Buzz Aldrin

Mars has been flown by, orbited, smacked into, radar inspected, and rocketed onto, as well as bounced upon, rolled over, shoveled, drilled into, baked, and even laser blasted.

The biggest benefit of Apollo was the inspiration it gave to a growing generation to get into science and aerospace.

For the future, primarily, we must educate people in science, engineering, technology and math.

Globalisation means many other countries are asserting themselves and trying to take over leadership. Please don't ask Americans to let others assume the leadership of human exploration. We can do wonderful science on the Moon, and wonderful commercial things. Then we can pack up and move on to Mars.

Computers allow us to squeeze the most out of everything, whether it's Google looking up things, so I guess that tends to make us a little lazy about reading books and doing things the hard way to understand how those things work.

Look at what Silicon Valley has done - the advance of computers.

Space is not just going up and coming back down again. Space is getting into orbit and being there, living there, establishing a presence, a permanence.

One of the major problems with long-term deep space human flight is the requirement for radiation shielding.

There's no doubt who was a leader in space after the Apollo Program. Nobody came close to us. And our education system, in science, technology, engineering and math, was at the top of the world. It's no longer there. We're descending rather rapidly.

Instead of planning the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, America should be preparing the shuttles for their next step in space: evolving, not shutting them down and laying off thousands of people.

In space, you don't get that much noise. Noise doesn't propagate in a vacuum.

I think humans will reach Mars, and I would like to see it happen in my lifetime.

What's aero braking? That's a way to use the gravity and upper atmosphere of Earth to sling shot a ship out either deeper into space, or slow it down to be 'captured' by Earth's gravity.

There are many people talking about access to space and, 'How can we make that cheaper? How can we turn that into a Southwest Airlines versus the big airlines?'

Everyone who's been in space would, I'm sure, welcome the opportunity for a return to the exhilarating experiences there.

I am excited to think that the development of commercial capabilities to send humans into low Earth orbit will likely result in so many more Earthlings being able to experience the transformative power of space flight.

There were about six years when there was not one American who went into space. We shouldn't do that again.

Can you imagine, in 2030, taking a space cruise on the very ship that carried the first human beings to Mars? I can't believe that people wouldn't line up for that possibility.