SPACE TRAVEL QUOTES II
quotations about space travel and exploration
And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this.
SAUL BELLOW
Mr. Sammler's Planet
The spice is vital to space travel.
Travel without moving.
ASTRAL PROJECTION
"Dancing Galaxy"
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"
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
Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on
Ground Control to Major Tom (ten, nine, eight, seven, six)
Commencing countdown, engines on (five, four, three)
Check ignition and may God's love be with you (two, one, liftoff)
DAVID BOWIE
"Space Oddity"
Earth is the best planet in our solar system. We go to space to save Earth.
JEFF BEZOS
Twitter, April 22, 2018
Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.
CARL SAGAN
Cosmos
Will outer space be preserved for peaceful use and developed for the benefit of all mankind? Or will it become another focus for the arms race--and thus an area of dangerous and sterile competition? The choice is urgent. And it is ours to make. The nations of the world have recently united in declaring the continent of Antarctica "off limits" to military preparations. We could extend this principle to an even more important sphere. National vested interests have not yet been developed in space or in celestial bodies. Barriers to agreement are now lower than they will ever be again.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City, September 22, 1960
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
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"
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
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
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
My descendants are going to surf light-waves in space.
KATHERINE MACLEAN
"The Missing Man"
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
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
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
Human exploration and colonization of Mars will keep us busy for hundreds, even thousands, of years. During that time, there will be advances in nanotechnology, space sailing, robotics, biomolecular engineering, and artificial intelligence. These advances are occurring even now, affecting our outlook about what it means to be human and engage in human activity. Those technologies will not merely allow us to stay home on Earth and Mars, but our minds will extend our presence throughout the universe so that we will not need or want to extend our bodies there -- even if we could, which I think is doubtful.
LOUIS FRIEDMAN
"Beyond Mars: The Distant Future of Space Exploration", Discover Magazine, December 3, 2015
Space travel is just too darn expensive. And we know why it's too expensive. It's because we throw the rockets away. We're never going on to do these grand things and to expand into the solar system as long as we throw this hardware away. We need to build reusable rockets.
JEFF BEZOS
"Jeff Bezos Says He's Using Amazon 'Lottery Winnings' To Put Humans In Space", Newsweek, July 21, 2017