I'm at a place where I want to have fun. I want to be challenged. I want to love the people I work with and continue to appreciate being in the position to work and play and explore.
A product is most easily sold when it has an identity. So they wrap you all up and put a label on you. And then that's what you have to be. But what I'm looking for is the opportunity to explore what I can do, probing the limits, learning.
I'm really hopeful about the future of space exploration and human spaceflight. Civilization as we know it has been defined by exploration. You know, we need to go off and find out what's around the next corner and what's just beyond what we already know. It's part of our being; it's part of our moral fiber to go off and explore.
If there's no limit to how big the entropy can get, then you can start anywhere, and from that starting point, you'd expect entropy to rise as the system moves to explore larger and larger regions of phase space.
It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.
There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.
We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well.
It's crazy: the first black man to actually step foot in America came as a free man, as an explorer, with the Spaniards. That's something for me - as a black American, it gives me a little bit of pride because we were free and respected somewhere else before slavery became what it was.
There's a really great documentary called 'Many Rivers,' which documents the totality of slavery from its inception, and then it gives you a little history on how America came to prominence. It's crazy - the first black man to actually step foot in America came as a free man, as an explorer, with the Spaniards.
I have to have the wheel. It's given me an opportunity to experience and explore things.