Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation by children being taught mathematical concepts.
NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space observe and make a journal about the space flight and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.
Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence.
I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.
The newspapers loved pinup pictures of pretty young swimmers and as a national champion I got more than my share of space in the sports pages.
I knew that I did not have to buy into society's notion that I had to be handsome and healthy to be happy. I was in charge of my 'spaceship' and it was my up my down. I could choose to see this situation as a setback or as a starting point. I chose to begin life again.
Deep down the US with its space its technological refinement its bluff good conscience even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation is the only remaining primitive society.
Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.
We must always emphasize research and development of science and mathematics and I can think of no better way to achieve this than through our future in space.
When I did 'Battlestar Galactica' it was the first time I really understood science fiction. That was a very political drama but set in spaceships so people didn't really take it seriously. But some really fascinating things were explored in that.
Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.
Don't you see what's at stake here? The ultimate aim of all science to penetrate the unknown. Do you realize we know less about the earth we live on than about the stars and the galaxies of outer space? The greatest mystery is right here right under our feet.
Life science research can be done on multiple platforms. Since we have a very small number of people flying into space the more people you have the better.
It's such a long mission and we get to spend so much time in space... we're doing such exciting research. And I don't want to overemphasize the life science research but as a physician the life science research that we're doing is extremely exciting.
We're looking at Earth science observing our planet. Also space science looking at the ozone in the atmosphere around our Earth. Also looking at life science. And on a human level using ourselves as test subjects.
If I can get some student interested in science if I can show members of the general public what's going on up there in the space program then my job's been done.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.