Space Travel Quotes

I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.

I was up in the Van Allen Belt. This is factual. And I don't know why they're scared of the Van Allen Belt, because it's simply hot. You'd be surprised how warm space is…. The DC-8 airplane is the exact copy of the space plane of that day. No difference, except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it, and the space plane didn't.

There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.

It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you're not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it's actually space that's moving.

I have never been to Mars. What will we discover when we get there? A red landscape, quiet horizon, frozen glaciers? Probably all is as beautiful, in its own way, as the Earth was thousands of years ago.

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.

I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.

I started SpaceX with the expectation of failure.

My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars - this is very important - so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there.

With 'Apollo 13,' I wasn't sure the genre would work, because space films hadn't done that well.

An end of something means the beginning of something else, and I don't think that something else is going to be the death of the manned space program.

The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.

I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors. They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky.

Man must rise above the Earth -- to the top of the atmosphere and beyond -- for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives

The space station is the most unique laboratory we've ever built. The reason we have it is to do research on materials, people, medical matters, pharmaceuticals - the possibilities are nearly endless.

I would love to set foot on another planet - lunar or Mars or somewhere.

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!

Gravity on Earth provides a force that keeps our bones and muscles working. In the microgravity of space, our bones and muscles are not taxed, so they begin to atrophy.

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.

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

The body is a vehicle for the mind, and that vehicle is how you travel through space.

Man will not always stay on Earth; the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.