Thomas Zurbuchen

“I do that often in reviews. I push against one person and see whether the other one comes to rescue them. I want to know, like, do they let them sink? I mean, frankly, I put more edge against one person. Sometimes I apologize at the end. Sometimes it's exactly…”

“So I will make the decision that it's one, it's not a vote. It's one decision by one signature. The only signature that matters there for most of these missions is mine, right? Because I take the accountability, right?”

“First of all, I, Believe it's very likely, right? I mean, as a scientist, the answer must be, I don't know.”

“For me, that almost made a mistake mechanism is so important for big projects. Talk about the almost mistakes, because they surely will be mistakes if you don't fix them. What can we learn from almost mistakes? Also, talk about the mistakes”

“When I started my kind of master's degree in astrophysics we had no planets elsewhere other than the ones in our solar system. In the meantime, we have thousands of those planets, and some of them look awfully like, you know, like our own kind of relative to t…”

“I frankly, I, we had a team, I basically replaced in my reporting structure, everybody. And the simple reason for that is I wanted to basically create a before and after. I wanted to make sure that the after is one that we are together and we are one, we are l…”

“What I really hate, if you really want to tick me off, come show up and tell me everything is low risk. That makes me believe you haven't understood your job, right?”

“So in that room, there were very few people who wanted to fire the engine. But I took the decision to fire the engine, and then we prepared for it. And as we prepared for it, all of a sudden we realized that the engine had a problem. It had a leak. It was some…”

“I think the hardest part of research is always to find that edge, right? So kind of, you know, kind of, if you really look at the best research, you know, I think of it like I'm a mountain guy. I think of it as like walking in the mountains on that ridge on th…”