Kathleen Rubins Quotes

With the mission to Mars, the whole world wants to get involved. So we actually have 13 different space agencies from around the world working on the global exploration road map.

The ability of the humans to not only function in space but be very functional when they arrive at their destination, those are the kinds of things we're learning from the science. Fuel transfer technologies and all the things we can learn about the space environment are all valuable to us for pressing on out.

And now for Return to Flight, I'm chief of robotics working in the astronaut office in Houston, as a Canadian.

'The Martian' may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.

During my 8 years as chairman, I had the privilege to peer into the future to see dynamic citizen astronauts returning to and from the heavens which we can expect in the future.

Many of us in Congress have been calling on the Administration to articulate a bold mission for NASA. It seems that the President is answering that call. I wholeheartedly support his vision for going back to the moon, and from there to worlds beyond.

To send humans back to the moon would not be advancing. It would be more than 50 years after the first moon landing when we got there, and we'd probably be welcomed by the Chinese. But we should return to the moon without astronauts and build, with robots, an international lunar base, so that we know how to build a base on Mars robotically.

Back in the days of Apollo, sending humans to the moon was the only viable way to get the scientific data we wanted. But now, with our computer and robotics technology, there's very little an astronaut can do on Mars that a well-designed rover can't.

When you think about exploring deep space, it's very dangerous for humans. To potentially sacrifice human life is a delicate proposition. On the flip side, if you want to send a robot to another planet for an extended period of time and at some point you know it'll cease to function, it's not considered a tragedy.

We're using the space station as a test bed for some of the technologies that are going to enable us to work autonomously in space and hit some of our deep-space exploration goals.

Very little useful science got done in the space station. NASA never did the experiments needed to develop the technologies required for a genuine interplanetary expedition: centrifugal gravity to avoid bodily harm and a truly closed biosphere.

Every day, we get a little bit closer to the kind of expertise and the kind of experience we're going to need to go there. I'd love to be the guy walking on Mars.

I don't go along with going to Moon first to build a launch pad to go to Mars. We should go to Mars from Earth orbit. We have already been to the Moon; we've already practiced.

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

We want to make sure we get living astronauts to the surface of Mars.

We're not going to get humans to Mars until at least the mid-2030s, and the world is going to change by then.

Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.

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

The first two missions have some test objectives, some new capabilities that we're going to try to develop on orbit to possibly be used on later flights.

In order for us to have a future that's exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we're a space-bearing civilization.

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 have a secret project at Third Man where we want to have the first vinyl record played in outer space. We want to launch a balloon that carries a vinyl record player.

We must become a space-faring nation.

The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX.