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It's our destiny to explore. It's our destiny to be a space-faring nation.

We need a community of nations capable of space flight because we all have to be off this planet sometime in the future. Our sun is going to burn out eventually, and we are not in a sustainable situation.

One of the big things about space exploration is that it is as expensive as it is complicated, and you need all the countries of the world to help if you want to accomplish big goals.

As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.

People make their own fates, and if enough of us make our fate to be space explorers, perhaps we can actually get some space exploration done.

The space program needs a goal, and the goal should be humans to Mars.

Sending people into space is very important culturally. That's really the justification. You cannot rationally justify it on the basis of the science and technology we get out of it.

The government will see that human spaceflight is useful - for science and the economy - and inspirational.

To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond.

Space is not an enterprise that belongs to the U.S. or to Russia or to China - it is a human endeavor and experience. And that's as it should be.