Rick Tumlinson Quotes

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.

I do not expect NASA to go out and build settlements and colonies. I do not expect them to give SpaceX all the money needed to colonize Mars. I do not expect them to realize the future of humanity is contingent on harvesting the wealth of the solar system overnight and suddenly subsidize my asteroid mining project.

If governments decide to return to the Moon - as seems to be the case - it must be to build villages, not bases, and to do it as rapidly as possible, as it needs to be an immediate challenge, not a distant dream. And if some want to go to Mars or mine asteroids, they need to be seen as part of a new frontier community.

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.

America can take man to the moon, and America can take men to Mars - and beyond.

People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it's cool.

My view is that we should go back to the moon, build up the infrastructure to make flights there commonplace - be comfortable with it - then use that infrastructure to expand and go to Mars.

There is a potential to be a big explosion of what spaceflight is gonna mean to just an everyday person in the near future. I think it's very hopeful for our young people: all the exciting things that they could be doing in the future relative to space and space exploration.

There was nothing technical or physical stopping us from having moved on from Apollo to a permanent Moonbase, the development of industries in space, and the establishment of the first human communities on Mars. We could have - we can - do it anytime we actually decide that it is our goal, organize ourselves to make it happen, and Just Do It.

Obviously I'd like NASA to follow their charter - the exploration of our solar system and beyond. I'd like to see people someday go to Mars.

It is time to kickstart a new U.S. space transportation industry and time to spread that industry into space itself, leveraging our space station legacy to ignite imaginations and entrepreneurship so that we can move farther out, back to the Moon, out to the asteroids, and on to Mars.

My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.

The first colony on Mars is not going to be built by a private company. How are you going to make money? You're not.

What are you going to do with astronauts who first reach the surface of Mars and then turn around and rocket back home-ward? What are they going to do, write their memoirs? Would they go again? Having them repeat the voyage, in my view, is dim-witted. Why don't they stay there on Mars?

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

Terraforming our moon will take many decades and vast abilities. Before we can begin, we'll have to master the resources of our solar system - especially transporting raw masses over interplanetary distances.

After Apollo 17, America stopped looking towards the next horizon. The United States had become a space-faring nation, but threw it away. We have sacrificed space exploration for space exploitation, which is interesting but scarcely visionary.

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.

We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

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.

Every couple of years, we could dispatch people from Earth to Mars.

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

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.

I suggest that going to Mars means permanence on the planet - a mission by which we are building up a confidence level to become a two-planet species.

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.