Best 148 quotes in «space exploration quotes» category

Sooner or later, everybody dreams of other worlds.

So. Our little pearl of warmth, our spinning orrery of lives, our island, our beloved solar system, our hearth and home, tight and burnished in the warmth of the sun—and then—these starships we are making out of Nix. We will send them to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again.

Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.

The American and Russian capabilities in space science and technology mesh; they interdigitate. Each is strong where the other is weak. This is a marriage made in heaven - but one that has been surprisingly difficult to consummate.

The army had little attraction for him, but it afforded him the possibility of taking a great step toward his goal. After all, if the military saw fit to replace the body that he was planning to liberate from the earth's gravity with an explosive charge, this was a mere detail, at any rate so far as the preliminary experiments were concerned. Creative science should be able to take advantage, without remorse, of the substantial sums allocated by destructive folly.

The alien reached out her hands to hold Alex’s tightly. “Please. Some of what I want to express, it may be difficult to locate the right words.” “Of course.” Pure alabaster eyes stared back at her. “Child, there is a hole in your mind.

The Anadens have a somewhat different perspective on death.” “On account of not having to deal with it, sure. Personally, I think their little immortality contrivance has destroyed the value of life for them.” “It brought you back.” “Thus I reserve the right to be hypocritical on this particular topic.

The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides

... the heritage of mankind is not the earth but the entire universe,

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!

The Idoni Primor’s gaze fell on Eren immediately. Her head tilted in idle curiosity while a fingertip dipped into a crystal bowl beside her. “I know your face, anarch.” She brought her fingertip to her mouth and sucked it dry of gods only feared what hypnol. “You have been a most troublesome little asi of late. Have you come here to repent, to fall to your knees and beg to be allowed to return to the fold? Fair warning—you’ll be on those knees for a while.

The moon, the serene moon, was creating a conflict of opinion in America almost as violent as the racial problem.

The man who eventually reached the moon would be traveling in a vessel made of earthly materials.

The moon is considered a relatively easy object to land humans on, everything else is much harder by orders of magnitude. It is the reason why we have not been to Mars and will likely never go there successfully with humans.

The ISS would not be the incredibly capable orbiting research facility it is today without either Russians or Americans, just as it couldn't have been built without the Canadian arm used in its construction.

The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein -- humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth

The people who created this amazing mission of exploration chased their new horizons hard; they never let go of their dream; they put everything they had into it; and eventually they chased it down and accomplished what they set out to do.

The one that will put the first human colony on another planet is certainly the most important human on Earth. And you can judge the rest of mankind of his time by how they judge him along the way.

The progeny will be lost and adrift. Without the integrals reinforcing their focus and purpose, they will begin to question both.” “Sator, this is not a bad thing. Humans spend years struggling to figure out what they want to do with their lives, then often revisit the question at multiple points in the course of living it. It’s in our nature.” “Commandant, I’m sure I need not remind you that we are not Human.” “No. But perhaps when this is over, you will become a bit more so.

There are many places that are not made for staying," Heckleck said. "They are too harsh, too hard, and too far away from whatever you call home. You don't root where you don't have to, unless you're unluck.

There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go, and the set of people who can afford to go...and that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies...even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship...If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel. We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones for sure, and probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have that forcing function, and an Earth-to-Mars economy, we’ll cover the whole Solar System. But the key is that we have to make the Mars thing work. If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. That’s the next step.

The sky is the limit only for those who aren't afraid to fly!

The sky is but a looking glass into a pool of airless oceans, cast off into a dance of light and energy, leaving only a facet of guidance to navigate. Such an existence lays but within the mind man.

The universe is not ordered, and it will not become so simply because one wishes it. The universe is chaos made manifest. The military does a fine job of creating an illusion of structure, of dependable rules to provide an answer for every situation. “But it is only an illusion, one which on its best days holds the chaos at bay.

The truth is, we’ve had a fairly uneventful stay in the Gennisi galaxy. We staked our claim to our little corner of it and settled in, happy to be left alone to live how we chose. “But this doesn’t mean there aren’t grave threats out in the cosmos—more terrifying than our imaginations can conjure—or remarkable wonders beyond our capacity to envision. It shouldn’t be a surprise that when we finally went looking, we discovered one of them.” Nika nodded thoughtfully and shut off the map. “Well, I guess it’s time for us to go find out which one.

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.

