I don't play golf or have sports hobbies. Just my two businesses and my family.
My 3-year-old daughter told my wife she doesn't think I'm a pilot anymore because I don't fly. That was crushing.
As someone who flew in lots of airshows in his 20s, I know what immortal feels like.
Throughout our history we've had a lot of unique marketing initiatives that have led to growth.
I believe that we do have an obligation to leave the world a better place than we found it.
Our mission to space had to serve a bigger purpose, which is why St. Jude is such a big part of this. It can't simply just be about opening the door to space for everyday people.
In a multi-day mission there is a lot of time for a lot of things to go wrong.
When you're flying off soft keys on a touch screen it's a totally different feel, and a lot of muscle memory is lost. There is that delay when you look at the screen and input a command before it's executed, versus something instantaneous when you move the stick.
I don't know that there's ever been a human spaceflight mission that did not have some anomaly.
I want everyone to know what it's like to be very, very uncomfortable and to push themselves anyway. It helps build confidence when other challenges come up.
The founders of Draken and the senior management team all fly one of the positions in the Black Diamond jet team.
As long as Lehigh Valley Airshow is around, we'll perform it.
I started my company Harbortouch when I was 16 and that's still my day job so I never had any break from the action to ever think about joining the military.
It all starts with opportunity. You can have the smartest person that works tirelessly day and night on a business venture but if there's no opportunity behind it, it's going to be a pretty big, uphill battle.
In our 14 years in business we have never launched a program that changed the face and direction of the company more significantly than our free POS initiative.
The mobile solutions offered by companies such as Square, and now Amazon, may seem tempting for merchants due to the low cost, but these solutions simply do not have the functionality or reporting capabilities that real businesses need.
Harbortouch's revolutionary free POS program offers full-featured, touch-screen POS systems with no up-front costs, making it a much better solution for small and mid-sized businesses than the mobile dongles being provided by Square and Amazon.
Our free POS systems provide the tools that real businesses need to operate, including advanced functionality, robust back-end capabilities and cloud-based reporting.
I think if orbital space flight is just the exclusive domain of a couple of countries and a select few, I don't know how far we're gonna get.
St. Jude's mission is not about rockets or space exploration, it's about treating some of the most heart wrenching conditions that any parent could imagine.
A big part of our mission here at Inspiration4 is to inspire what can be done here in space.
I drank the Kool-Aid in terms of the grand ambitions for humankind being a multiplanet species, and I think that we all want to live in a Star Wars,' Star Trek' world where people are jumping in their spacecraft.
I believe that history will record Inspiration4 as a pivotal moment in space exploration, as another important step towards humanity's next great rendezvous with destiny out in space.
Someday in the future, 50, a hundred years from now, you're going to have a lunar base, you're going to probably have some sort of a Martian colony. But you have to start somewhere.
The crew of Inspiration4 is eager to use our mission to help make a better future for those who will launch in the years and decades to come.
We're very aware of how lucky we are, to be part of this history that that SpaceX is creating right now.
We put in hundreds of hours at SpaceX, studied over 90 different kinds of training guides and manuals and lessons to learn how to fly the fly the Dragon and what to do in emergency situations.
When we're up in orbit, the first thing we will be excited to do is reveal what our zero-G indicator is and how that connects back to our overall mission. That's gonna be the first way we celebrate being in space.
When I found out that Inspiration 4 was gonna be the first all-civilian mission to space, well then there's no chance that's going to be a bunch of fishing buddies going on a joy ride. That's something of significance, of responsibility.
I know how lucky I've been in life.
I've been a space and aviation enthusiast since as long as I can remember.
When I was in kindergarten, I remember looking at picture books of the space shuttle.
There's going to be an awful lot of people who are going to get the opportunity to go up and explore among the stars.
It was like I need something else in my life, and that's when I kind of went back to my childhood interest in aviation and aerospace, and I just started flying.
The mountain climbing, I just want to be able to have a real cardio-intense event, and the payoff is you get the top.
I just care about getting it right. That's so important to me.
It was a real business. And actually from a taxpayer's perspective, every taxpayer should want more Drakens. We were able to do so much more for the government for like one-tenth the price. We need more of that, and that's exactly what Elon is doing at SpaceX by the way.
If we're going to continue making advances up there in space, then we have an obligation to do the same down here on Earth.
I intend to get four people in a tent that I can attest is absolutely smaller than the Dragon spacecraft, on a mountain when it's snowing out, and introduce everybody to some really stressful situations. We are all going to know each other incredibly well long before we ever strap into Dragon.
We set out from the start to deliver a very inspiring message, certainly what can be done up in space and the possibilities there, but also what we can accomplish here on Earth.
If you can run your entire business on an iPad, like a food truck, then that's Square country.
We didn't want to sound like an old and crusty financial institution. We wanted to sound like we were fast moving and that we had this killer technology that was also safe.
It's just that as you grow as an organization, the challenges become bigger and the results, if you do succeed, become grander.