“Frederick the Great, said things like, “If you want to achieve great things you have to accept the fact that you won’t be around to benefit from them – but you still have to work for them as if you would still be here, and take them totally serious. So if anyone comes to me and says, “Well, I want to fly to Mars, I want commercial industry to fly to Mars -but it needs to be in my lifetime. Then I say forget it. You have to accept the fact that you won’t be around anymore, but you have done your part in it, you have, you know, passed on the torch. And so we are great passer-oners of torches.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0LS6-BUbao

“I wrote science fiction later in my studies, which told me two things: the future is not predestined. The future is what you make it to be. There are all kinds of futures out there. And…it’s not destiny in that sense, predestined in that you are in a rut – you are not in a rut. You can change it. So I said, “Ok, I decide my own future.” And the other things was, that, in science fiction you read a lot about space flight. And that made clear to me, we’ll need space flight one day, as a lever, to open this closed system. Closed system: land, sea, air…this is really not your total ecology. There is space out there. The fourth domain. But in order to get there, get the energy from there, the resources from there, or put people out there – you need spaceflight.” http://youtu.be/is2mSrZTgj0?t=3m38s