RSS
Comma-separated values (CSV)
Text
JSONSpace Travel
I think we need to go to space. I don't think NASA needs to take us there.
Quote | Author | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hydrazine is flammable, explosive, toxic, corrosive, carcinogenic, teratogenic, and mutagenic. | ||||
| Asking NASA to develop low cost space access is analogous to asking Amtrak to develop new low cost locomotives. | Andrew Beal | |||
| The dinosaurs are not around today because they did not have a space program. | Arthur C. Clarke | |||
| For all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean—'spaceship.' | Arthur C. Clarke | |||
| Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. | Arthur C. Clarke | |||
| If we can put a man on the Moon, how come we can't put a man on the Moon? | Bill Engfer, Space Frontier Foundation | |||
| The only meaningful memorial, the only one that will really count, will be when there are streets, tunnels, living and working quarters named after each of those astronauts--and those who will yet die in this effort--in permanently occupied stations on the moon, on Mars, in the asteroid belt, and beyond. | Bruce F. Webster | |||
| History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve. | Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut | |||
| There's not a place in the universe that's safe forever; the universe is telling us, 'Spread out, or wait around and die.' | Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut | |||
| Chance of a lifetime, nuts! This is the greatest chance in all history. It's raining soup; grab yourself a bucket. | Delos (DD) Harriman, The Man Who Sold The Moon | |||
| 40 years after the Wright Brothers made their first flight, more than a million people had flown in a plane; 40 years after man first went into space, fewer than 500 people have followed them there. | Ed Hudgins | |||
| Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards. | Fred Hoyle | |||
| If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life. | Gus Grissom (who died in the Apollo 1 fire) | |||
| The result (of manned space flight) has been stunning technological achievement not only in aerospace, but also in medical technology, communications, energy and other diverse fields that sustain our civilization. We delete human space flight at the risk of stifling a major factor in technological innovation... If human space flight fails, technology fails. And if technology fails, the country fails. | Homer Hickam, a retired NASA engineer | |||
| It is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity. | Isaac Asimov | |||
| There are some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole. | Isaac Asimov | |||
| Any environmentalist who opposes space travel has no imagination whatever. | James Lovelock | |||
| The American West had to be subjected to massive civil engineering works before more than a small community of pioneers could live there. What you consider to be habitable is a function of your level of technology. | Jeff Greason | |||
| At the highest levels, there seems to be a belief that you can mandate reality, followed by a refusal to accept any information that runs counter to that mandate. | Jeffrey Finckenor, resignation letter from NASA, 2008 | |||
| I always knew I'd live to see the first man walk on the Moon. I never dreamed I'd see the last. | Jerry Pournelle | |||
| Any space expedition, public or private, that accepted the casualty rates of the early American settlers, would be tied up in criminal and civil court indefinitely. | John Hare | |||
| I’m old enough to remember when going to the moon was science fiction and not nostalgia. | Jon Callas | |||
| It says a lot about the state of hypersonic airbreathing propulsion that when the X-43 was boosted from Mach 0.8 to Mach 10 by a rocket, and then managed to briefly not slow down using a scramjet, this was considered a landmark accomplishment for the scramjet, and utterly unremarkable for the rocket. | Josh Hopkins | |||
| There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. | Marshall McLuhan | |||
| The future of manned spaceflight lies in waiting till it can be done by private enterprise, or through private sponsorship. | Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society | |||
| We could have done Apollo with a lot fewer people, but we couldn’t have done it with any more. | Max Faget | |||
| There are many better ways of flying than standing on a pillar of fire. | Mitchell Burnside Clapp | |||
| ...for every failure mode someone can envision, someone else must provide a solution... The proven costs of such solutions are money, schedule delays, and additional unknowns. I believe that many of our solutions to problems create more serious problems through added complication, dilution of effort, and increased time compression on already over-stressed work loads... Unless management and program personnel develop a sense of proportion, we will forever be trying to chase things to the last decimal point, frittering away limited resources on insignificant issues. | NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, 1990 | |||
| The two things that excite my grandchildren the most are space and dinosaurs—and we're very short on dinosaurs. | Norm Augustine (retired chairman, Lockheed-Martin) | |||
| The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA. | Page 191, Columbia Accident Investigation Board report | |||
| It's not NASA's job to send a man to Mars. It's NASA's job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society to send a man to Mars. | Rand Simberg | |||
| In response to the Soviet socialist state enterprise for space, we created one of our own. | Rand Simberg | |||
| [A] state enterprise for space... worked fine for a short moon race, but we made the mistake of thinking, in utter defiance of our nation’s historic tradition of individualism and free enterprise, that this could be a successful model for the sustained opening of a new frontier. | Rand Simberg | |||
| If extraterrestrial aliens had contacted the White House after the last lunar landing in 1972, and told the president that humans wouldn’t be allowed to move into space beyond earth orbit, and to pass the message on to his successors, but that the public was not to know this, it’s hard to imagine how policy actions would have been much different. | Rand Simberg | |||
| There's a reason it's almost impossible to figure out what NASA programs cost: NASA doesn't know. If they knew, they'd have to report that to Congress, and they'd lose some of the money. So they hide the money, they hide it so well they themselves don't know where it is, and then they truthfully tell Congress, 'We don't know what it costs, but here's our estimate.' It's a hell of a way to run a space program, but the alternative is to shut the thing down. | Randall Clague | |||
| Almighty Ruler of the all, Whose Power extends to great and small, Who guides the stars with steadfast law, Whose least creation fills with awe, O grant thy mercy and thy grace, To those who venture into space. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| I suspect that our race's tragedy has been played endless times. It may be that an intelligent race has to expand right up to its disaster point to achieve what is needed to break out of its planet and reach for the stars. It may always--or almost always--be a photo finish, with the outcome uncertain to the last moment. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| In fact, the real engineering problems of space travel have been solved since World War II. Conquering space has long been a matter of money and politics. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| NASA has two remarkable records: first, a space program far more successful than anyone had dared hope; and, second, the most incredibly bumbling, stupid, inept public relations of any government agency. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Our national loss of nerve, our escalating anti-intellectualism, our almost total disinterest in anything that does not directly and immediately profit us, the shambles of public education throughout most of our nation... cause me to predict that our space program will continue to dwindle. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| When I went to school, they taught me to honor the Flag, vote the straight party ticket, and believe in the law of conservation of energy. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Our race will spread out through space--unlimited room, unlimited energy, unlimited wealth. This is certain. But I am not certain that the working language will be English. The people of the United States seem to have lost their nerve. | Robert A. Heinlein, Congressional testimony, 19 July 1979 | |||
| The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practicable machine by which men shall fly for long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be. | Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1906 | |||
| Space travel is bunk. | Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of Britain, 1957, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik | |||
| The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load. | Stephen Hawking | |||
| [Robotic] rovers like these accomplish their tasks far more slowly than humans in the same environment would. What Spirit and Opportunity typically achieve in a day, a human explorer could do in less than a minute. | Steven Squyres, Principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission | |||
| There is simply no possibility of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. You can leave that out of your thinking. I wish the American people would leave that out of their thinking. | Vannevar Bush, Chairman of NASA's predecessor NACA | |||
| ||||