Elon Musk Quotes

We're not going to get humans to Mars until at least the mid-2030s, and the world is going to change by then.

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.

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.

It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.

I would suspect strongly that over a period of time, if we put our mind to going to Mars, it will be a consortium of several countries.

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

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.

Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that.

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

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

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

It seems that 'rocket scientist' is a job category that's here for the long haul, like 'mortician.' But all this activity masks an important point: rockets are not a terribly efficient way to lift things into space.

Can you imagine, in 2030, taking a space cruise on the very ship that carried the first human beings to Mars? I can't believe that people wouldn't line up for that possibility.

Back in the days of Apollo, sending humans to the moon was the only viable way to get the scientific data we wanted. But now, with our computer and robotics technology, there's very little an astronaut can do on Mars that a well-designed rover can't.

I was thinking as a little girl growing up that I would be there. When I look at whether we can go to Mars, it's definitely something we can do.

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

I'm trying to get to Mars before everyone else.

Going to Mars would make NASA great again.

I personally think going to Mars, if it takes two years or two and a half years, that's doable. Certainly, the first people who go there, that's going to be a big motivator, being first getting to Mars.

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!

The space program needs a goal, and the goal should be humans to Mars.

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.

An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept: that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft.

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.