I don't think we should have to do a Mars mission on the basis of hysteria. I think we should do a Mars mission on the basis of a deliberate judgment that what we want to do is open up a new planet for humanity... that we are continuing to be a nation of pioneers.
We need to drastically reduce the importance of the petroleum game itself by enacting flex-fuel-vehicle legislation that will open the transportation market to fuels derived from non-petroleum sources.
Energy powers our economy, both literally and figuratively.
There is nothing 'conservative' at all about Putin's cause. What he is offering is a synthetic ideology called Eurasianism, composed for him by Dugin, as a means of uniting all the anti-Western movements of the world under Kremlin control.
We have never been in danger of running out of resources, but we have encountered considerable dangers from people who say we are running out of resources and who say that human activities need to be constrained.
Just think how much poorer we would be today if the world would have had half as many people in the 19th century as it actually did. You can get rid of Thomas Edison or Louis Pasteur; take your pick.
I think that when humans get around to exploring and building cities and towns on Mars, it will be viewed as one of the great times of humanity, a time when people set foot on another world and had the freedom to make their own world.
I grew up in the 1960s and wanted to become part of the great space exploration effort, but when I graduated from college in 1974, the Apollo program was over, and the country had moved into this pessimistic mode. We had entered the 'age of limits.'
People make their own fates, and if enough of us make our fate to be space explorers, perhaps we can actually get some space exploration done.
In the 1960s, reaching for the moon meant just that. It was a metaphor for attempting the impossible, and we attempted it, and we did it. And it inspired millions of people in every way. The number of science graduates in this country doubled in the 1960s at every level - high school, college, Ph.D.
The facts of the fossil record never justified denying poor people a healthy diet. The facts of the weather record do not justify denying poor people affordable energy. And no set of facts, whatever they may be, can justify denying scientists - or anyone else, for that matter - the right to free speech.
Federal lawmakers need to change the rules so that vehicles converted to use new fuels can be put on the road; the only restriction should be that they pass the same standard state tests that all other cars do.
The Soviet Union used the exploitation of workers under capitalism as an agitational issue to subvert Western democracies even as it practiced slave labor at home.
Europe certainly needs a genuine conservative movement to combat the creeping bureaucratic collectivism that is stifling the human potential of the Continent.
Every dollar added to the price of oil weakens America and strengthens her enemies.
Every dollar cut from the price of oil weakens the enemies of freedom and strengthens America.
In August 1994, I was invited to have dinner with House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich. At that time, I was a senior engineer working for Martin Marietta Astronautics in Denver, where I had been responsible for inventing a new plan called 'Mars Direct.'
When people have their own money at stake, it's a lot easier to find and settle on practical, no-nonsense solutions to engineering problems than is ever the case in the complex and endless deliberations of a government bureaucracy.
Would offering the Mars Prize damage NASA? I don't think so.
The American people want and deserve a space program truly worthy of a nation of pioneers.
