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"  Published in the January 2003 issue of Esquire Once you&amp;#039;ve been first, it cannot be done again. Not by you, not by anyone else. Success brings on great challenges. When you achieve something, you&amp;#039;re categorized in that area. There&amp;#039;s an assumption by other people that you know everything, when of course you really don&amp;#039;t. Responsibility has been overcome quite a bit by market forces. We live in a competitive world, but that doesn&amp;#039;t mean you have to stab people in the back to get ahead. History gets reinterpreted as time goes on. Many times, the participants are lost in the retelling of the story. Over time, humanity aligns itself with things that work and discards things that don&amp;#039;t. People were excited when we landed on the moon. You go to the moon a couple more times and they&amp;#039;re not so excited. We have the ability, at such high fidelity, to simulate the physical world through computers. But when the spiritual world or human behavior comes into play, we don&amp;#039;t have a very good model for that at all. Exploration is wired into our brains. If we can see the horizon, we want to know what&amp;#039;s beyond. What attracts note these days are people who are controversial. There needn&amp;#039;t be any substance to their accomplishments. Sometimes fame is the result of very individual action. Other times, it comes from being a part of an endeavor \u2014 but as a natural result of that, you end up being singled out. That&amp;#039;s just a spin of fate. You have an obligation to live up to it. Television has grown on society in a way that has pretty well overwhelmed all the other means of information dissemination. It&amp;#039;s convenient, it&amp;#039;s competitive, it&amp;#039;s dedicated to marketing. I&amp;#039;m not sure how we can really turn that around too much. We need to see the value of alternative ways. Things are not going to pan out based on what is most logical. The future is going to be based on a lot of other considerations. In my mind, public space travel will precede efforts toward exploration \u2014 be it returning to the moon, going to Mars, visiting asteroids, or whatever seems appropriate. We&amp;#039;ve got millions and millions of people who want to go into space, who are willing to pay. When you figure in the payload potential of customers, everything changes. NASA is still living with the idea that the primary purpose of the space program is science. I always wanted to get into aviation. I knew that from the time I was growing up: My father was flying airplanes and I wanted to fly airplanes. He kind of suggested that I go into the Navy even though he was in the Air Force. I couldn&amp;#039;t quite understand why, though I had a slight tendency to get seasick when I was young. Obviously, I resolved that. I see how incomprehensible things are, but I&amp;#039;m comfortable with unanswered questions. It&amp;#039;s not productive to try and figure out what&amp;#039;s behind the order of the universe. You just have to cope with the unknown; the answers will unfold on their own terms. The universe is the way it is. It&amp;#039;s not going to be changed by supplications. Marriage requires sacrifice. It eliminates a loneliness, but along with that there&amp;#039;s the challenge of compatibility. Also, there is a multiplication of purpose \u2014 proving that one plus one can equal more than two. Children have their own ideas about which way to go; they don&amp;#039;t like direct suggestions. It&amp;#039;s a challenge for parents to understand. Bravery comes along as a gradual accumulation of discipline. My father had regrets about not being recognized for whatever he was doing. I think that&amp;#039;s the case in many professions. Money? The more you have, the easier it is to get more. For every winner, there&amp;#039;s a loser. And that person didn&amp;#039;t really need to lose. They just didn&amp;#039;t understand the game plan. One of the prices we pay for conspiracy theories is that we are educating a generation of skeptics who are pessimistic about our way of life, our reward system, and our achievements. I believe in the First Amendment, but there should be responsibility. Things that are commonplace today were magical to people one hundred years ago. Carl Sagan said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no extraordinary evidence supporting claims of UFOs. There&amp;#039;s got to be more than somebody saying they saw something. There could be life on other planets. But intelligent life? There&amp;#039;s a big difference. As a father, I wasn&amp;#039;t around an awful lot. I probably wasn&amp;#039;t as attentive as I would like to have been. Some of the kids turned out real well, and some of them, you know, are dealing with life on life&amp;#039;s terms. The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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