My wife Janet: she is the most scrupulously honest human being I have ever encountered.

Eden Hazard, a true sportsman.

David Attenborough, because he sticks to what he loves and is still passionate about it. God bless him.

Dr. Pedro Cavadas, a pioneer in face transplants and a specialist in the transplant of severed members. This surgeon from Valencia devotes his summer breaks to travel to Africa and tend to children who have been castrated in tribal conflicts.

We had a couple of cliffhangers on Apollo XIV. In the first place, we tried to dock with the lunar module, and that didn’t work, so it could have been the end of the deal, but we finally got that organized. And then, the actual landing on the surface. We were supposed to get an update from the radar, we couldn’t go below 13,000 feet, and that came in only at the last minute. So there were a lot of little nervous things that kept you awake all the way down until you landed.

And I say, “Every single dollar that was spent on the space program, went into the pockets of the individuals who worked on it: the contractors, the subcontractors, the vendors. It went to feed their children, put clothes on their back, send them to school.…If we are going to be the leaders of the world, and we are going to worry about trade balance, if we are going to worry about military systems, or solving the problems of the environment, we are going to have to continue to spend money on research, medical research as well.

And I think that still is true of this business — which is basically research and development — that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

I think all of us certainly believed the statistics, which said that probably 88 percent chance of mission success and maybe 96 percent chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.

No. I think all of us had such confidence in the technology that it was not a question. It was just a question of scheduling and a question of the funds to do it. I think one has to have that kind of an attitude, particularly when you are involved in research and development. You’ve got to believe it’s going to be done eventually.

A little bit of overconfidence perhaps. A lack of attention to duty. Little insidious things that happened. You had this great team of dedicated, qualified people, but they get a little bit complacent, and boom! Pretty soon something goes wrong.