The most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
When you are a kid, parents tell you, that you can be whoever you want to be. You can be an astronaut and go to space. Sure, why not? It’s harmless to say that to a child.
But when you are an adult and you are serious about Mars and our necessity to go there and make a colony in order to be multiplanetary species… Then it sounds weird and people start to look at you with pity.
We have to have courage to start talk about it and then make things in space industry. And I’m not talking here about courage of an astronaut who sits on a barrel of explosives and flies into emptiness which is trying to kill him all the time. I’m talking about courage of thousands of people whose knowledge and work was necessary to send the astronaut to space. I’m talking about courage of all those people, who at some point in their lives said to their parents, girlfriend or husband, that they won’t be a doctor, a lawyer or a mid-level manager in a prosperous corporation. They won’t be. Because they decided to seriously pursue that thing, that pulls them with huge force of gravity, just like massive the black hole… They decided to dedicate themselves to space. Decided to study astronomy. Decided to construct satellites. Decided to design Marsian rovers. Here on this planet. Here in this country. Here in this city.
