Some people will always be volunteers to explore, and it is, in my mind, a privilege.

You're always under the microscope, and you don't know which mission you're going to get. It's a surprise.

Will we go explore? Absolutely. That's what humans have been doing since we left the caves in Ethiopia. Why? Because this is part of our nature. We're curious. We want to push the envelope. That will never stop. We will see people on Mars, hopefully in our lifetime. My hope is that the endeavour is so large, so complex, so technically challenging, so demanding and so uplifting, that it will be done with a consortium of nations. I hope the people who do set foot on Mars will do so for all mankind, and not just one nation in particular.

A lot of people, I think, would love to see the earth from above, wear a spacesuit. Certainly, when I was a kid, I wanted to wear a spacesuit.

Nobody is going anywhere in 10 years.

Almost everything I do when I approach an operational problem comes from the time I've been in space. It's a way of organizing your thoughts. We use problem-solving; what we call "what-if-ing." What if this happened? What would we do? We go over plan B, C, D, E, F, and whatever else, depending on the criticality of what we're doing. This kind of thing can be applied almost everywhere, even at home.

On the day a country decides not to invest a cent in innovation, discovery or exploration, that country decides to be a tributary to others.