Rick Tumlinson Quotes

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

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.

It is time to kickstart a new U.S. space transportation industry and time to spread that industry into space itself, leveraging our space station legacy to ignite imaginations and entrepreneurship so that we can move farther out, back to the Moon, out to the asteroids, and on to Mars.

The first credible humans-to-Mars plans are starting to weave together in public-private partnerships. In fact, I can say with some authority that this will also be the case in terms of the Moon and asteroids as well.

It is time to declare that the goal of the United States in space is the settlement of the solar system, from low Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars.

Hopefully, we will get more and more people interested in doing research in space. I think eventually it's also going to be a great commercial market.

If governments decide to return to the Moon - as seems to be the case - it must be to build villages, not bases, and to do it as rapidly as possible, as it needs to be an immediate challenge, not a distant dream. And if some want to go to Mars or mine asteroids, they need to be seen as part of a new frontier community.

We endorse Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos' vision of 'millions of people living and working in space' - this is the heart and soul of the NSS Roadmap to Space Settlement.

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.

Aside from communications satellites, space is devoid of industry.

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.

We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

There are people who would love to spend their last ten years, or five years, or whatever it is, on the surface of Mars.

The way I see it, commercial interests should manage a lunar base while NASA gets on with the really important task of flying to Mars.

To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond.

To move forward, what's required is a unified space agenda based on exploration, science, development, commerce, and security.

Space is where great scientific and commercial breakthroughs of the future will be made. Space is where we can achieve progress in making our country safer from ballistic missile attack. Space is also where medicines of the future will be made, and where some of our children may make their living.

I read 'The High Frontier' in high school. I read it multiple times, and I was already primed. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me. It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces were not the right place for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.

Development of space will improve life on Earth. Access to space is important for agriculture, humanitarian efforts, communications, and navigation.

I'm hopeful that commercial space exploration will takeoff. To really fuel the spaceflight revolution will require an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and I think that's only going to happen in the commercial sector - if there are large profits to be made.

Elon just presented a plan for settling the solar system in this century that is realistic and affordable. In my paper, 'A Pathway to a Thriving Commercial Space Economy' at IAC, I also laid out a path forward to a growing economy in space that produces new opportunities for all.

Rather than being an impediment, NASA can and should be the driver of commerce, the provider of the technology necessary to make some big money in space. The truth is that private enterprise already has a huge presence up there.

By 2030, up to 10 percent of the world's gross domestic product could be linked to space in some way.

The economics of the space industry are changing. Within so called 'NewSpace,' not only are new entrants being created almost daily, the business models and capital sources have proven to be dramatically different from traditional models built upon large government contracts and defence-related spending.

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.