Hermann Oberth Quotes

Sometimes people wonder why aeroplanes are so cheap and rockets are so expensive. Even the most superficial comparison shows one obvious difference: aeroplane engines use outside air to burn their fuel, while rockets have to carry their own oxidisers along.

What goes up must come down.

The factor most ignored in discussing interstellar flight is the kinetic energy that must be invested in the ship to make its tons of matter move at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.

You're going very fast when you're on orbit, going around the world once every hour and a half.

You need propellants to accelerate toward Mars, then to decelerate at Mars, again to re-accelerate from Mars to Earth, and finally to decelerate back at Earth. Accordingly, the mass of these required propellants, in short, drives our need for innovative launch vehicles.

Newman's first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down.

Playgrounds are essentially machines to induce Newtonian physics on our own bodies.

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.

The slow-motion replay doesn't show how fast the ball was really travelling.

Once solved, the severe handicaps imposed on space exploration by the weight and chemical limitations of rockets would no longer apply. The whole timetable of our conquest of the planets in our solar system would be tremendously speeded up, from hot Mercury all the way out to frigid Pluto.

The years of space flight since the orbiting of Sputnik I back in 1957 had produced many fascinating results, but they had also brought a realization of the many problems that surrounded the use of rockets for space flight.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

Building advanced AI is like launching a rocket. The first challenge is to maximize acceleration, but once it starts picking up speed, you also need to focus on steering.

I actually don't think it matters how early or late you are as long as you hit critical mass.

Anytime you hit a curve, or you hit on the side of the wall, you hit against the side of the sled. We're taking four to five, sometimes six or seven Gs on our body every time we go down the track. And then the crashing.

Our annual school physics trip was always to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, as it's such a good example of Newtonian physics. You can learn about centrifugal force and Newton's first law from the roller coasters, and the Viking long boat is a giant pendulum. It's good for children to understand that science underpins all these brilliant things.

We're used to thinking of force as a stable phenomenon, but it has a cinematic variable, which is acceleration.

Certainly, I want to be the first through the sound barrier in a car.

I love pace. I love it.

Everything in my life happens really fast.

No lens is quick enough to track the movement of the human body. The molecules are always moving.

I move slowly, and I used to move fast. I miss that.

The truth is, every single rocket launch off of planet Earth is risky.

Something like speed of play can be a big deal.

I know all we're doing is travelling without moving. Speed freak faster than a speedin' bullet, slow down. If I don't, I might just lose it, locked up. You've got me honey, locked up under heavy brakin', yeah. You know I've got to hang on, drive too fast, I might be last.