Seth Shostak Quotes

Well, we have two major goals. The most important one is to get the station arm on board the station, because that's this really milestone in the space station building since from now on they will be using this arm to continue building the space station.

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

If you're going to go into space, you have to have an objective, a mission. Where do you want to go? Earth orbit? The moon? Mars? What's the technology to get there? You develop the technology for the mission.

In America, we have no means of getting to our own Space Station. We have to pay the Russians to put our people up there to send them into space - rendezvous with the Station and bring them back at the end of their stay, and that to me is just wrong. We're supposed to be the world's greatest space-faring nation, and to cancel our own means of getting there I thought was a mistake, even though it would save some money.

Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.

I had been here five years already, training very hard, learning about the systems, the shuttle, the station systems. But, everything really became real when I started to work with them.

The space elevator's not just another competitive technology, promoted by people who simply like the idea of diminishing the luster of the thrusters. It would open wide the doors to space.

Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.

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.

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

Remember, I am not trying to orbit the earth. It is a simple elevator ride for 20 minutes.

I founded a launch company called International Microspace when I graduated medical school in 1989. We were trying to build a microsatellite launcher.

We can't start over and develop a Saturn 5-type vehicle from scratch.

A factory that can turn carbon nanotubes into a sheet a yard wide and long enough to stretch one-fourth of the way to the moon is not something you'll find at your local industrial park. That's the show-stopper for the space elevator. The ribbon.

There should be an international lunar base. That is certainly doable.

Claiming that solid rockets are necessary for a heavy-lift launcher is obvious nonsense.

Lighter computers and lighter sensors would let you have more function in a given weight, which is very important if you are launching things into space, and you have to pay by the pound to put things there.

After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we'll have room for specialists. But right now we don't.

We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.

We also had to bring with us some desired scientific equipment over to the station as well as assemble new machines. For that, I had to conduct two space walks.

A zero-gravity flight is a first step toward space travel.

At that point, there will be the handover between the shuttle arm and the station arm so that the shuttle arm will take the cradle and put it into the cargo bay.

I'm not going into infinity. I'm going into low earth orbit.

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.

As far as the satellite itself is concerned, that doesn’t give me any apprehension at all.