Best 148 quotes in «space exploration quotes» category

I am glad we have not yet been able to reach the stars or inhabitable planets that dance about them. For they would in all probability be owned and divided by corporations and framed by industrial interests. Better they rest in distant tranquility, apart from our manufactured chaos. Let generations to come that learn to embrace one another, with their scientists, artists and poets, be the ones that immerse in that abundance and future. For now it is best it remains out of humanity's childlike hands in that big jar, light years away, marked "cookies." There for that coming time when the only thing we need feed off of, is the endless discovery and beauty.

I believe my judgment has never been clearer. I have seen firsthand their potential, their strength of will, in a way you have not.” “You have loosed a chaotic, unstable variable into the Mosaic. They will destroy everything.” “It is a risk. They also may save everything.

Ideally, the ISS program will just be one more incremental step on an expanding, incredible journal of exploration and understanding, taking us higher and farther.

If there was anything the last year had taught her—if there was anything Caleb had taught her, the Metigen War had taught her—it was that perspective was everything. If you wanted to understand your enemy, you must understand that they were the hero in their own story.

I find these comparisons particularly poignant: life versus death, hope versus fear. Space exploration and the highly mechanized destruction of people use similar technology and manufacturers, and similar human qualities of organization and daring. Can we not make the transition from automated aerospace killing to automated aerospace exploration of the solar system in which we live?

I find it curious that I never heard any astronaut say that he wanted to go to the Moon so he would be able to look back and see the Earth. We all wanted to see what the Moon looked like close up. Yet, for most of us, the most memorable sight was not of the Moon but of our beautiful blue and white home, moving majestically around the sun, all alone and infinite black space.

I frankly expected a far more negative reaction from you on discovering…” she glanced around the lab “…the situation. Why are you helping?” “I’m not helping—I’m merely not hindering in as strenuous a fashion as I am able.

If we are to send people, it must be for a very good reason - and with a realistic understanding that almost certainly we will lose lives. Astronauts and Cosmonauts have always understood this. Nevertheless, there has been and will be no shortage of volunteers.

I’ll gloss right over the implication in what you said that the Reor are sentient entities—for now. Dare I ask why they gave you a copy of their universal decryption key?” Alex and Caleb shared a look, and she shrugged. “We can only speculate, but it’s possible they want us to win.” Miriam dropped her elbows on the table. “Hmm. Okay. In that case, I welcome the minerals to our side of the fight.

I lay on my back, surprised at how calm and focused I felt, strapped to four and a half million pounds of explosives.

I’ll do whatever I can to help guarantee this plan succeeds, and I’ll try to make sure I’m in the right place at the right time.” “The right place and time for what?” “If I knew that, ma’am, I probably wouldn’t need to be there.

I’ll ask you to look at the ships arrayed against you and consider what weaponry they might possess. Weaponry strong enough to crack your hulls? I know what weaponry you bring to bear, and I assure you it will not crack ours. “Are you willing to risk the lives of thousands under your command to find out? Are you willing to risk your own life?” The silence hung across space like a shroud. “This is not over, Admiral Solovy.” “That is the first true thing you’ve said today.

I'm even going to electrolyze my urine. That'll make for a pleasant smell in the trailer. If I survive this, I'll tell people I was pissing rocket fuel.

It’s pretty hard to get to another star system. Alpha Centauri is four light years away, so if you go at 10 per cent of the speed of light, it’s going to take you 40 years, and that’s assuming you can instantly reach that speed, which isn’t going to be the case. You have to accelerate. You have to build up to 20 or 30 per cent and then slow down, assuming you want to stay at Alpha Centauri and not go zipping past. It’s just hard. With current life spans, you need generational ships. You need antimatter drives, because that’s the most mass-efficient. It’s doable, but it’s super slow.

In other words, pretty much every star you see in the night sky hosts at least one planet. The next time you find yourself outside at night, take a moment to stop and consider the implications of this result as you gaze at all those pinpricks of light. Every one of them hosts at least one world, and most stars will have more than one planet. Solar systems are the rule and not the exception. They’re everywhere.

It felt somehow comforting to return to the sparkling lake tucked into the mountains on Portal Prime. But why, when everything about Mesme made her the antithesis of comfortable? Because here was where desperation had become hope. Where helplessness had become purpose.

In the field of technology, simplification is always an enormous advance...

I sailed upon oceans, and I thought no challenge could be greater, and now men sail the void between stars. Oh, how I remember them. The constellations burning so bright at night. How could I ever have known? God's creation has a majesty which lays men bare at his feet.

It is a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

It was a subversive notion, the idea that she was free. Free to choose where to go and what to do with her time.

...It wasn’t only the color that suggested war to the ancients—it was the strange motion of Mars and the other visible disks that did not behave like the stars, seemingly fixed in the firmament, but advanced and retreated and advanced again along their paths. These disks were given the name planets, meaning wanderers.

It was killing him, seeing her this way. She was not meant to be uncertain, timid or fearful; the woman he knew exuded confidence so fiercely it might as well be a damn spiritual aura. He needed to fix this. “It’s time to adjust your perspective. You want to show the politicians on Earth they don’t rule the galaxy? Well, let’s show them.

