America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.
People need to be made conscious of a very simple reality: we have no choice but to share this planet, this small blue sphere floating in the vast reaches of space, with all of our fellow ‘passengers.’
When many astronauts go to space, they see the insignificant size of the earth and vastness of space, and they become very religious, because they have seen the Signs of Allah.
Space is to place as eternity is to time.
The purpose of going to Mars is for humans to first begin to occupy, permanently, another planet in the solar system. The astronauts or pilgrims, whatever you might call them, are going to be very historically unique human beings.
The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species.
The discovery and investigation of life on other planets is likely to change many of our ideas about how life arose on the Earth and even what is life and its natural development.
In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God’s creation… as music.
The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.
There are no wishy-washy astronauts. You don’t get up there by being uncaring and blase. And whatever gave you the sense of tenacity and purpose to get that far in life is absolutely reaffirmed and deepened by the experience itself.
Earlier generations of stars in the galaxy could well have had planets. But really, there was only hydrogen and helium to work with, so they’d all be gas giants and not small, rocky planets.
Reusable rockets promise much easier testing because you should usually get them back, and you can debug as you go rather than having to get everything perfect the first time.
I used to think about how nice it would be to visit the planets. Of course, I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime what has happened. I knew it would happen some day, but it came along faster than I at first thought.
The stars, that nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps with everlasting oil, give due light to the misled and lonely traveller.
Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.
I could have gone on flying through space forever.
Well, I don’t think we should go to the moon. I think we maybe should send some politicians up there.
I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.
As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt.
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
Houston, we’ve had a problem.
Most of our history in space has been communicated in terms of action – what people do, a chronological list of events which have transpired – as opposed to the human experience of having done those things.
The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an ‘escape tower’ containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch.
