Rusty Schweickart Quotes

Here I am at the turn of the millennium and I'm still the last man to have walked on the moon, somewhat disappointing. It says more about what we have not done than about what we have done.

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

All the best to SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and, yes, the Progress teams, who are all working on their own solutions to open the frontier along with Boeing and the rest of the fliers trying to fly, all of whom I know personally share the dream. This isn't their fault; they just want to make things fly.

NewSpace, commercial space - whatever you want to call it - is rising, with or without government support. It is rising in West Texas and on the Gulf Coast, in California and on the Virginia coast, and rising from the ashes of the old space program in Florida and in small shops and university labs in a hundred places in between.

Competition-driven innovation and price pressure that commercial practices foster can only make human spaceflight ever more common and U.S. leadership in this domain ever clearer.

If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.

Russia is still the leader in world space exploration. But its position of leader involves great responsibility - we have no right to lag behind. We can and we must move constantly forward.

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

It's very sad that there's going to be a hiatus in manned space flight from the U.S. The Shuttle was a fantastic, hugely complex vehicle. It was inevitable it would come to an end, but this is the opportunity for the commercial world to get involved. As the Shuttle era ends, another window of opportunity opens.

You can never tell when a commercial space venture will suddenly become viable.

Virgin Galactic, which will be operating SpaceShipTwo, will be only one of several spacelines. The competitors for Virgin include the Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, and possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And likely a couple of others who are smart enough not to tell people what they are doing!

Most of our history in space has been communicated in terms of action - what people do, a chronological list of events which have transpired - as opposed to the human experience of having done those things.

Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented - putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine.

I feel we need to remind the world about the Apollo missions and that we can still do impossible things.

I want manned spaceflight, not just back to the Moon, but beyond that. And I want my daughters and my son to have their own July 20, 1969, to remember. Apollo 11 didn't give us wings; it only showed us how far the wings we had would take us.

If space is not profitable for business, there will be very few people in space.

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

My quest to expand access to space began more than a decade ago, when I teamed up with Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites to build SpaceShipOne. This innovative air-launched vehicle was the world's first private spacecraft to carry an astronaut into sub-orbital space.

The commercial space industry is enormous and ripe for disruption.

I'm hopeful that commercial space exploration will takeoff. To really fuel the spaceflight revolution will require an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and I think that's only going to happen in the commercial sector - if there are large profits to be made.

Fifty years after humans landed on the moon for the first time, America has driven a golden spike on the trail to new space exploration feats through the work of our commercial partner SpaceX and all of the dedicated and talented flight controllers at NASA and our international partners.

SpaceX has reopened the cosmos, and the space race is back on, only this time it is in the private sector.

I've been doing a few interviews since the loss of the SpaceX Dragon on its way to the Space Station. Each one very quickly questions the viability of what they call commercial space in light of the failure. I tell them space is hard: this is what happens early in a program with new technology.

I don't think we should have to do a Mars mission on the basis of hysteria. I think we should do a Mars mission on the basis of a deliberate judgment that what we want to do is open up a new planet for humanity... that we are continuing to be a nation of pioneers.

2012 will be seen as the beginning of the frontier era in space.