Elon Musk Quotes

Build a rocket ship and leave the earth!

When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.

The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer - which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff - pulled up to the launch pad.

The truth is, every single rocket launch off of planet Earth is risky.

The rockets light! The shuttle leaps off the launch pad in a cloud of steam and a trail of fire.

I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. I grew up in Houston. Gordo Cooper was my favorite astronaut.

So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.

I don't have to go into outer space to write about an astronaut.

Astronauts are very professional and when they're preparing for launch, they prepare for it as the most serious endeavor of our lives.

For the last several years and culminating in six months in orbit next year, I've been training for my third space flight. This one is almost in a category completely different than the previous two, specifically to live in on the space station for six months, to command a space ship and to fly a new rocket ship.

In Mars, we've been given a wonderful set of moons... where we can send continuous numbers of people.

As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes.

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

We got to the moon.

The rocket had worked perfectly, and all I had to do was survive the reentry forces. You do it all, in a flight like that, in a rather short period of time, just 16 minutes as a matter of fact.

If you want to go into space first time on a new vehicle that's never been flown, you want to go with a pro.

Go to the moon - that's my dream.

It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.

I'm not going into infinity. I'm going into low earth orbit.

I wanted to get superimposed on a shuttle launch.

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

For the new century, back to the moon, back to the future and this time back to stay. And then a journey into tomorrow, a journey to another planet, a manned mission to Mars.

SpaceX lowered the cost of going into space by 10x.

We fly to 106 kilometers. We've always had as our mission that we always wanted to fly above the Karman line because we didn't want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you're an astronaut or not.

One of the things that I'm very excited about with New Shepard, which is our suborbital tourism vehicle, is using that to get a lot of practice. One of the equilibria that we're at today with space launch is that we don't get to practice enough.