Buzz Aldrin Quotes

I think eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it's going to have to be with NASA's help.

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

Private enterprise can never lead a space frontier. It's not possible because a space frontier is expensive, it has unknown risks and it has unquantified risks.

There are many people talking about access to space and, 'How can we make that cheaper? How can we turn that into a Southwest Airlines versus the big airlines?'

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

I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.

I don't think the space station will ever do anything for exploration. Putting people up there for a year or more is the only way you will get anywhere near the exploration concept.

If you take all the money we've spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles.

My view is that we should go back to the moon, build up the infrastructure to make flights there commonplace - be comfortable with it - then use that infrastructure to expand and go to Mars.

There are several revenue streams that are near and present that could support a private space station, including in-space manufacturing, microgravity research, and tourism - for both individuals and sovereign nation astronauts - and in-space supply logistics.

As you begin to create more destinations, that will naturally create a stronger economic pipeline for space. And just as we have been the leader of commercial air travel for the first century, as we look to the second century of aviation, I would expect Boeing to be the leader in both air and space travel.

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.

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

The bottom line is 2018 should finally be the year where we see the early stages of broad-based commercial space tourism appear. Demand will certainly be driven by the early successes or failures of those missions, the marketing of those missions, as well as the propensity for tourists to become repeat flyers.

And from, you know, small ideas, bigger ideas emerge. So we're starting with suborbital space flights and we'll then go into orbital space flights and, you know, maybe one day we'll send people on a one-way voyage into the depths of space as per the science fiction trips.

Since Yuri Gagarin and Al Shepard's epoch flights in 1961, all space missions have been flown only under large, expensive government efforts. By contrast, our program involves a few, dedicated individuals who are focused entirely on making spaceflight affordable.

I think I need to continue to think and plan and marry all of the different things that we could do that make transportation in space from the earth to the space station, from the earth to the moon to space stations around the moon to visiting an asteroid.

The future is about wings and wheels and new forms of space transportation, along with our deep-space ambition to set foot on another world in our solar system: Mars. I firmly believe we will establish permanence on that planet. And in reaching for that goal, we can cultivate commercial development of the moon, the asteroid belt, the Red Planet itself and beyond.

Not everyone can be an astronaut and go into space, some people with sufficient resources can purchase and fly sub-orbitally thanks to various companies and for more money (considerably) fly into orbit.

Target launch date for Falcon I maiden flight is Halloween(October 31) from our island launch complex in the Kwajalein Atoll. For potential customers out there, I should mention that Kwajalein has some of the worlds best scuba diving and snorkeling! It is literally a tropical paradise.

Astronauts will remain the explorers, the pioneers-the first to go back to moon and on to Mars. But I think it's really important to make space space available to as many people as we can. It's going to be a while before we can launch people for less than $20 million a ticket. But that day is coming.

The same way people are now paying a couple thousand dollars to fly to other parts of the world, people will be paying $50,000 to spend a weekend on a space station.

We hope to create thousands of astronauts over the next few years and bring alive their dream of seeing the majestic beauty of our planet from above, the stars in all their glory and the amazing sensations of weightlessness and space flight.

With space travel, [it's] no different. You know, in 1990 I read the name Virgin Galactic Airways. Loved the name. And set out to try to find an engineer or rocket scientist in the world who could build a safe, reusable rocket that could take people to and from space and we could start a whole new era of commercial space travel.

Where we're operating is orbital adventures. We would offer five to seven days in low Earth orbit aboard our own spacecraft where customers would have the view of the Earth; get to experience really living in space, probably conducting some scientific investigations that we would piggyback onto those flights. So, they would have the whole experience, kind of a mini-experience of what professional astronauts have.