What drives me is exploration with a purpose, more the classic Royal Geographical Society genre.

My final question: Why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build a habitation on Mars and we have programs to look at colonizing the Moon but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet, and the technology is at hand!

I am really dedicated to understanding the planet/creature on which we live and know that means I must go beneath the sea to see 72 percent of what is going on.

I learned how to order my thoughts, and most important, learned how to develop a plan. I discovered the power of a plan. If you can plan it out, and it seems logical to you, you can do it. And that was the secret to success.

My family came in 1635 from England and settled in Williamsburg. Shortly after, they split up; half went to New England and half stayed in Virginia. I'm a Virginian Ballard.

Most of the time you are growing up, people tell you what's wrong with you. Your coach tells you, your parents tell you, the teachers tell you when they grade you. I think that's very good in the early stages, because it helps you then develop skills. But at some point in your career, generally I think when you are in your teens, you look in a mirror and you have to say, despite all the bumps and warts, "I like that person I'm looking at, and let's just do our best."

Fifty percent of the United States of America is underneath the ocean. And we have better maps of Mars than those areas.