SPACE TRAVEL QUOTES II
quotations about space travel and exploration
My descendants are going to surf light-waves in space.
KATHERINE MACLEAN
"The Missing Man"
We shape life, we travel space
But we don't know the words to the songs of the ocean
STAR ONE
"Songs of the Ocean"
Our flight must be not only to the stars but into the nature of our own beings. Because it is not merely where we go, to Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse, but what we are as we make our pilgrimage there. Our natures will be going there, too.
PHILIP K. DICK
"The Android and the Human"
Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.
CARL SAGAN
Cosmos
Space travel is like hanging upside down for a long time!
BRINDA K. RANA
"Astronaut twins study shows space travel causes premature aging", La Jolla Light, August 1, 2017
The spice is vital to space travel.
Travel without moving.
ASTRAL PROJECTION
"Dancing Galaxy"
In my mind, public space travel will precede efforts toward exploration -- be it returning to the moon, going to Mars, visiting asteroids, or whatever seems appropriate. We've got millions and millions of people who want to go into space, who are willing to pay. When you figure in the payload potential of customers, everything changes.
BUZZ ALDRIN
Esquire, January 2003
So why spend money on space, which is and always had been a non-economic endeavor? In part, because we are still coasting on the achievements of the giants who came before us. We have let them down, let ourselves down, and become a country where dreams and aspirations are shrinking. We create magical devices--manufactured elsewhere--that sit in our palms and can tell us there is good pizza around the corner, but we can't get our hands around a version of our future that unpacks the mysteries of the great beyond. America is no long that kind of place, that kind of country, that kind of ideal.
DAVID CARR
"American Greatness 2.0: A week in which private space efforts explode etched the sad reality that the U.S. no longer reaches for the stars", Medium, November 1, 2014
NASA's next urgent mission should be to send good poets into space so they can describe what it's really like.
SHANNON HALE
Dangerous
Some say that we should stop exploring space, that the cost in human lives is too great. But Columbia's crew would not have wanted that. We are a curious species, always wanting to know what is over the next hill, around the next corner, on the next island. And we have been that way for thousands of years.
STUART ATKINSON
New Mars, March 7, 2003
The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
2001: A Space Odyssey
That's ultimately what space travel was all about, was sending out ships from earth into space. And not just in some, like, space shuttle that's got the foam coming off of it. You need your own glowing, you know, multicolored' space ship.
BECK
"The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton"
I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
EDWARD ABBEY
"The First Morning", Desert Solitaire
And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this.
SAUL BELLOW
Mr. Sammler's Planet
To venture into space we must be strong-willed and determined. We must be fully committed to its exploration and discovery; space permits no half measures and is unforgiving of mistakes.
HENRY JOY MCCRACKEN
LM, November 1997
Imagine we could accelerate continuously at 1 g -- what we're comfortable with on good old terra firma -- to the midpoint of our voyage, and decelerate continuously at 1 g until we arrive at our destination. It would take a day to get to Mars, a week and a half to Pluto, a year to the Oort Cloud, and a few years to the nearest stars.
CARL SAGAN
Pale Blue Dot
As long as we are a single-planet species, we are vulnerable to extinction by a planetwide catastrophe, natural or self-induced. Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.
DAVID GRINSPOON
Slate, January 7, 2004
Returning to Earth, that was the challenging part.
BUZZ ALDRIN
"The Dark Side of the Moon", GQ, January 2015
Space tourism will bloom very soon.... Regular tourist flights, orbital hotels--then the real payoff begins. I foresee an interplanetary cruise ship, a lunar cycler. Assembled in Earth orbit, this liner is given a powerful push--sending it on its way to the moon. The lunar cycler will undergo a cosmic dance: loop around the moon, return to Earth, slingshot around Earth, and return to the moon again. The round-trip will take just over a week. And every time the lunar cycler swings by Earth, it'll be met by a supply ferry, maybe even restocked with champagne, and boarded by a fresh group of travelers.
BUZZ ALDRIN
Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration
I'm coming back in ... and it's the saddest moment of my life.
ED WHITE
at the conclusion of the first American spacewalk during the Gemini 4 mission, June 3, 1965