The Launch of ExoMars | MARS

I've been thinking about exom for more than 16 years. So, that's it over there, right? Serious, guys. What we're doing is really rather difficult. A lot of things have to go right.

One minute, one minute, one minute. Building the instruments is hard, and maybe if you haven't had enough test time, and you're thinking to yourself, oh my goodness, you know, this has got to go on another one of these damn rockets. Launches are inherently dangerous; there's always some sort of a risk of something blowing up, as long as the thing doesn't blow up when I'm too close to it, and we have lift-off.

The Americans have had failures, the Europeans have had failures, the Russians have had failures. We check things, we recheck them, we have checkers checking the checkers. And how much is enough to ensure that you don't fail?

There she goes! Jeez, look at that beautiful god fling! That's an experience, isn't it? Holy SM! We have to wait a little bit while things deploy, and then we're on our way to Mars. Yeah, gets you sort of [Applause].

You had this incredible number of people all working to send something to a strange kind of pinkish dot in the sky. I really like not seeing Mars as a challenge to overcome, but Mars has an opportunity to unite people together in a peaceful way and give our species a goal. You're giving people something optimistic to [Music] pursue.