We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.

So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'

I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we're the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.

Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.

Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.

I want upon death to be buried, just like in the old days, where I decompose by the action of microorganisms, and I am dined upon by any form of creeping animal or root system that sees fit to do so.... I will have recycled back to the universe at least some of the energy that I have taken from it. And in so doing, at the conclusion of my scientific adventures, I will have come closer to the heavens than to Earth.

Going into orbit around Earth - where the space station is today, and where the space shuttles and John Glenn and all those folks go-that's three-eighths of an inch above a schoolroom globe, just FYI. That's not very far from Earth. Yes, you are off Earth, but you're not really going anywhere yet. The moon was the only real destination.