Ray Bradbury Quotes

You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.

When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you're there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn't be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you're there.

We need to begin thinking about building permanence on the Red Planet, not just have voyagers do some experiments, plant a flag and claim success. Having them go there, repeat this, in my view, is dim-witted. Why not stay there?

Did the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return trip? They came here to settle. And that's what we should be doing on Mars. When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you're there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn't be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you're there.

About First Landing by Robert Zubrin: Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars.

The first human beings to land on Mars should not come back to Earth. They should be the beginning of a build-up of a colony/settlement, I call it a 'permanence'.

I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.

It's not a matter of if we're going to go to Mars, it's a matter of when.

In terms of goals for NASA before I die, we need to be living on Mars. And I might not live that long, so they better get on with it!

In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams!

I'm moving to Mars next week, so if you have any boxes...

I want to make rockets 100 times, if not 1,000 times better. The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there'll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets.

I love the John Glenn model... I may call NASA in 25 years or so, and see if they'd like to send me to Mars.

Unless we are able to commit to a permanent growing settlement [on Mars], then I don't think just going there with humans and coming back is worth doing. The expense of planning to come back is like the people who left Europe to come to America and then to turn around and go back to Europe, it really doesn't make any sense at all.

It might be helpful to realize, that very probably the parents of the first native born Martians are alive today.

There's a very real argument that the minute we are capable of going to a planet, whether it's Mars or another one, and inhabiting it, that we really should.

I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.

People keep talking about how we have to go to Mars. We may want to go to Mars sometime.

Mars would seem, to me, to be the best place to focus our collective effort as a species... I think people would like to experience something sort of hopeful in terms of where we go next... as a species.

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

I used to be a strong believer that we would eventually colonize the solar system the way it's been done in science fiction many, many times: bases on the moon, Mars colonized, move out to the outer planets, then we go to the next solar system and build a colony there. I don't know now - I'm not as convinced that's the way it's going to pan out.

When we build our own colonies, we can do them in near-Earth vicinity, because people are going to want to come back to Earth. Very few people - for a long time, anyway - are going to want to abandon Earth altogether.

The frontier in space, embodied in the space colony, is one in which the interactions between humans and their environment is so much more sensitive and interactive and less tolerant of irresponsibility than it is on the whole surface of the Earth.

In my opinion, future space exploration will require us to inhabit the moon, initially, and later Mars. This is a humongous task for any one nation to carry out.

Going to Mars would make NASA great again.