Even though I knew I was inside the space shuttle getting ready to go fly, something about it wasn't completely real up until we got the call at about one minute to go, to close and lock our visors and start our oxygen flow. People often ask me, "What did it feel like right at the moment of launch?" And they're surprised when I tell them actually what I felt was relief. It wasn't like being anxious or scared or anything. It was relief because this is something I had wanted to do my whole life and now that the boosters had lit, we were on our way to go do it and nothing was going to stop us.

Qian Xuesen, the father of the Chinese Space Program, studied in the United States, and he was a protégé of Theodore Von Carmen's at Cal Tech and helped start the jet propulsion laboratory there, and then he got caught up in the anti-communism wave and was accused of being a spy and was actually deported back to China where he built from nothing, their entire missile and space program. So, in a way, in a very real way, the United States in trying to protect so-called protect our secrets and throwing this guy out of the country, we helped seed and start the Chinese missile program.

If you think about the energy that a rocket engine has to put out and all the fuel and you're sitting on top of like a bomb. And on the Space Shuttle, that big orange tank is filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the white cell rocket boosters on the sides are filled with solid propellant. There's a lot of energy in all those chemicals there and you've got to control it in a way so it doesn't explode. So, there's a lot of plumbing, a lot of valving, a lot of control systems, and it's a very complicated thing. So, how do you bring the price of that down?

One day, people will be able to buy tickets to visit space.

The neatest thing about research and science is we don't necessarily know what's going to come down the pike. We think we know what we're working on. Oftentimes, discoveries are made when you're trying to discover something else. You end up accidentally discovering a different thing. So, one of those things might happen that enable us to have more efficient rockets.

The ultrasound that has application not only in space for a long mission or for a mission to the Moon or Mars, but also in remote areas on the Earth. Not even just - I'm not even talking about expeditions like to the Antarctic, but just a remote area, a small town somewhere. The local doctor is not going to know everything, and so if that person can link in with a diagnostic ultrasound to the hospital in New York City through the internet, then they can do a very quick diagnosis of something that's wrong with someone that's in this remote area.

Two years ago, China tested an anti-satellite weapon that actually caused quite a bit of controversy and one of the controversies is that by blowing up a satellite, you are creating more space debris which is a hazard to satellites and spacecraft in lower Earth orbit and if they had been a partner, you'd have to do an experiment, and if they had been a partner in the international space station, would they have really done that test? They would have really thought twice about creating that tension between the countries and potentially endangering a project that they were a part of.