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"
The spice is vital to space travel.
Travel without moving.
ASTRAL PROJECTION
"Dancing Galaxy"
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
Human DNA spreading out from gravity's steep well like an oilslick.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Neuromancer
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"
The second best thing about space travel is that the distances involved make war very difficult, usually impractical, and almost always unnecessary. This is probably a loss for most people, since war is our race's most popular diversion, one which gives purpose and color to dull and stupid lives. But it is a great boon to the intelligent man who fights only when he must--never for sport.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Time Enough For Love
We who were meant to roam the stars go now on foot upon a ravaged earth. But above us those other worlds still hang, and still they beckon. And so is the promise still given. If we make not the mistakes of the Old Ones then shall we know in time more than the winds of this earth and the trails of this earth.
ANDRE NORTON
Star Man's Son
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
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
Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.
CARL SAGAN
Cosmos
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
I think commercial space travel is critical. We're not really going to do much in space at all until the price to low-Earth orbit gets driven down. Right now it's just so damn expensive, there's no economic incentive to go into space. So any missions are just governments spending money they're not going to recoup. But if you can drive down the price, then there will be a commercial space enterprise and economics will see to it from there. If you can imagine a scenario where, for $50,000 you can go into space and spend a week on a space hotel, like a space station. And the whole process were as safe for you as international [air] travel is today. I think people would be lining up to do that. There would be infinite demand.
ANDY WEIR
"The Martian author Andy Weir: Private space travel is critical", engadget, September 30, 2015
Today the stars and tomorrow the galaxies. No force exists in the Universe that can stop us.
JAMES P. HOGAN
Inherit the Stars
There are so many problems to solve on this planet first before we begin to trash other worlds.
E. A. BUCCHIANERI
Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
STANISLAW LEM
Solaris
Nobody is going to emigrate from this planet, not ever. On a local scale--the solar system--it makes little sense to continue exploration by sending live astronauts to the moon, and much less to Mars and beyond to where simple alien life forms might reasonably be sought--on Europa, the ice-sheathed moon of Jupiter, and on fiery Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. It will be far cheaper, and entail no risk to human life, to explore space with robots. The technology is already well along, in rocket propulsion, robotics, remote analysis, and information transmissions, to send robots that can do more than any human visitor, including decisions made on the spot, and to transmit images and data of the highest quality back to Earth. Granted that our spirit soars at the thought of a human being--one of us--walking on a celestial body like explorers on unmapped continents in times long past. Yet the real thrill will be in learning in detail what is out there, and seeing ourselves what it looks like, in crisp detail, at our virtual feet two meters away, picking up soil and possibly organisms with our virtual hands and analyzing them.... It is an especially dangerous delusion if we see emigration into space as a solution to be taken when we have used up this planet.... Earth, by the twenty-second century, can be turned, if we so wish, into a permanent paradise for human beings.
EDWARD O. WILSON
The Social Conquest of Earth
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
And now 'tis man who dares assault the sky...
And as we come to claim our promised place,
Aim only to repay the good you gave,
And warm with human love the chill of space.
THOMAS G. BERGIN
"Space Prober"
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