Quotes from Ellen Stofan

So many people I talk to who work in technology, you ask them, 'What got you interested in science?' and those from my generation say, 'The Apollo landings.'

We're going to understand that there is life on other bodies in the solar system.

The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe.

Water-based life is very much an Earth-centric view, and we can push the envelope on that here in our own solar system. We have the methane seas of Titan.

You see countries like India really investing in their space program because they see it as inspirational and good for their economy.

With the mission to Mars, the whole world wants to get involved. So we actually have 13 different space agencies from around the world working on the global exploration road map.

'The Martian' may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.

I'm actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.

I grew up in this business... A lot of my life has been centered around this question about how NASA is helping us to understand our own home planet... and to understand our place in the universe.

What we expect to find, certainly in our own solar system, are probably simple single or multiple-cell forms of life. To get to intelligent life takes stability of conditions over huge, long periods of time.

We have to ask, 'How can we break a huge challenge like sending humans to Mars into a series of doable, affordable steps? How can we break that problem down into chunks in order to keep making progress?'

If I had an unlimited budget, I would really be probing that question of life because we know what the questions are, and we know what the destinations are.

I live an hour from NASA's HQ in Washington, D.C., and sitting in a jam stresses me out.

I'm so biased to this issue of the origins of life and the limits of life.

When you look at Venus and the Earth, they formed at about the same place in the solar system. They're made of about the same materials; they're about the same size.

Prior to Magellan, due to the fact that we knew it was so hot on Venus, we thought that the rocks at the surface would behave more plastically, more like Silly Putty than like solid rock in the way that we think of it, like the rocks that I'm sitting on.

I wish someone would redo 'Dune.'