Homer Hickam Quotes

Supplying fuel for a Mars expedition from the lunar surface is often suggested, but it's hard to make it pay off - Moon bases are expensive, and just buying more rockets to launch fuel from Earth is relatively cheap.

If you've been wondering where the next gold rush is going to take place, look up at the night sky to our closest celestial neighbor. The next economic boom might just be a mere 240,000 miles away on the bella luna.

Commercialization of assets off the planet would mutually reinforce the growth of interplanetary communication.

We need to open the frontier between the Earth and Moon to large-scale human activities, we need to establish human outposts and communities off the Earth and begin the job of doing so right away - and do so largely based on letting the people take over most of the jobs.

When the moon was first visited in 1969, the astronauts brought back a treasure trove of unique minerals. Contained within specimens was an isotope called Helium-3, which turns out to be the perfect fuel for fusion reactors.

The first trillionaire can be made in space.

I'm extraordinarily passionate about the idea of asteroid mining in the future. Asteroids out there, we know them from those that have fallen on the Earth, there is a class of asteroids, sub-class of nickel/iron asteroids, which are 50,000 times more enriched than Platinum mines on earth.

Mars could very well be a staging location for the resources of the asteroid belt. We have to learn how to get a payback somewhere, but it's beyond Mars that the real payoff will come from minerals.

I've worked with some great people [in Star Trek], and I was paid handsomely, and it was a nice role. So the whole experience was positive for me.

There is only one definition of science fiction that seems to make sense: 'Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.'

When I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon I cried

I don't think everybody wanted to be on [new Star Trek series] . I certainly didn't.

Will a day come when our cars have carbon-fiber tubs, 18,000-rpm V-10 engines, and ground-effects tunnels? Perhaps, about the same time we have condos on the moon.

Now when we opened Disneyland, outer space was Buck Rogers.

Science fiction that's just about people wandering around in space ships shooting each other with ray guns is very dull. I like it when it enables you to do fairly radical reinterpretations of human experience, just to show all the different interpretations that can be put on apparently fairly simple and commonplace events. That I find fun.

So we down-to-earth, gutsy, tough, realistic, and practical types have just been squandering billions of dollars and unimaginable amounts of energy, nerve-work, and materials in whizzing off to the moon to discover, as astronomers knew before, that it was just a dreary slag heap. This is the true, original and scientifically etymological meaning of being lunatics. Crying for the moon.

I didn't really watch the show [Star Trek]. I still haven't seen about 150 of them. So I didn't really think of them too much in terms of episodes. I thought of them as kind of one long seven-year episode.

Since I was really little, I've just always had an obsession with, not just science fiction, but science and space. And also because as time passes and the more advanced science becomes, the more interesting it becomes.

I expected the unexpected and went [on the Moon] with an open mind. I think the visual scene was described by my words on first landing - "magnificent desolation." Magnificent for the achievement of being there, and desolate for the eons of lifelessness.

The shuttle tomorrow is truly like laying the last spike on the transcontinental railroad, only much more so. And whether or not we're going to see in in the next 10 or 20 years, there are people alive today who will see manufacturing in space from moon materials or from asteroids.

As a result of reading science fiction when I was eight, I grew up with an interest in music, architecture, city planning, transportation, politics, ethics, aesthetics on any level, art...it's just total! It's a complete commitment to the whole human race on all the Earth. That's what science fiction is about.

To me, it's science fiction for me to do the things I've been blessed to do in this industry.

Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

I came out of school one day, and there was this pulp magazine. It was a rainy day, and it was floating toward the sewer in the gutter. So I pick up this pulp magazine, and it's Wonder Stories, and it's got a rocket-ship on the cover, and I'd never seen a rocket-ship.