One of my goals is to reinvent philanthropy.

The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us are going to the stars.

We are not going to stop here on planet Earth. We're going to move out to other planetary bodies.

In the space business, space had gotten very much to be the aerospace industry. This is something that governments only do and it's where the Boeings and the Lockheed's and the Northrop's and so forth. And there's no way these small companies could do it.

Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster. ... I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.

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!

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.