Space Travel Quotes

You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.

~ Samuel Beckett

There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.

~ Octavia E. Butler

To respect a mystery is to make way for the answer.

~ Criss Jami

I had aimed at Mars and was about to hit Venus unquestionably the all-time cosmic record for poor shots.

~ Edgar Rice Burroughs

Problem is (follow me closely here, the science is pretty complicated), if I cut a hole in the Hab, the air won't stay inside anymore.

~ Andy Weir

Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed. Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have.

~ George Alec Effinger

And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.

~ Douglas Adams

We are in the process of finding out what filling the sky with hundreds of thousands of satellites does to all life on Earth.

~ Steven Magee

Space: the gaping hole between land and other land.

~ Se Zbasnik

Isn’t antimatter what fuels the U.S.S.Enterprise?

~ Dan Brown

Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women.There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program.

~ Neal Stephenson

The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein -- humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth

~ Martin J. Rees

No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don’t get any work done because we’re all looking at it too much?

~ Patrick Ness

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars!

~ Michael Flynn

Ah, youth!It was a beautiful night...The moon was out of orbit.The stars were awry.But everything else was exactlyas it should have been.

~ Roman Payne

She and Kennedy both dove for the power connector; Kennedy reached it first and yanked out the connection as Alex landed on her stomach beside it.The air settled down until the fine hairs on her arm no longer stood on end. Alex dropped her forehead to the platform and started laughing. “Just like university, isn’t it?”“Almost—nothing’s actually blown up yet.

~ G.s. Jennsen

She skidded around a corner, slamming her shoulder into the wall and bouncing off of it without slowing. Caleb?Silence. Forty-six meters. A long stretch of hallway. She pushed faster, harder. Twenty meters.She burst into the room in unison with a deafening crash of metal shearing metal.

~ G.s. Jennsen

Imagine you are Siri Keeton:You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.You'd scream if you had the breath.Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

~ Peter Watts

Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards?

~ Ray Bradbury

Glacier blue plasma rippled and sparked across the interior of the portal. “It seems keeping secrets is what you do.”“Secrets are merely the necessary means. Survival is the end goal. Survival of ourselves, survival of species who do not deserve to be eradicated from the universe. Survival of the universe itself.”“Survival’s noble and all, but what good is it without the freedom to live as you choose?”“A question you have the luxury to ask because you survive.

~ G.s. Jennsen

No amount of standing on hilltops on dark nights and surveying the heavens could prepare a man for the actuality of space travel, because the earthbound observer saw only the the stars, not what separated them. They glittered in his vision, filling his eyes, and he had no choice but to assign them a position of importance in the cosmic scheme. The space traveler saw things differently. He was made aware that the universe consisted of emptiness, that the suns and nebulae were almost an irrelevancy, that the stars were nothing more than a whiff of gas diffusing into infinity. And sooner or later that knowledge began to hurt.

~ Bob Shaw

Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we've had for so long will lose its value once it's realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea?

~ Dexter Palmer

Laches faded away, leaving Miriam standing facing Hyperion, the Metigen who had orchestrated the slaughter of over fifty million people a short year ago.There were limits to even deals with the devil, lines which should never be crossed…but she was beginning to wonder when she might find one.

~ G.s. Jennsen

In order to be a better writer, one must always write.

~ Safa Shaqsy

People feared what they did not understand, and they without a doubt did not understand her. Those who believed they did least of all. She was something new.

~ G.s. Jennsen

Alex screamed and lashed out at the points of light from within, desperate for something tangible to rage against. Caleb wrapped his arms around her from behind and coaxed her out while glaring at the Metigen in loathing.Then he lessened his hold on her to a single hand. Together they turned their backs on the alien and began walking away.

~ G.s. Jennsen

Crushed sandstone sifted through Caleb’s fingers, insubstantial as dust. A breeze caught the debris mid-fall and spirited it away before it could join the ashes blanketing the ground. He stopped in the middle of what had once been a street, his arms pulled in at his sides, his fists balled in barely restrained fury.

~ G.s. Jennsen

Children are turning themselves into monsters and, quite frankly, it is your fault. You initiated the creation of this technology, then you allowed it to slip through your fingers.”Miriam’s jaw tightened. “I disagree, but now is the least optimal time imaginable for assigning blame. People are dying, and I will not stand around debating semantics with you while they are.

~ G.s. Jennsen

You ask me to make peace with the monsters who did this?”She didn’t even look around at ‘this.’ “Yes. The alternative is extinction. There’s no coming back from that—no new weapon to fire when no one is left and you’ve no universe left to fire it in.

~ G.s. Jennsen

Evening had turned the sky a deep persimmon. The remaining sunlight enriched the colors of the ubiquitous flowers and foliage to even greater vibrancy, as if the saturation filter had been notched up several levels.Caleb noted all this in passing as he strode deliberately forward. He didn’t know how he was going to do this, only that he had to make the attempt.

~ G.s. Jennsen

Jasper set an intercepting course towards that Rhylonian Star Duster. Maybe we can catch them on their blind side.”“Doesn’t this ship have a cloak?” Jaq asks.“Miss Synergy, I don’t know what they teach now a’days at the Academy, but ships do not wear clothes.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

The moon is considered a relatively easy object to land humans on, everything else is much harder by orders of magnitude. It is the reason why we have not been to Mars and will likely never go there successfully with humans.

~ Steven Magee

It is a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

~ Alan Shepard

If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.

~ Jodi Picoult

Jasper!” Casey shouts, startling the young woman. “My cargo is talking to me!

~ Nathan Reese Maher

She points to where he went and looks to the neutral Baumen. “He—he did that to me on purpose! He’s insane. Literally, insane!”The munchkin just shrugs. “Welcome aboard!” and returns unconcerned to his work.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Riley asked himself why he had ever considered space travel romantic. “Because you are a romantic,” his pedia said.

~ James Edwin Gunn

Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.

~ Carl Sagan

Smiling now, Michael Dawn sat on his rooftop, gazing at the stars above him, just like men had done for thousands of years. Out there lay secrets and mysteries that an eternity could never unravel, worlds he could only imagine. Yet looking at them then, it all seemed so surreal. As if the only purpose the stars had in this world was to shine their tiny points of light down on him that evening. To give him something beautiful and breathtaking to admire. Maybe that was their only purpose. Maybe trying to get more out of them, trying to travel among them and shed light on things that were better left unexposed, had been the trouble all along.

~ John A. Ashley

Radical space technologies never reach the public because unknown groups do not wish humanity to have access to the highest knowledge or the most advanced scientific inventions. Perhaps this suppression is out of fear that the masses may be able to explore our Solar System and the Universe beyond it. Whatever the case, it seems they want us to stay at ignorant levels forever.

~ Takaaki Musha