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One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.

I was born in 1960, and space theory, especially in the last part of that time and going into the '70s, space was very relevant at that time. It was on television - all the experiments, the moon landings, everything like that.

I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.

For days after the launch, Sputnik was a wonderful curiosity. A man-made moon visible by ordinary citizens, it inspired awe and pride that humans had finally launched an object into space.

I grew up watching a lot of the coverage of the early U.S. space program, all the way back starting with Mercury and then through Gemini and Apollo and of course going to the moon as the main part of the Apollo program.

And everything stopped quite rapidly because I knew that nobody in Europe was able to go to space. It was the privilege of being either American or Russian.

If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

We were young, we were pilots, and we were hungry to test the new technology of 'space machines.' And we all wanted to be first.

There weren't any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.