Alan Stern Quotes

The need for a detailed, comprehensive examination of the Saturn system became clear during the early 1980s, after the two Voyager spacecraft made flybys of the planet. These celebrated events were the opening acts in the story of humanity's exploration of Saturn.

Whether there's even an ocean on Pluto deep inside is a question I hope New Horizons can address in indirect ways.

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

I think that one of the things that will come out of the New Horizons mission is that the public will take a look, and they won't know what else to call Pluto but a planet - and a pretty exciting one.

Perhaps the best motivation for going to Mars is political. It is obvious that no single nation currently has either the will or the resources to do it alone, but a consortium of nations and space agencies could achieve it within 20 years.

You stop planetary exploration, those people who do that extraordinary work are going to have to go do something else.

You don't go into space just for the science. Economically, it is not worth it. I think the reason we should be in space is for the exploration; it's the human endeavour.

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

President Bush's proposal to focus our resources on sending humans to Mars is intriguing, but it is not the most compelling reason that Americans ought to focus our interest on the Red Planet.

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.

Being in space, I'm really looking forward to working with this team of folks that I'm with.

Britain should definitely be part of a Mars mission.

The day Apollo 11 landed, I knew men would walk on Mars in my lifetime. I'm no longer nearly so sure. The last budget put forward in Canada contained not a penny for Mars.

Being able to have a laboratory on Mars, being able to have some sort of sustained human presence on Mars in the future, I think, is critically important for science.

From the moment of using rocket devices, a great new era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament.

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

We all get where we're going by circuitous journeys, and some of the setbacks are warranted.

When the first American steps on the red dust of Mars, it's going to be because of computer scientists.

Getting a team of scientists on Mars could be transformative.

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.

The Cassini mission was all about a comprehensive investigation of Saturn and everything in the Saturn system, and it's been a mission that's been done jointly with the Europeans.

I'm absolutely compelled for NASA to send international astronauts to Mars to find out if Mars ever harbored life.

It would be impossible in a few words to describe all that we've found with Cassini. No mission has ever gone as deep for as long on a planetary system as rich as Saturn's.

Cassini was so profoundly, scientifically successful. It's amazing to me, even, what we were able to do right up until the end.

I can't imagine how many kids around the world will look at pictures of Pluto and think, 'I want to grow up to be a scientist.'