quotations about space travel and exploration
Why our space program? Why, indeed, did we trouble to look past the next mountain? Our prime obligation to ourselves is to make the unknown known. We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whatever we are.
GENE RODDENBERRY
The Star Trek Compendium
Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have.
GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER
Live! from Planet Earth
No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight. This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward. So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
speech at Rice University, September 12, 1962
Only via continuing to probe every nook and cranny of the universe that is accessible to us will we truly build a useful appreciation of our own place in the cosmos.
LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
A Universe from Nothing
In my own experience -- this is not a scientific survey -- people who are buying tickets in advance for suborbital flights are doing so [because] by being an early adopter they're helping push the technology forward. They're not doing it because [it] would be fun. There's a component of [fun], but they're doing it because they know that if people hadn't bought $10,000 flat-screen TVs nobody would have one today. If people hadn't bought $5,000 cell phones nobody would have one today. They're people who have dreamed of spaceflight for a long time, they want to see spaceflight really happening. They're aware that by being one of the pioneering customers they're helping to make that happen.
JEFF GREASON
"The Future of Commercial Space Travel According to Jeff Greason: Interview", December 8, 2015
The point of no return on transportation comes when the profits from space transportation are sufficient that you can fund the next-generation, improved product out of the profits from the current generation, without having to go back to capital markets or go back to government agencies and asking permission to improve the product. That's what every other technical area has. You people don't go and petition Congress for next-generation cell phone technology, because they make enough profit from the current generation to make the next generation. Same with computers, same with cars, same with everything like that. [Commercial spaceflight isn't] there yet.
JEFF GREASON
"The Future of Commercial Space Travel According to Jeff Greason: Interview", December 8, 2015
From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'
EDGAR MITCHELL
People Magazine, April 8, 1974
Oh my gosh, we are in the Wright Brothers era of commercial space so that was a very interesting job for me. Do I foresee that we will have any mishaps? The Virgin Galactic SpaceshipTwo accident that resulted in the loss of one pilot and injury of another last year comes to mind. Absolutely, there will be mishaps. We will do that. The thing to remember though is that even at the height of the space shuttle era we sent less than fifty or so people into space a year- it was very controlled. We will learn so much more by commercial enterprise flying a lot and flying every day, and there will be mishaps then, just like there are mishaps today.
PAMELA MELROY
"An interview with Pamela Melroy, a retired astronaut dedicated to space exploration", Chicago Now, September 5, 2015
The truth of the matter is that humans or any other living thing -- be it a plant or a fruit fly from planet Earth -- are not meant for space travel. Traveling in space is very hard on creatures, producing physiological effects similar to premature aging.
WILL BOWEN
"Astronaut twins study shows space travel causes premature aging", La Jolla Light, August 1, 2017
Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival. Not only does that get people interested in sciences and all the related fields, [but] it transforms the culture into one that values science and technology, and that's the culture that innovates.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
"Space Chronicles: Why Exploring Space Still Matters", NPR, February 27, 2012
Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die -- a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards?
RAY BRADBURY
Yestermorrow
Can you travel space and time
Do you have a face like mine
Are you far from humankind
Don't you want to say hello
Maybe spend a week or so
With us
AMY DIAMOND
"We Could Learn a Lot"
Louis Friedman has always balanced his optimistic vision for the future of human space exploration with a dose of reality.... Friedman is optimistic that human space exploration will continue well into the future. However, here's that dose of reality from Friedman: humans will never venture beyond Mars, at least not in any historically significant way. Once humans tame Mars, how will humanity continue to explore cosmic frontiers, and to what end? Space travel, according to Friedman, will be an act more focused on transporting our minds -- with the help of new technologies -- rather than our bodies.
DAVID WARMFLASH
"Beyond Mars: The Distant Future of Space Exploration", Discover Magazine, December 3, 2015
We must never confuse space colonization with the conquest of space. The world beyond ours is unimaginably vast; it will be what it has always been. When humankind begins to make its home in space, it is we who will change.
CAMERON M. SMITH
Scientific American, January 2013
What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?
TOM WOLFE
The Right Stuff
We will never be able to build enough spaceships. The demand is enormous.
RICHARD BRANSON
"Demand for Space Travel Is Out of This World", Bloomberg, July 6, 2017
[Space travel] will come, but only when there is a high enough demand so that you can have a "public highway" system. To support today's air traffic network, you've got to have a million passengers constantly on the move. The same will be true in space: It's not really a technology problem, it's more a sort of chicken-and-egg economic problem. I hope that it will grow, probably on the back of the military. The military has needs for all kinds of space launching and is prepared to pay for it. So with luck something like this space highway will develop. It doesn't matter who pays for it initially. In the end it will belong to everybody.
FREEMAN DYSON
Discover Magazine, June 2008
What comes across from the early space travellers is a privileged sense of belonging. In a crudely material age, they learned that we, and other living things, are part of this Earth, and without it we are nothing.
JOHN BURNSIDE
"The real value of space travel is recognising the beauty of our planet", New Statesman, July 8, 2017
On one side are those who believe space travel is difficult work, but who go for it anyway. On the other are those who believe caring for a goldfish is, and who don't go after much of anything. Where we choose to seed ourselves on the spectrum of what's possible is what will ultimately define the size of our lives.
MARY-JO DIONNE
"Leadership And Life: Insights Gleaned On Necker Island", Huffington Post, July 13, 2017
Robots going places is not as exciting as humans going places. The only people clamouring for space launches to Mars to recover the wandering robot skateboard currently stuck in a sandtrap there are, well, the people who want to make it their android whore. And when your Martian explorer is not exploring any more because it's stuck in a sandtrap, it means you've sent a skateboard to do the job of a human.
WARREN ELLIS
"Warren Ellis: On Space Travel", Wired, May 2001