You should command and demand the tenfold leverage on your dollars when you give it away as well.

I founded a launch company called International Microspace when I graduated medical school in 1989. We were trying to build a microsatellite launcher.

NASA calls stuff nominal instead of phenomenal, like it really is. So I have given up that there is going to be a balance and NASA is going to do certain things and we are finally in a state of existence where small groups of individuals can do extraordinary things, funded by single people.

More than ever before in history, individuals can now band together to solve grand challenges. We face enormous problems, but we 'as individuals' have enormous power to solve them.

In 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, I realized that the school didn't have a student space organization. I made posters for a group I called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and put them up all over campus. Thirty-five people showed up. It was the first thing I ever organized, and it took off!

I believed that once we got to the Moon, there was no stopping us. But in fact, we did stop.

The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.