Lee de Forest Quotes

Most people never believed in the real possibility of going to the moon, and neither did I until I was in my twenties.

We knew it was going to be difficult to get to the moon. We didn't know how difficult.

You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times... and safely home again.

I was motivated to improve the U.S. strategy of going back to the moon in 1985. That's a long time ago. Going back to the moon would be a great achievement for tourism adventure flights.

We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own.

Man must at all costs overcome the Earth's gravity and have, in reserve, the space at least of the Solar System.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000 mph.

The years of space flight since the orbiting of Sputnik I back in 1957 had produced many fascinating results, but they had also brought a realization of the many problems that surrounded the use of rockets for space flight.

We must become a space-faring nation.

Yesterday, we sought telescopes good enough to see all the planets. Today, we seek vehicles good enough to reach them.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

When it comes to the things that people really want in science fiction - like space travel - the simplest things end up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to live on Earth.

To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.

My expertise is the space program and what it should be in the future based on my experience of looking at the transitions that we've made between pre-Sputnik days and getting to the moon.

It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.

I've always been interested in the idea of space exploration. When I was younger it was just a dream, but the theory of rockets being able to travel through space was very much alive. I found it very exciting.

You stop planetary exploration, those people who do that extraordinary work are going to have to go do something else.

Sending a couple of guys to the Moon and bringing them back safely? That's a stunt! That's not historic.

The rockets... can be built so powerfully that they could be capable of carrying a man aloft.

We constantly learn new lessons up here. The experiences we gather will enable us to establish a long-term station on the moon and to go on to Mars.

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

We'll go back to the moon by not learning anything new.

Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars.

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

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.