James May Quotes

I wanted to be in an anti-gravity machine so bad! Maybe a different time, a different place.

We go across lands, we go across water. And then the next logical step was to start flying just over a hundred years ago and of course, now we're going to look up at the stars and say what's next, what's out there?

I just felt that space was the next thing coming in aviation. It was higher, faster. It had the risk.

Really exotic methods of propulsion . . . will have to be devised to get there. How it will be done, I do not know. Whether it will be done, I am not quite certain. But I would bet it can be done.

The labor of rising from the ground will be great, ... but as we mount higher, the earth's attraction, and the body's gravity, will be gradually diminished till we arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall.

In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.

I had started Zero-G specifically to broaden the public for access to weightlessness.

Look how far the human race has come in terms of air and space travel in the last hundred years. So in the next couple of thousand years, you've got to believe that we're going to be able to do all kinds of amazing things.

With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.

For the industry we're starting now, for suborbital flight, there is no destination, so the spacecraft you go up in has to be large and spacious. That's why SpaceShipTwo is much bigger than SpaceShipOne: It needs to be because you want those six people to be floating around and enjoying themselves.

It so happened that my goals kind of matched my career progression toward becoming an astronaut.

It seems that 'rocket scientist' is a job category that's here for the long haul, like 'mortician.' But all this activity masks an important point: rockets are not a terribly efficient way to lift things into space.

Trying to build a spaceship by making an aeroplane fly faster and higher is like trying to build an aeroplane by making locomotives faster and lighter - with a lot of effort, perhaps you could get something that more or less works, but it really isn't the right way to proceed.

Then, much later, my next dream was to become an astronaut, and I was fortunate to realize that dream, also.

Growing up in the '60s and early '70s, with the space flight and the Apollo program, I always loved planes. I always loved rockets and I always loved space travel.

By my mid-30s, I just thought, 'This is not going to happen. I am never going to become an astronaut in the U.K.'

The most important thing we can do is inspire young minds and to advance the kind of science, math and technology education that will help youngsters take us to the next phase of space travel.

Star Trek's genial premise is that the cosmos is flush with intelligent species, and our descendants will interact with them face-to-face, thanks to warp drive and some winsome space cadets.

Research into manned spaceflight is shifting from low-Earth orbit to destinations much further away, like Mars and the asteroid belt. But society will have to invent many new technologies before it can plausibly send people to those distances.

I think that the first men to land on Pluto are going to make some very astonishing discoveries. But I am also sure that they will never go there in rockets. They will have to make the immense trip by some more powerful means - like the anti-gravitational drive.

While the circumnavigation of the solar system seems farfetched, it may not be once the problem of effective anti-gravitational control is solved.

I believe that there will be women astronauts sometime just as there are women airplane pilots.

We fly to 106 kilometers. We've always had as our mission that we always wanted to fly above the Karman line because we didn't want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you're an astronaut or not.

By the time I was 13, I was very interested in rocketry.

Only in space did I realize how lucky I am to be Korean. Only in Korea could I have gone to space before turning 30 years old.