“Franklin Chang-Diaz who is my idol, another astronaut who now is in the entrepreneurial space business, has a VASIMER rocket engine that if it works, and I think it will, will take us to Mars in 39 days instead of 8-11 months. NASA provided him a VERY small stipend to get started to bring his project to Technology Readiness Level 1,2 and 3. And now he’s at the point where its ready to fly but he has done that with what they call venture capitalists, private investors. That’s what Lori and I talk about. We can’t, the government can not fund everything we need to do. But we can inspire and open the door for commercial, entrepreneurial entities to become involved, to be come partners with NASA in this research and development that will enabled things to come about. No, you can’t make enough money for NASA to do the things that I think you want to do. But together we can inspire young people to want to put their money that they do have and are looking for places to invest into science and technology and together I think we will go back to the moon and eventually we will go on to Mars and other places even deeper into the solar system.”

Inspiring kids to try and do slightly better in math is good, but if you can inspire them to invest their own money in space ventures as adults then you’ve really done something useful. IMHO, the true legacy of Apollo is Elon, Bezos, Branson, Carmack, Tito, Bigelow, etc who saw what was possible and decided to go do it themselves instead of waiting on the Government to do it for them.