Let us not fool ourselves into thinking we went to the Moon because we are pioneers, or discoverers, or adventurers. We went to the Moon because it was the militaristically expedient thing to do.

To believe in a universe as young as 6 or 7,000 years old is to extinguish the light from most of the galaxy.

If an artist is reaching for the universe as a source of creative muse, then I'm there. I'm gonna say, "Yeah. Here's Saturn. Here's a black hole. Here's twisted space-time. Talk to me. What do you need? What do you want?" And I'll just feed you, because I think only then does science become mainstream - when science becomes a legitimate topic for artists.

I don't want to go back into space for military reasons, but the economic driver still remains. And so it's a matter of people understanding how that economic driver is revealed with healthy investments on the space frontier.

There are photons that have been traveling for 30,000 years, and I'm... snatching them from this journey and planting them into my digital detector. And then I started feeling bad for the photon, and I said maybe it wanted to continue but I got in its way. But then I said, no, those are probably happier photons than the one that slammed into the mountainside that will go unanalyzed and will not contribute to the depth of our understanding of the universe.

Here's the problem, when you're stargazing on a mountain top you are partially oxygen-deprived and you're in command of million dollars worth of hardware. So as much as I would like to sip wine under the stars, it's contraindicated in the instructions on operating telescopes.

If the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.