Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

No national sovereignty rules in outer space. Those who venture there go as envoys of the entire human race.

My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

Landing on the moon was a dream that millions of kids have had for hundreds of years.

I was a frustrated astronaut all my life. I grew up at a time when space seemed to have no boundaries, and lots of us presumed humans would be living on the moon and landing on Mars.

Retain the vision for space exploration. If we turn our backs on the vision again, we're going to have to live in a secondary position in human space flight for the rest of the century.

My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species.

Space is going to be commonplace.

I watched the moon landing as a boy, and I thought that was the most exciting thing ever, going into space, orbiting Earth and exploring other planets. That looked fantastic.

Eventually there are going to be cities in space.

You don't go into space just for the science. Economically, it is not worth it. I think the reason we should be in space is for the exploration; it's the human endeavour.

We must still think of ourselves as pioneers to understand the importance of space.

After Apollo 17, America stopped looking towards the next horizon. The United States had become a space-faring nation, but threw it away. We have sacrificed space exploration for space exploitation, which is interesting but scarcely visionary.

I've always been interested in space and the idea of exploration in that area since I was a child growing up through the '60s.

We've gotta reinvest in space travel. We should've never left the moon.

Space offers extraordinary potential for commerce and adventure, for new innovations and new tests of will. As Americans, we can't help but reach for the stars. It's our nature. It's our destiny.

I think here in America the space programme was such an enticing thing to be going on, that the thought of a family being able to go into space and live up there was really kind of mind-bending at the time.

Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.

By 1973, we had a space station, the Skylab, and we had multiple probes going up to planets. So, all this wonderful stuff happened in 10 to 15 years. About that time, there should have been enormous initiatives to make it affordable for people to fly in space, not just a handful of trained NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts.

Space exploration promised us alien life, lucrative planetary mining, and fabulous lunar colonies. News flash, ladies and gents: Space is nearly empty. It's a sterile vacuum, filled mostly with the junk we put up there.

America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.

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.

Several weeks before the Russians launched Sputnik, our team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory asked permission to place a rocket in orbit around the Earth. We could to it with two days of preparation. We had been doing experiments with 2 stage rockets to test materials and designs for nose-cones returning from space. We launched rockets straight up. At the maximum height we turned it around and fired the second stage to drive it straight back to Earth so it could achieve the speed of an object returning from space. We were developing more and more powerful second stage rockets. We had just calculated that our newest second stage had more than enough thrust to, after the ascent, turn the rocket at right angles to the perpendicular, and fire the rocket into orbit around the earth. We could do this easily. The military were initially very enthusiastic. America could be the first nation that put a satellite in orbit. However, the authorities in Washington, not only refused us permission to try, but postponed a number of our regular launches and forbade us from talking to anyone about our capability or request for our experiment.. When Sputnik was launched into orbit a few weeks later, we were really puzzled. No one ever explained why Washington had refused us permission, but we came up with a theory: The issue of the legality under international law of one country having its satellite in orbit over another country’s airspace was not at all settled. If we did satellite reconnaissance in the future over the Soviet Union, the Russians could claim that was an act of war. And we had extensive plans to create such satellites and launch them when we solved all the technical problems in the future. We believe that the authorities knew that the Russians were about to launch Sputnik. By allowing them to be the first to launch, it would be they—not us—who would be setting the precedent of sending satellites over other nation’s airspace and claiming this was not aggression or an act of war as they thought they were way ahead of us. In addition, after WWII, President Eisenhower was having difficulty getting Congress to spend money on rocketry and satellites as well as science and technology including science and mathematics education which was then terrible in America. So allowing the Russians to “beat us” the administration had the issue that they needed, and they allowed the Russians to set the legal precedents that they would have opposed if we were ahead of them and orbited a satellite first. Either President Eisenhower and his team were brilliantly shrewd or they were pretty dumb because we easily could have put our rockets in orbit then.

Space has always been confusing to politics.