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It's an audacious thing to build a model of the cosmos. It's exciting how little we know.

If you start out with a little telescope observing the stars and you keep at it over the years, as I have, it's kind of a dream to one day have an observatory where you can always go and use the telescope conveniently.

Telescopes and microscopes bring to our view the otherwise unseen and unknown.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

It's hard to imagine anything more interesting than learning how we're woven into the enormous tapestry of existence. Where did our universe come from? How special is our world, and how special are we? We allocate tens of billions of dollars annually to NASA, NSF and academia in search of the answers.

In order for us to have a future that's exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we're a space-bearing civilization.

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.

We are discovering what the universe is really like, and it is totally magnificent, and one can only be inspired and awestruck by what we find.

A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral.

With the Hubble telescope and all the other things that are out there, I believe something would have come through. Today, I really believe we are unique.