Space Funding Quotes

As long as humanity has been human, it has looked toward the heavens and dreamed that some day, some way, there would be giant federal contracts involved.

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

President Obama is launching a new $6 billion space policy that will ultimately take astronauts to Mars. Of course, it's $6 billion and $45 if the astronauts have a carry-on.

The day Apollo 11 landed, I knew men would walk on Mars in my lifetime. I'm no longer nearly so sure. The last budget put forward in Canada contained not a penny for Mars.

People will come back and influence their communities to get excited about space. Space funding will increase because people will see the benefit it has to the way people relate to the world, the way people relate to problems, and the way people view themselves.

Astronauts have been stuck in low-Earth orbit, boldly going nowhere. American attempts to kick-start a new phase of lunar exploration have stalled amid the realisation that NASA's budget is too small for the job.

The nobility of the human spirit grows harder for me to believe in. War, zealotry, greed, malls, narcissism. I see a backhanded nobility in excessive, impractical outlays of cash prompted by nothing loftier than a species joining hands and saying “I bet we can do this.” Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government red-lining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let’s squander some on Mars. Let’s go out and play.

I don't see anything beneficial about the US spending 100 billion dollars to go back to the moon unless we learn something new that will help us go to the moons of Saturn okay and so we ought to use that to breed new breakthroughs and to test new breakthroughs and to fund it.

People come up to me and say, 'It's too bad the space program got canceled.' This is not the case, and yet that is what most of the public thinks has happened.

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.

As a cornerstone of my policy, we will substantially expand public-private partnerships to maximize the amount of investment and funding that is available for space exploration and development.

I'm hoping that the suspension of the space program is just that, a suspension, and that it's not the final say in the matter, because I think we need it.

My position is that it is high time for a calm debate on more fundamental questions. Does human spaceflight continue to serve a compelling cultural purpose and/or our national interest? Or does human spaceflight simply have a life of its own, without a realistic objective that is remotely commensurate with its costs? Or, indeed, is human spaceflight now obsolete?

Does it make sense for the U.S. to expend hundreds of billions of dollars to mount a new Apollo-style program to return to the moon? Or have we blazed that trail? Shouldn't we help other nations achieve this goal with their own resources but with our help?

When someone tells me, 'Oh, we have so many problems on Earth; space exploration costs too much money,' I say, 'I absolutely agree with you. But I still hope we do it.'

Donald Trump's administration is floating a proposal to return to the moon - and to shut down the International Space Station to help pay for it. The first part of this idea is good. The second is horrible.

The one period of glory in NASA was the first nine years when they weren't a bureaucracy yet... and they haven't gotten back to that excitement, that adventurism, and won't. So, I would take most of the NASA budget, and I would turn it into prizes for private sector.

The Mars Polar Lander cost the average American the price of half a cheeseburger. A human lander would cost the average American more - perhaps even ten cheeseburgers! So be it. That is no great sacrifice.

Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-'60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate.