Alan Shepard Quotes

One day, people will be able to buy tickets to visit space.

In my mind, public space travel will precede efforts toward exploration -- be it returning to the moon, going to Mars, visiting asteroids, or whatever seems appropriate. We've got millions and millions of people who want to go into space, who are willing to pay. When you figure in the payload potential of customers, everything changes.

With space travel, [it's] no different. You know, in 1990 I read the name Virgin Galactic Airways. Loved the name. And set out to try to find an engineer or rocket scientist in the world who could build a safe, reusable rocket that could take people to and from space and we could start a whole new era of commercial space travel.

I was fortunate enough, after many visits to many wonderful, weird people to come across Burt Rutan, who is a genius in the Mojave Desert. And SpaceShipOne was born and had three flights into space that won something called the X Prize. And from there, we're building SpaceShipTwo, which is ... a beautiful spaceship that is very, very, very nearly completed and will be ready from about next Christmas onwards to start taking people into space.

If we want to go to space with humans, that's for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.

We're going to see passengers in space stations in 15 years, who will be able to buy a ticket and spend a weekend in space.

Point-to-point transit via low orbit could dramatically speed up international flights, connecting the world even further. And safe, consistent space travel opens up the possibility of commercial space stations, trips to the moon and exploration beyond.

I've always hankered after going into space and walking on the moon and Mars. I did want to be an astronaut, and had there been a manned space flight programme in the U.K., I would have been knocking on the door.

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

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.

In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.

In 12 or 15 years, there will be routine, affordable space tourism not just in the U.S. but in a lot of countries.

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.

There's going to be space travel at some point.

I do think space hotels are probably in our future.

The bigger shift in space exploration won't be commercial crew - that will be a validation of something we already knew was going to be the case. It will be when you have a fully private company launching everyday citizens. When people know people in their communities who have been to space on a daily basis.

I believe you'll see a low Earth orbit space travel business begin.

The bottom line is 2018 should finally be the year where we see the early stages of broad-based commercial space tourism appear. Demand will certainly be driven by the early successes or failures of those missions, the marketing of those missions, as well as the propensity for tourists to become repeat flyers.

You can picture pretty easily if there were a paying passenger aboard a rocket that failed, like Challenger failed. Certainly it would be a tragedy, and a tragedy for the company. They would have a hard time recovering from it.

Astronauts will remain the explorers, the pioneers-the first to go back to moon and on to Mars. But I think it's really important to make space space available to as many people as we can. It's going to be a while before we can launch people for less than $20 million a ticket. But that day is coming.

Space travel will be like every other business. There will be competitors. . . . Thirty months from now, I'm confident we'll be flying people into space.

Eventually everyone will have the opportunity to travel onto space.

Flight out of the atmosphere is a simple thing to do and should have been available to the public twenty years ago. Ten years from now, we will have space tourism where you will be able to see the black sky and the curvature of the earth. It will be the most exciting roller coaster ride you can buy.

Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles. . . . It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: "I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!"

The case for sponsorships in commercial spaceflight is compelling and could dramatically impact the economics of space tourism. Global brands are looking for fresh, new ways to position themselves on the leading edge of their categories.