NASA spent millions of dollars inventing the ball-point pen so they could write in space. The Russians took a pencil.

Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed. Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have.

Mia stood between the bed and the broken window, holding an active plasma blade at waist-height in front of her. A thick coat of blood stained the plasma nearly from hilt to tip, hissing as it dribbled from blade to floor. “Are you all right?” Mia gave her a wan, distant smile. “It’s okay. I’ve done it before.

NASA's next urgent mission should be to send good poets into space so they can describe what it's really like." --Dangerous by Shannon Hale

Nisi flashed his charismatic, mysterious smile. “Now, with this in mind, are you ready to take the next step?” Despite Caleb’s attempts at caution—at circumspection and even suspicion—the man’s words stirred his blood. They teased the possibilities of the power within his reach, real power extending far beyond parlor tricks and personal protection to a place where the course of life itself could be changed. “I am.

No amount of standing on hilltops on dark nights and surveying the heavens could prepare a man for the actuality of space travel, because the earthbound observer saw only the the stars, not what separated them. They glittered in his vision, filling his eyes, and he had no choice but to assign them a position of importance in the cosmic scheme. The space traveler saw things differently. He was made aware that the universe consisted of emptiness, that the suns and nebulae were almost an irrelevancy, that the stars were nothing more than a whiff of gas diffusing into infinity. And sooner or later that knowledge began to hurt.

No country in the world can continue to spend what we are sacrificing for the moon without rapidly being reduced to utter ruin.

No doubt, there was something that drew people to this particular launch—a sense of something epochal, a passing of the torch from Voyager to a new generation of explorers who had been inspired by Voyager. You could feel it; it was in the air, now it was a new generation’s chance to explore never-before-seen worlds.

Part of what drives us to explore and discover is the intangible: expanding our horizons, feeding our curiosity, finding all those unexpected things, and trying to answer those profound questions discussed in previous chapters, like how did the universe begin? How did life begin? Are we alone?

No matter what comes, we will persevere. It’s not over until we win.” Oh, how she wanted to believe him. How she wanted to believe that her father not only had all the answers, but the power to make everything okay. Once upon a time she had believed it; then he hadn’t come home. “Why are you so sure?” “Because I didn’t cross universes to return to life, simply to die again.

Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate.

No, we absolutely should do it. If we can capture such a motherlode, it could make a pivotal difference in the coming war. We need it. AEGIS needs it, my mother needs it. This is why we’re here. “I’m merely pausing at the precipice of the cliff, peeking down into the chasm and asking, ‘Are we sure?’ So…” Alex eyed him wearing an uneasy grimace “…are we sure?

One of the key principles of the Outer Space Treaty is that space is the common heritage of humanity and cannot be owned by anyone – government, nation, individual or corporation. Space is very colonial: we talk of the ‘conquest’ of space, the ‘high frontier’ or the ‘final frontier’, colonising other planets, and the innate urge of human beings to explore, often without thinking about it; it’s such a strong master narrative. Instead of considering the treaty to be outdated, we might equally think of it as a radical statement of equality and justice – and one we need more than ever.

On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth

People ask what will happen if Mars One fails. There will be Mars Two, Mars Three, there will be Gliese 581 One, Proxima Centauri b One etc. If a project opens the path for other projects, it means that it has already triumphed!

People feared what they did not understand, and they without a doubt did not understand her. Those who believed they did least of all. She was something new.

She climbed into the shuttle and got in his personal space. “Who are you working for?” The man spat in her face. She rolled her eyes and wiped the spittle off her cheek. Then she punched him square across the jaw before grabbing him by the throat. “WHO are you working for?

Pregnancy, childbirth, healing and old age all required gee force. No amount of gengineering by the Biomistresses of the great stations could circumvent that inescapable evolutionary fact.

Pushing the boundaries and uniting the world: That’s what Mars One is about.

Semantics, Admiral. I’d appreciate an honest answer.” “I’d appreciate a multitude of honest answers, but I rarely expect to receive them.” Miriam sighed; the verbal tete-a-tete was growing tiresome. Time to bring an end to it with, ironically, honesty.

Reluctantly, we had already accepted every challenge at the moment we were born. And as long as we live, we have no right to give up. For we, or at least someone very similar to us, already died once, long ago in a faraway place.

She pointed to the wreckage of one of the frigates in the distance. Half the ship had landed atop one of the towers on the edge of the city, the other half on the flatland beyond. “You didn’t…do that, did you?” He shrugged with proper dramatic flair. “I did say I came to rescue you. They were in my way.

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.

Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.

She skidded around a corner, slamming her shoulder into the wall and bouncing off of it without slowing. Caleb? Silence. Forty-six meters. A long stretch of hallway. She pushed faster, harder. Twenty meters. She burst into the room in unison with a deafening crash of metal shearing metal.

She thought he might have said her name, but it was background radiation accompanying the hum in her ears and the symphony in her head— —a song of quantum mechanics and trajectory calculations and astroscience physics and where to go, where to go, where to…

Sooner or later, everybody dreams of other worlds.

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.