Ellen Stofan Quotes

There are people who would love to spend their last ten years, or five years, or whatever it is, on the surface of Mars.

I was a frustrated astronaut all my life. I grew up at a time when space seemed to have no boundaries, and lots of us presumed humans would be living on the moon and landing on Mars.

It's time to open the space frontier to citizen explorers.

By refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it's time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface.

The time will come when we permit more people in space.

Will we have a colony on Mars? I think so.

We go as humans into space to expand the domain of humanity and life - not robots. And as we do, we will get more science because when you are living somewhere, you obviously learn more about it. NASA and the government must first get out of the way and then support us as we open the frontier.

I think it's inevitable that there will be Earthlings establishing a presence on Mars. And I would say that it would certainly take place by 2050 or shortly thereafter.

Space travel for everyone is the next frontier in the human experience.

Of course, it's a dream to go to Mars. I want to find out whether there was life there or not. And if there was, then why did it die out? What sort of catastrophe happened?

My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species.

The guys who walk on Mars are going to be historic.

Going to Mars would evolve humankind into a two-planet species.

I don't think there is much value in trying to use the moon as a base to go to Mars. That's going into one gravity belt and having to get back out of it again. And the moon doesn't have a lot to offer as a resource base.

I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory.

In Mars, we've been given a wonderful set of moons... where we can send continuous numbers of people.

Buzz Aldrin doesn't think we need to go back to the Moon - that we should go straight on to Mars. I'm more on the side that says we should go back to the Moon. I think there's a lot we can utilise the Moon for scientifically.

Let's not spend resources that we don't need to be sending astronauts back to the moon. Let's not spend expensive resources on bringing people who have reached Mars back again. Prepare them to become a growing colony.

The purpose of going to Mars is for humans to first begin to occupy, permanently, another planet in the solar system. The astronauts or pilgrims, whatever you might call them, are going to be very historically unique human beings.

Clearly, some creative thinking is badly needed if humans are to have a future beyond Earth. Returning to the Moon may be worthy and attainable, but it fails to capture the public's imagination. What does get people excited is the prospect of a mission to Mars.

I think we need to move to the moons of Mars and learn how to control robots that are on the surface. It's not the impatient way of getting there, but Mars has been there a long time.

My key aim is to get man on the surface of Mars by the mid-2030s.

'The Martian' may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.

Mars is far more attractive as an outpost colony for earthlings than the moon is.

During my 8 years as chairman, I had the privilege to peer into the future to see dynamic citizen astronauts returning to and from the heavens which we can expect in the future.