Elon Musk Quotes

We do need different types of propulsion to get to Mars. I wrote one of the first Ph.D. theses on that in the 1960s.

I don't think we're going to build a 50-person spacecraft or a 100-person spacecraft.

Britain should definitely be part of a Mars mission.

We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own.

I study orbital dynamics as a hobby. My idea of a good time is sitting down and drawing on that knowledge to imagine a space mission from beginning to end, getting as many details right as I can.

If you're going to go into space, you have to have an objective, a mission. Where do you want to go? Earth orbit? The moon? Mars? What's the technology to get there? You develop the technology for the mission.

With the mission to Mars, the whole world wants to get involved. So we actually have 13 different space agencies from around the world working on the global exploration road map.

Chemical propulsion is obsolete to go anywhere other than the moon. Three days - that's acceptable. But for Mars, we need propulsion technologies to get us there in, say, 60 days - then spend whatever length of time we want to spend and return when we want to come home.

Am I willing to go to Mars? Yes, but I'm not willing to spend nine months getting there, then wait 18 more months until the planets align to come home.

With every inch of land on Earth now catalogued by our satellites, the stars are the next place we as a species must travel. And with a booming world population that will hit 9.1 billion in 2050, large-scale space travel may become a necessity.

I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.

Man must at all costs overcome the Earth's gravity and have, in reserve, the space at least of the Solar System.

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.

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

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.

We need to move off the planet. And Mars is the next best place.

We are involved in technology development for, you know, missions that we hope to plan that would take us to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle it must never outstep, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York!

What I'm trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

The big reason why we don't have space colonies and regular trips to the moon is that flying into outer space is just plain 'hard.' The business of safely transporting people off the Earth is a costly affair that requires a lot of technology.

My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars - this is very important - so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there.

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.

We've gotta reinvest in space travel. We should've never left the moon.

To try to really land a spacecraft really on another world is really difficult, and if we lose that ability, it's going to be heartbreaking.

My key aim is to get man on the surface of Mars by the mid-2030s.