it. We're going into an age of exploration that will be bigger than anything the world has ever seen... If a man faces up to the (unknown) and takes the dare of the future, he can have some control over his destiny.

America put more money into research, into the new and the unknown than any nation in history, and the same thing with education, and those two things led us into a worldwide preeminence in a very short period of time.

To sit back and let fate play its hand out and never influence it is not the way man was meant to operate.

I think that it's good for us to be able to travel in space and do research in space, and I emphasize the research, because space travel to me is far more than just seeing how far we can go.