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If we did not have such a thing as an airplane today, we would probably create something the size of N.A.S.A. to make one.

You can't imagine a world, quite frankly, without a safe and secure aviation system. And so our job is to really focus on that, and what we need to do to keep it safe and secure.

Aviation is proof that given, the will, we have the capacity to achieve the impossible.

Real obstacles don't take you in circles. They can be overcome. Invented ones are like a maze.

The big mathematical challenge for flying robots is making them move in six dimensions: x, y, z, pitch, yaw and roll. We create 3-D obstacle courses in the lab - windows, doors, hula-hoops taped to posts - and ask the robots to fly through. It looks like a Harry Potter Quidditch match.

We don't have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do.

That's what we want to do here at Johnson Space Center. I think what we have always brought to NASA and brought to the country is trying to push the boundaries, trying to go to the next level.

Why don't they make the whole plane out of that black box stuff.

I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.