I Have A Hunch The Most Important

America Was Good Enough To Make A Small Compact Lighter Weight Nuclear Weapon. The Russians Still Had These Big Clunky Heavy Ones, So They Had To Build The Big Boosters In The Arm's War, So Now All Of The Sudden Russia Could Take Off The Shelf And Put Into Orbit Much Heavier Things Than We Could, So That's Why They Had The Original Leadership.

When You Have A Transportation System That The Price Of Propellant Is Essentially Negligible Something Is Very Wrong. If You Look At Any Other Transportation System, A Car, A Motorcycle, A Train, An Oil Tanker, An Airliner, You Name It; About A Quarter To A Third Of The Operating Cost Is Buying The Propellant.

I Like To Call The Difference Between Research And Development. Some People Use That Interchangeably. They'll Say R&d. They're Two Totally Different Things.

A Nasa-funded Study Estimates That If The Price Of A Ticket To Space Approached $100,000, Close To A Million People Would Buy One. That's A $100 Billion Industry. Microsoft Cofounder Paul Allen Gave Me $20 Million In Startup Funding To Go After That Market.

Space Travel Is The Only Technology That Is More Dangerous And More Expensive Now Than It Was In Its First Year. Fifty Years After Yuri Gagarin, The Space Shuttle Ended Up Being More Dangerous And More Expensive To Fly Than Those First Throwaway Rockets, Even Though Large Portions Of It Were Reusable. It's Absurd.