Best 73 quotes in «space travel quotes» category

Riley asked himself why he had ever considered space travel romantic. “Because you are a romantic,” his pedia said.

She and Kennedy both dove for the power connector; Kennedy reached it first and yanked out the connection as Alex landed on her stomach beside it. The air settled down until the fine hairs on her arm no longer stood on end. Alex dropped her forehead to the platform and started laughing. “Just like university, isn’t it?” “Almost—nothing’s actually blown up yet.

She points to where he went and looks to the neutral Baumen. “He—he did that to me on purpose! He’s insane. Literally, insane!” The munchkin just shrugs. “Welcome aboard!” and returns unconcerned to his work.

Smiling now, Michael Dawn sat on his rooftop, gazing at the stars above him, just like men had done for thousands of years. Out there lay secrets and mysteries that an eternity could never unravel, worlds he could only imagine. Yet looking at them then, it all seemed so surreal. As if the only purpose the stars had in this world was to shine their tiny points of light down on him that evening. To give him something beautiful and breathtaking to admire. Maybe that was their only purpose. Maybe trying to get more out of them, trying to travel among them and shed light on things that were better left unexposed, had been the trouble all along.

Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we've had for so long will lose its value once it's realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea?

Sometime we don't always get what we want!" shouted Evie, not knowing herself. "That's life!"... The Captain, still looking at her, raised his eyebrows in surprise. He was proud of her for being brave enough to shout at (the villain), but he said softly to her, "Usually men with knives at your friend's neck get what they want, Evelyn.

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.

Standard procedure; the usual high volume of paperwork required to even sneeze on another planet.

Space is often compared to our oceans. Throw a stone at the water and the density smothers its propulsion. Skim the stone across the surface and the propulsion is mostly preserved with minimal drag. This kind of approach could work for NASA's mission to Mars.

Space: the gaping hole between land and other land.

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.

There are often evolutionary parallels on the different worlds because creation tends to be economical.

There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.

That was a hell of a thing.

THERE IT IS,’ my mother says, and what she means is that the dot we’ve been nearing for weeks, the one that’s been growing into a larger dot with two smaller dots circling it, has now become even larger than that, growing from a dot to a disc, shining back the light from its sun, until you can see the blue of its oceans, the green of its forests, the white of its polar caps, a circle of colour against the black beyond.

These beings, with soaring imagination, eventually flung themselves and their machines into interplanetary space.

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 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 Mars settlement may not grow that quickly, although the length of a sea voyage cross the Atlantic in the 1600's is comparable to the time it will take people to get to Mars on a spacecraft, and the cost, in relative terms, is not that different.

You ask me to make peace with the monsters who did this?” She didn’t even look around at ‘this.’ “Yes. The alternative is extinction. There’s no coming back from that—no new weapon to fire when no one is left and you’ve no universe left to fire it in.

These stories are true. They just haven't happened yet.

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

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. [Address at Rice University, September 12 1962]

Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.

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.

Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards?

60,000 kilometres per second may be the practical (!) speed limit for space travel

You can't show me the Earth from space and fly right past the moon, entice me into this magical machine and invite me to come with you, and then ask me to stay behind!

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.

You think this is a walk in the park, that it’s all beauty pageants and tea parties? Come on girl, wake up! This is survival at its most intense.

Children are turning themselves into monsters and, quite frankly, it is your fault. You initiated the creation of this technology, then you allowed it to slip through your fingers.” Miriam’s jaw tightened. “I disagree, but now is the least optimal time imaginable for assigning blame. People are dying, and I will not stand around debating semantics with you while they are.

Advanced weaponry, victories in battle and space travel do not an advanced species or civilization make.

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.

Ah, youth! It was a beautiful night... The moon was out of orbit. The stars were awry. But everything else was exactly as it should have been.

Alex screamed and lashed out at the points of light from within, desperate for something tangible to rage against. Caleb wrapped his arms around her from behind and coaxed her out while glaring at the Metigen in loathing. Then he lessened his hold on her to a single hand. Together they turned their backs on the alien and began walking away.

Don't just discover . . . Encounter!

Crushed sandstone sifted through Caleb’s fingers, insubstantial as dust. A breeze caught the debris mid-fall and spirited it away before it could join the ashes blanketing the ground. He stopped in the middle of what had once been a street, his arms pulled in at his sides, his fists balled in barely restrained fury.

From space the little world looked like nothing much - perhaps a pitted and decaying pumpkin, dull orange-black in color, with a handful of tiny orbiting craft floating around it like fruit flies. Here and there amber lights shone out of craters in the surface. What seemed to be scores of deformed silver minnows nibbling the pumpkin rind - together with numbers of smaller noshmates - were actually huge transactinide carriers and lesser starships, either taking on fuel or docked nose-to-ground while their crews rested and recreated inside the not so heavenly body. I have been told that the original Phlegethon of Greek mythology was a fiery river in Hades. Sheltok Concern owned a dozen or so similar way stations with brimstony names - Gehenna, Styx, Sheol, Tophet, Avernus, Niflheim, and the like - that served vessels bound to or fro the terrible R-class worlds where ultraheavy elements are mined.

Evening had turned the sky a deep persimmon. The remaining sunlight enriched the colors of the ubiquitous flowers and foliage to even greater vibrancy, as if the saturation filter had been notched up several levels. Caleb noted all this in passing as he strode deliberately forward. He didn’t know how he was going to do this, only that he had to make the attempt.

Glacier blue plasma rippled and sparked across the interior of the portal. “It seems keeping secrets is what you do.” “Secrets are merely the necessary means. Survival is the end goal. Survival of ourselves, survival of species who do not deserve to be eradicated from the universe. Survival of the universe itself.” “Survival’s noble and all, but what good is it without the freedom to live as you choose?” “A question you have the luxury to ask because you survive.

Here is one way to conceptualize NASA's heroic era: in 1961, Kennedy gave his "moon speech" to Congress, charging them to put an American on the moon "before the decade is out." In the eight years that unspooled between Kennedy's speech and Neil Armstrong's first historic bootprint, NASA, a newborn government agency, established sites and campuses in Texas, Florida, Alabama, California, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; awarded multi-million-dollar contracts and hired four hundred thousand workers; built a fully functioning moon port in a formerly uninhabited swamp; designed and constructed a moonfaring rocket, spacecraft, lunar lander, and space suits; sent astronauts repeatedly into orbit, where they ventured out of their spacecraft on umbilical tethers and practiced rendezvous techniques; sent astronauts to orbit the moon, where they mapped out the best landing sites; all culminating in the final, triumphant moment when they sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of their lunar module and bounce about on the moon, perfectly safe within their space suits. All of this, start to finish, was accomplished in those eight years.

Beyond the corridor of our space-time there are infinite numbers of universes, each of them is governed by its own set of laws and physics.

Her teeth clattered together like banging cymbals. Her fingernails glowed white, and her heart stuttered over two beats. “Input. It. Now.” “Done!” Let go, Nika. All you have to do is let go. She focused on her fingers, which seemed to be glued to the conduit, and directed every conscious process to willing them apart millimeter by— —she flew backward across the room and slammed into what remained of a wall.

Humanity is like someone whose outstretched arms are reaching for the stars but whose feet are mired in the mud.

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.

I don't mean to deny a feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the Earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon, I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.

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.

If someone told you your life was going to end then offered you an olive branch to life, would you take it?

If we get it wrong, if we repeat the mistakes of our past, the consequences could be devastating. But if we get it right, the potential benefits to the future of humanity are astonishing.

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.