Best 73 quotes in «space travel quotes» category

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.

I had aimed at Mars and was about to hit Venus; unquestionably the all-time cosmic record for poor shots.

In retrospect, it was silly to think that the experience of traveling in space could be approximated by a repurposed walk-in freezer. To find out what would happen to a man alone in the cosmos, at some point you just had to lob one up there.

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.

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

If the space travel is at the top of a country’s agenda, that country is surely a very developed one!

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.

In order to be a better writer, one must always write.

Interstellar travel is like a flight to Australia on acid.

Isn’t antimatter what fuels the U.S.S. Enterprise?

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.

I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect. But once the salt is taken care of and the distasteful organic molecules have been trapped in an activated charcoal filter, urine is a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage. I was about to use the word unobjectionable, but that's not accurate. People object. They object a lot.

In space there are no seasons, and this is as true of the ships that cross the distances between humanity's far-flung homes. But we measure our seasons anyway: by a smile, a silence, a song.

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.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne's 1865 novel "De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon)." The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne's book apart from the other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel -- his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists -- the Russian, the German, and the American -- were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer.

Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women. There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program.

Mars looks like Vegas without the casinos.

Nikki could barely pull herself away from the spinning alien beauty in the window, but Elon Musk was on the big screen with a drink in his hand. “Congratulations, Starship, on entering Martian orbit,” he said, smiling and raising his flute of champagne from the now very distant Florida peninsula. “Cheers to the six of you and best wishes for a safe and stellar landing on Monday.” -- from the upcoming novel MARS COLONY AGATHA: NIKKI RED by Jack Chaucer, 1-1-20

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo.

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.

Normal people have rock collections, shell collections, key ring collections and stamp collections. (The Captain had even known somebody with a letterbox collection.) But a people collection? That had to be the most bizarre one he'd come across. Not to mention the most unethical.

On this planet are every kind of deadly animal from across the stars. The only people that come here are hunters looking for the most dangerous of trophies. No rescue. You either get your prize or you die.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars!

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.

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?

Space: the gaping hole between land and other land.

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.

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.

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.

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