quotations about space travel and exploration
The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired is a harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for the stars, and our children's children's and so forth children may regard a ship as a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm. Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not with the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth.
ROBERT WILSON LYND
"The Herring Fleet", The Pleasure of Ignorance
To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing.
MARY ROACH
Packing for Mars
I speak now not as a planetary scientist but as someone who has colleagues who are planetary scientists and this is what they told me. Who doesn't want to go to Europa? The problem is the technology to enable that is not yet available. And so if you direct monies to go to Europa prematurely and you find out that it fails, for whatever reason, it would not have been an effective investment of your money. So you say, "Well, we can try to go to Europa, but it might fail, or maybe the technology won't come for yet another decade or we know how to get to Mars. We know how to do air bags and drop rovers and those sort of things, so let's do that." So we're prioritizing not so much the science but we're prioritizing what's doable.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
"Space exploration and the culture of innovation: an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson", SFGate, March 28, 2012
What comes across from the early space travellers is a privileged sense of belonging. In a crudely material age, they learned that we, and other living things, are part of this Earth, and without it we are nothing.
JOHN BURNSIDE
"The real value of space travel is recognising the beauty of our planet", New Statesman, July 8, 2017
We can have a trillion humans in the solar system. What's holding us back from making that next step is that space travel is just too darned expensive. I'm taking my Amazon lottery winnings and dedicating it to (reusable rockets). I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do that.
JEFF BEZOS
"Buzz Aldrin Is Raising Money to Send People to Mars", Time, July 16, 2017
We must stop this insane foraging; this conveying of our lunacies from one segment of the solar system to the next; we must, I say, stay on our home planet and work out our problems in the Arena of our birth.
BARRY N. MALZBERG
"Notes Leading Down to the Conquest"
When I review my travels among the astronauts, my mind's eye goes first to the Houston shopping mall where Alan Bean sat for hours after returning from space, just eating ice cream and watching the people swirl around him, enraptured by the simple yet miraculous fact they were there and alive in that moment, and so was he.
ANDREW SMITH
Moondust
We're almost resentful of human space flight now, because politicians and greedy technocrats screwed us out of the translunar Martian colony future we all thought was coming. We're just a little too resigned to another few years of puttering around in low Earth orbit, of quickie space tourism and trying not to fart in the International Space Station for 30 days at a time. Even the Chinese, the current eager lions of crewed missions, admit that their Moon missions may prove to be robotic. In my life I've seen a species go from believing it will live in space to accepting, all too easily, that it will die on the same old dirt its ancestors rot in. Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future.
WARREN ELLIS
"Warren Ellis: On Space Travel", Wired, May 2001
Private enterprise will never lead a space frontier. In all the history of human conduct, it's as clear to me as day follows night that private enterprise won't do that, because it's expensive. It's dangerous. You have uncertainty and risks, because you're dealing with things that haven't been done before. That's what it means to be on a frontier.... The government is better suited to these kinds of investments. They have a longer time horizon. They're not shackled to quarterly reports like you see in a private enterprise.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
"Neil deGrasse Tyson: Don't leave space exploration up to private companies", BGR, December 3, 2015
The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems able to escape from the doomed planet and contact manifestations of the same amino-acid seeding that have evolved in other solar systems. The mission is the message--to escape and come home.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Musings on Human Metamorphoses
The all but impossible glory of having walked on the moon, of proving our mind power and our brilliant technology, this cannot ever be dimmed.... We have hurled ourselves closer to the Gods.
EMIL PETAJA
"That Moon Plaque: Comments by Science Fiction Writers"
Mars is a feasible target but we must be careful to not bite off more than we can chew; after all space travel is still a very dangerous endeavour, one that will need some refining as we aim to discover more about our universe.
VINCENT DIRINGER
"Human Space Exploration, What Are The Holdbacks?", Cosmic Nova, August 3, 2017
Once you've grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a groundpounder.
GREGORY BENFORD
Matter's End
The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever-growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without.
LOREN EISELEY
The Star Thrower
The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.
WARREN ELLIS
"Warren Ellis: On Space Travel", Wired, May 2001
It really seems to me sometimes that the only hope is space. That is to say, perhaps the most energetic--in a bad sense--elements will move on to a new world in space. The problems of mass society will be transported into space, leaving behind this world as a kind of Europe, which then eventually tourists will visit. The Old World. I'm only half joking.
MARY MCCARTHY
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1962
Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us.... The whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Red Mars
Space travels in my blood
There ain't nothing I can do about it
Long journeys wear me out
But I know I can't live without it, oh no
THE ONLY ONES
"Another Girl, Another Planet"