The woman’s gaze sent chills racing down his spine. The diabolical, aberrantly predatory arch of her lips curdled his blood. Seriously, his blood must be curdling back at the lab right now. “Nice illusion. I’m definitely feeling the evil vibe here.” She stood and rounded the desk with perfect grace. “There is no illusion. Explain yourself quickly now, before I grow bored by your presence and dispense with it.

We are in the process of finding out what filling the sky with hundreds of thousands of satellites does to all life on Earth.

They had done it! Against all the struggles, doubts, and naysayers of the past 17 years, a spaceship had left Earth that day on its way to explore the Pluto system. With it rode the hopes of its team and a larger scientific community for what discoveries it would make there, a decade hence, in the cold, cold reaches of the outer solar system.

This was exactly what I experienced in space: immense gratitude for the opportunity to see Earth from this vantage, and for the gift of the planet we've been given.

Was Apollo worth all the effort and expense? If it had been about the Moon, the answer would be no, but it wasn't, it was about the Earth. The answer is yes. The only thing I can't see in all this is a rationale for going back. Unless we could find a way to take everyone.

This was supposed to be a dead planet? No. It just looked dead, and with typical human arrogance, we'd taken that at face value. Maybe there were whole worlds underneath that black and rocky shell.

Three men sat around a table. All were muscled and similarly greasy and easily identifiable as scum. As he breached the entrance all three were moving, drawing their own guns in surprise. Only one got off a shot.

To rise from the national level to the level of mankind, I call that progress. And that's what's so admirable. For a man to progress, once he has reached the White House-I wouldn't have thought it possible.

Unless humanity gives top priority to the space science, there will be no future for the humanity!

We are the middle children of history. Born too late to explore earth, born too early to explore space.

We cannot relive Apollo, but we can preserve its legacy; we can continue to tell the story.

We have a very short window in which to accomplish a great deal, one measured in minutes rather than hours. “We succeed, and we will have freed dozens of galaxies and species from tyranny. We succeed, and we will have saved our home, our friends and our loved ones from the looming threat of annihilation. We succeed, and everyone has a future. So let’s get it done.

Weightlessness was wonderful, and I was surprised at how natural it felt.

We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action.

We’ll go along with it for now. Valkyrie, keep close watch and be ready to swoop to the rescue.” ‘Hopefully swooping will not be required, nor rescue. But I am ready to do both.’ He squeezed her hand. “Alex?” “I’m ready, too.

What emerged from the portal was not the feared armada. Instead, it was a single ship. A familiar ship. I felt a quickening in my atoms. Clever, dangerous girl. I have been expecting you.

We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein.

We want to know. We want to know who we are and what we are capable of. I want to know. And yet we were dragged into another war. Another seemingly inevitable and gruesome legacy passed down, along with soma.

What do you want me to do? Arrest them all?” “When you can, absolutely.” “And when I can’t?” “Do whatever is necessary to remove their ability to act against us—against humanity.” “You mean kill them.” Her expression darkened in what he sensed was sorrow, but her shoulders rose. “If that’s what it takes.

Why a journey into space? Because science is now learning that the infinite reaches of our universe probably teem with as much life and adventure as Earth's own oceans and continents. Our galaxy alone is so incredibly vast that the most conservative mathematical odds still add up to millions of planets almost identical to our own — capable of life, even intelligence and strange new civilizations. Alien beings that will range from the fiercely primitive to the incredibly exotic intelligence which will far surpass Mankind. (The Hollywood Reporter, Sept. 8, 1966)

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 they were there and alive in that moment, and so was he.

When, in the fifteenth century, some audacious mariners who had sailed from Europe discovered America, nothing seemed to justify such a venture in the eyes of their contemporaries. Today, however, we can see it has given birth to the twentieth-century United States. Don't you think the existence of the United States constitutes a valid reason for Columbus's wild scheme...

When it comes to travelling to Mars, we either pursue physical paths and redesign our spacecraft with improved radiation-shielding and staggering fuel-efficiency. Or we cheat a little and bend the space/time continuum to get there.

When word of the astronomers’ vote in Prague reached the New Horizons team, reactions ranged from indifferent (“Who cares what astronomers think? They’re not the experts in this.”), to bemused, to annoyed, to seriously pissed off. As Fran Bagenal succinctly put it, “Dwarf people are people. Dwarf planets are planets. End of argument.