Elon Musk Quotes

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable.

Reusable rockets promise much easier testing because you should usually get them back, and you can debug as you go rather than having to get everything perfect the first time.

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

We believe SpaceX will become the world leader in space transport, and we want our investors to be part of that future.

I think humans will reach Mars, and I would like to see it happen in my lifetime.

Space travel is the only technology that is more dangerous and more expensive now than it was in its first year. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin, the space shuttle ended up being more dangerous and more expensive to fly than those first throwaway rockets, even though large portions of it were reusable. It's absurd.

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

Rocket scientists agree that we have about reached the limit of our ability to travel in space using chemical rockets. To achieve anything near the speed of light we will need a new energy source and a new propellant. Nuclear fission is not an option.

Once solved, the severe handicaps imposed on space exploration by the weight and chemical limitations of rockets would no longer apply. The whole timetable of our conquest of the planets in our solar system would be tremendously speeded up, from hot Mercury all the way out to frigid Pluto.

The strategic objective of New Shepard is to practice, and a lot of the subcomponents of New Shepard actually get directly reused on the second stage of New Glenn.

SpaceX lowered the cost of going into space by 10x.

I have a hunch the most important reason we're going to space is not known now.

In my mind, public space travel will precede efforts toward exploration -- be it returning to the moon, going to Mars, visiting asteroids, or whatever seems appropriate. We've got millions and millions of people who want to go into space, who are willing to pay. When you figure in the payload potential of customers, everything changes.

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.

Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.

The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.

I ended up realizing that NASA was unlikely to get me into space, or get me to the moon or beyond, and I needed some other way to drive this.

I think we're a long ways from really putting colonies of people out there who would live their whole lives out there in space. I don't see that happening for quite some time.

It was obvious to me that we could never colonize Mars without reusability, any more than America would have been colonized if they had to burn the ships after every trip.

If we were to start today on an organized and well-supported space program I believe a practical passenger rocket can be built and tested within ten years.

It is despairing to consider that the cost and reliability of access to space have barely changed since the Apollo era over three decades ago. Yet in virtually every other field of technology, we have made great strides in reducing cost and increasing capability.

When I orbited the Earth in a spaceship, I saw for the first time how beautiful our planet is. Mankind, let us preserve and increase this beauty, and not destroy it!

If we want to go to space with humans, that's for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.

Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there.

Space is hard - but worth it. We will persevere and move forward together.