Passion is what gets you through the hardest times that might otherwise make strong men weak, or make you give up.

When Kennedy said, 'Let's go to the moon,' we didn't yet have a vehicle that wouldn't kill you on launch. He said we'll land a man on the moon in eight years and bring him back. That was an audacious goal to put forth in front of the American people.

The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.

Deep down within anyone there's a flame that maybe had gone dormant that can be fanned or ignited in case it had blown out. This is the flame of curiosity, the flame of wonder, of awe, of all the things that make you want to learn something more tomorrow than you knew today.

Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival.

It could be that these other civilizations, if they are far more advanced intellectually than we are, would not even measure our existence as a blip on the intelligence radar. They could be so advanced that we are to them what worms are to us.

Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.