I get demoralized by organizations that start off with a mission and pull back when they find it's risky.

You could not legally put a human and fly them into space. In fact, you couldn't bring a spaceship back. All those spaceships we were sending commercially into space were one way. You sort of like, got rid of them. And most passengers, who go up, do want to come back down.

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

The idea of a young thin woman who weighs 100 pounds driving herself around in a 4,000 pound SUV is laughable.

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!

The thing about frontiers, it allows the individuals who are best, whether they're men or women or minorities or whatever, to step to the top. So in traditional societies, old world societies, in the United Kingdom if you would; if you were born into the right stratus, the right class, you had the ability to succeed.

My father, who grew up picking olives on the Greek island of Lesbos, was a doctor. So my family expected me to become a physician.