Fritz Zwicky Quotes
Jupiter is so big and its gravitational pull so strong that man would find it difficult to move about on the surface. The answer is to whittle it down to proper size with terrajets and nuclear power, using the debris to increase the size of Jupiter's moons so they, too, can be colonized.
Zwicky, Fritz. Discovery, Invention, Research: Through the Morphological Approach. Macmillan, 1969, p. 235.
Medaris then told him to do it in 90 days to give him some slack. 80 days later the U. S. put its first satellite in orbit with a Jupiter Rocket. There were scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who had been experimenting with rocket recovery, who realized that they had enough power and technique to escape the Earth’s gravity and put an object in orbit. The asked for permission to do so on their next weekly firing and were refused. Two months later, the Russians put Sputnick in orbit.
NASA has now sent probes to every planet and dwarf planet. It took less than a century.
Before the first airplane had flown, Tsiolkovsky had worked out the mathematics and physics to put a rocket powered scientific probe into orbit.
This was 50 years before the invention of the airplane, and more than 100 years before space travel.
Fritz Zwicky was a Swiss astronomer. He worked most of his life at the California Institute of Technology in the United States of America, where he made many important contributions in theoretical and observational astronomy. In 1933, Zwicky was the first to use the virial theorem to infer the existence of unseen dark matter, describing it as "dunkle (kalt) Materie".
