Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Quotes

I'd love to be an astronaut. I bet you get a better understanding of our planet seeing it from a distance.

We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like.

The first year I was at NASA, I was only responsible for optical and ultraviolet astronomy. Frankly, there wasn't much else.

We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well.

The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe.

It feels great to discover a planet, just like any discovery in science, except that it has more of the feel of exploration - you can go back and look at it. However, I can never visit.

My interest in astronomy grew from the play 'Space' that I did, where I had to learn where my character was from. I had to study the stars and figure where everything was and how I got here and all of those things.

We'd never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn't been for space exploration and NASA.

Man will not always stay on Earth; the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.

Anything that stimulates the public's imagination about the nobility and the importance of space exploration is something that I'm very excited to be a part of.

Yesterday, we sought telescopes good enough to see all the planets. Today, we seek vehicles good enough to reach them.

We shouldn't persuade people that we can simply conjure up the sun and the moon: at the most, we can deliver a telescope.

You cannot exploit the advantages of getting above the atmosphere unless you are able to get up there reasonably large-sized telescopes and unless you are able to keep these telescopes pointing at one region of the sky for long periods of time to a high degree of accuracy.

When we meet people who are astronauts or deal in astronomy, it's always really fascinating.

Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?

There are other planets besides the Earth and Mars. I'd like to remind you that studying Venus is vital to understanding life elsewhere.

I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.

If I had to go back to school for anything, I'd go for astronomy.

The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.

Hubble is unique. Nothing else can do what it can do. Once it's gone, we're going to be paralyzed.

For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.

Astronomy is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation. The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion.

Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.

Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards.

My expertise is the space program and what it should be in the future based on my experience of looking at the transitions that we've made between pre-Sputnik days and getting to the moon.