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

If you can make a big impact on the global literacy problem, you can uplift a big portion of society.

I'm extraordinarily passionate about the idea of asteroid mining in the future. Asteroids out there, we know them from those that have fallen on the Earth, there is a class of asteroids, sub-class of nickel/iron asteroids, which are 50,000 times more enriched than Platinum mines on earth.

Imagine a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy. Building this better world is humanity's grandest challenge.

I ended up realizing that NASA was unlikely to get me into space, or get me to the moon or beyond, and I needed some other way to drive this.

When cars have the sensory systems around them, GPS intelligence, they're looking at the world not only in visual spectrum, but infrared, ultraviolet and everything else that's going on and they've got reaction times in microseconds. Not a tenth of a second. They're a hundred thousand times faster.

The quality of your life is a function of who you go through life with.