180 Quotes About Space-exploration

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.

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...

You can ask a President to provide for two years ahead, maybe for twenty or even thirty years, but not for two hundred or a thousand!

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.

Early SETI efforts were marked by overly optimistic estimates of the probable number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest and to take a more down-to-earth view. Earth may be more special, and intelligence much rarer, in the universe than previously thought.Skeptical Inquirer Volume 30.3, May / June 2006

A still more glorious dawn awaitsNot a sunrise, but a galaxy riseA morning filled with 400 billion sunsThe rising of the milky way

...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.

Engineers are all too often unsung heroes; if we are ever, in truth, to travel between stars, it will be thanks to their aspirations and imagination... for they are the bridge builders.

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.