Alan Stern Quotes

Sending people into space is very important culturally. That's really the justification. You cannot rationally justify it on the basis of the science and technology we get out of it.

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

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.

I don't think the space station is innovative. Going to the moon was innovative because we had no idea how to do it.

Every day sees humanity more victorious in the struggle with space and time.

Science does not just drive space travel - space travel also drives science.

Space travel for everyone is the next frontier in the human experience.

Space is going to be commonplace.

The practical case for manned spacef light gets ever-weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturisation - indeed, as a scientist or practical man, I see little purpose in sending people into space at all. But as a human being, I'm an enthusiast for manned missions.

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.

We must still think of ourselves as pioneers to understand the importance of space.

We could raise prodigious cities and create nations, and explore the universe.

Throughout history, when societies have been faced with big challenges, they've put their best people on them. During the Space Race, American and Russian scientists, engineers, astronauts and cosmonauts pushed the bounds of what was possible and landed men on the moon.

The space program is not only scientific in purpose but also is an expression of man's insistent determination to do the nearly impossible - to explore the unknown, even at great risk.

What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.

If we stop exploring space, we're going to lose the same part of us that found vaccines and penicillin, the part that searches for cures to cancer and AIDS.

Unless you have manned [space] travel, you don't stir the imagination of people.

That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Humanity is not forever chained to this planet.

It is rash to set limits to the progress of science. A man who had maintained at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee that within fifty years one would fly the Atlantic in a matter of hours would have risked being certified and locked up; yet we have seen this happen, and in the circumstances I am not prepared to rule out with any confidence the possibility one day of journeys through space in vessels carrying supplies of food and oxygen to the moon and the nearer planets.

The Discovery was the most intricate, complex machine man has ever built. It's a testament to our time.

There's going to be space travel at some point.

An end of something means the beginning of something else, and I don't think that something else is going to be the death of the manned space program.

I understand that space travel and expansion is just as much about altering ourselves, our attitudes, our social structures, our very biology, as it is about altering the places we choose to live.

The U.S. space program has mythologies attached to pioneering and conquering, but the Russian tradition is very different. In the Russian tradition, the ultimate goal of humanity was to resurrect all humans.