SPACE TRAVEL QUOTES III
quotations about space travel and exploration
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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
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"The First Morning", Desert Solitaire
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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
Returning to Earth, that was the challenging part.
BUZZ ALDRIN
"The Dark Side of the Moon", GQ, January 2015
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
NASA knows that space travel, specifically spending time in zero gravity, is hard. But since the plan is to send men and women up to Mars, which is a six-month flight one way, it is trying hard to develop ways to counteract the debilitating aspects of space travel so the astronauts can function when they get to the red planet. Luckily, the gravity on Mars is less than it is on Earth, so they should be able to stand up and carry out their activities.
WILL BOWEN
"Astronaut twins study shows space travel causes premature aging", La Jolla Light, August 1, 2017
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
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
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
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
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
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
The spice is vital to space travel.
Travel without moving.
ASTRAL PROJECTION
"Dancing Galaxy"
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
Human DNA spreading out from gravity's steep well like an oilslick.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Neuromancer
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
Lewis loved fishing in space. Yes, I know there are no fish in space, but catching fish is not at all the main point of fishing. Ninety percent of the activity is sitting with rod and reel just simply mulling things over. Lewis spent hours in a space suit sitting on top of the Ray with his line dangling, contemplating the sheer beauty of the Universe.
ERIC IDLE
The Road to Mars: A Post-Modem Novel
And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this.
SAUL BELLOW
Mr. Sammler's Planet
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
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
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"