I would say - and paint doesn't peel unless it's acrylic paint, so maybe it is acrylic paint that they're using, not oil paint. So let me say yes, it would be acrylic house paint, which, when it dries, peels very nicely. So let's go with that.

Just before I said I wanted to be an astronomer I said I wanted to be a baseball player. I was quite athletic at the time, probably because I was bigger than other kids, and if you're bigger than other kids and you're 11 you win everything.

In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.

Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there.

I want to encourage people to not think in terms of gifts, but think in terms of, wow. You work hard to succeed at that, because that's exactly what I do.

I wake up and I go to work. I don't look for the cup of coffee. The universe is enough of a draw for me - to awaken me and have me bound out of bed and go to my office.

If NASA were advancing a space frontier there would be challenges you've never seen before. You have to be creative and you have to patent some new idea. You get to Mars...well, how do we get the water from the soil? I gotta invent a new device that will do that. And the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, how can we use that? Can we breathe the oxygen from the carbon dioxide?