In the old days, the Soviets were using space as a selling point for communism.

That whole day of the space flight is very vividly impressed on my memory because it was such a new experience. We hadn't done that before. And then I've recalled it so often since then I think that it's a -- it's remained very vivid over the past 50 years, seems to me like about a week or two instead of 50 years.

That was a real fireball.

Zero G and I feel fine.

Americans just want us to... not be concerned if they can be constitutionally justified... Why, if we had to do that we could not pass most of the laws we enact around here.

People keep talking about how we have to go to Mars. We may want to go to Mars sometime.

I don't like the way the whole thing has developed. And I just hope that we develop our own transportation system, both spacecraft and new boosters, as soon as possible. I hate to think that we may be out there seven to ten years out and dependent on the Russians for our journey into space.

I think even in bad times it's good to keep some money going into research. And that's the purpose of the whole space program. It's not just exploration and going to see how far we can go out into space and keep people alive and bring them back, although exploration certainly has its place.

Probably, had World War II not come along and intervened, I would have tried to be a doctor. My son's a doctor, and I still take some medical journals to this day.

To me, we have never really exploited our ability in low-Earth orbit.

Old folks have dreams and ambitions too, like everybody else. Don't sit on a couch someplace.

I think sometime we will go to Mars and I think we'll explore it with humans sometime, but I think it's really wise to do all the robotic exploration ahead of time and learn as much as possible. Once we have learned as much as possible with the robots, then that's the time to send people, and let them then continue the research that the robots have started.

We're going to go to the moon. We're going to go on to Mars. We're going to set up a base on the moon. OK, but no money to pay for it, nothing in the budget for it. And so the decision made at that time was to cancel the whole shuttle program to save money, which I think was very, very short sighted.

It's something to see a satellite being launched from another satellite.

We had an airplane, a Beechcraft Baron, that we -- I had since 1981. And Annie Glenn and I both of had to have knee replacements unfortunately over the past year, and it made it more difficult to climb up on the airplane. We weren't using it that much so we did -- it hurt a lot but I finally sold the airplane.

As far as actually setting up colonies of people who would live their whole lives in space, I think we're a long ways from doing that yet, and I think we have many, many decades before we could be able to even consider something like that.

We had 83 different space research projects on my last space flight in '98, and they covered the whole gamut.

Everywhere that Americans spread off the Eastern seaboard, heading west across this country, they put up the schoolhouse first, hired a schoolteacher, and put all the kids in school.

We are more fulfilled when we are involved in something bigger than ourselves.

Just to continue a space program because it's a space program? No, I don't think we have an obligation for that.