Jim Backus Quotes

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

America can take man to the moon, and America can take men to Mars - and beyond.

Space exploration is important research to our economic and national defense, and America's space program is a symbol of our success as a scientifically and technologically advanced nation.

The space program is a peaceful project. The next door is opening. We have to go farther into space. But, before that, we need to develop far more improved nutrition and more advanced spacecraft.

I think the International Space Station is providing a key bridge from us living on Earth to going somewhere into deep space.

The building of the International Space Station is something wonderful, and it will show us how to take the next step beyond low-Earth orbit.

I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory.

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

'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.

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.

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.

Not only shall we be able to cruise in space, …

I am very inspired by the exploration of space via private means.

If I were part of Gaganyaan, I could have been sure that for the next few years, there would have been a second space mission and a third space mission.

We need to move off the planet. And Mars is the next best place.

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.

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.

What I'm trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

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 believe that the only way that the human race is gonna survive is to start colonizing space and setting up colonies on the moon, and then space stations.

I don't think we're going to build a 50-person spacecraft or a 100-person spacecraft.

It's time to open the space frontier to citizen explorers.

By refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it's time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface.