Somebody Would Think I Was Trying To

As A Youngster, I Read Of Buck Rogers And Flash Gordon. As A Student, I Wrote English Reports On Science Fiction. And As A Fighter Pilot, I Observed The Selection Of The Mercury Astronauts. All This Was Fascinating, But I Really Didn't Think I Would Ever Be A Part Of It. It Was Only When My Good Friend Ed White Was Selected As A Gemini Astronaut That I Decided To Join Nasa As Part Of The Apollo Program.

I Think It's Inevitable That There Will Be Earthlings Establishing A Presence On Mars. And I Would Say That It Would Certainly Take Place By 2050 Or Shortly Thereafter.

We Have The Ability, At Such High Fidelity, To Simulate The Physical World Through Computers. But When The Spiritual World Or Human Behavior Comes Into Play, We Don't Have A Very Good Model For That At All.

There Are A Lot Of Reasons For Not Doing Something. And If Humanity Had Come Up With All The Reasons For Not Doing Something We Wouldn't Have Spread Across The Earth The Way We Have. There's A Curiosity, And I Would Submit That That Curiosity Will Put Human Beings On The Surface Of Mars.

We Should Go Boldly Where Man Has Not Gone Before. Fly By The Comets, Visit Asteroids, Visit The Moon Of Mars. There's A Monolith There. A Very Unusual Structure On This Potato Shaped Object That Goes Around Mars Once In Seven Hours. When People Find Out About That They're Going To Say 'who Put That There? Who Put That There?' The Universe Put It There. If You Choose, God Put It There.