Grant Imahara Quotes

It's very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there's radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It'd be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth.

I'm in favor of changing the destination of humans. There are a lot of manned missions that can be done, but not in the direction of the moon.

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.

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.

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

The space industry is developing and delivering benefits that tie into our immediate needs and priorities here on Earth-for example, medical and materials research, and satellite communications.

After the loss of Columbia a couple of years ago, I think we were reminded of the risk. All of us, though, have always known that the Space Shuttle is a very risky vehicle, much more risky than even flying airplanes in combat.

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

Mars is a long ways away. The moon is only 240,000 miles, but Mars is in the millions. It's too risky without spending more time going to the moon.

We have to engineer devices that are going to work in space stations. Those same things are going to work in the most remote regions on Earth.

You can't 'control' a Mars mission from Earth. The Mars mission is going to have to be controlled by the people on Mars... There is just too much involved that is out of sight of Earth.

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.

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.

If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.

During that space walk there will be some repositioning of the power so that the arm can be fully controlled by the robotic station that is in the Lab.

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.

One of the major problems with long-term deep space human flight is the requirement for radiation shielding.

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.

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

Asteroids are deep-space bodies orbiting the Sun, not the Earth, and traveling to one would mean sending humans into solar orbit for the very first time. Facing those challenges of radiation, navigation and life support on a months-long trip millions of miles from home would be a perfect learning journey before a Mars trip.

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

My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.

Research into manned spaceflight is shifting from low-Earth orbit to destinations much further away, like Mars and the asteroid belt. But society will have to invent many new technologies before it can plausibly send people to those distances.

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.