The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience.

For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested.

I'm not a scientist, I was not a good science student, I felt effectively alienated from science throughout my young life, and it was only when I became an adult that I began to really appreciate from a completely different angle the power of science.

Would a NASA reality show "Lunar Shore" be more popular than "Jersey Shore?" Civilization's future depends on that answer.

There are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace - a physicist is a trained problem solver.

Because we all just function, the rest of us, just go to work and come home; artists make life bearable. They give perspectives on things we never knew you could have. They bring joy. They explore inner human emotion, and at its best, the full dynamic range of that emotion.

The value of the space program is beyond science, it's beyond military; it's a cultural shift in how we think of our place in the universe.