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Space Travel Quotes

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Space Travel Quotes

“She grinned. He shook his head. “You’re so beautiful, Lisa.” Her eyes lowered, betraying her disbelief. That and fear. He urged her closer until she rested against his chest, her head tucked beneath his chin. “Don’t be afraid,” he murmured. “I vow I will protect you and keep you safe.” She curled a hand around his neck, her fingers stroking him and sending little tingles down his back. “Now vow you’ll keep YOU safe. THAT will ease my fear.” He couldn’t do that. If he had to die to protect her, he would.”

“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.”

“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”

“I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect. But once the salt is taken care of and the distasteful organic molecules have been trapped in an activated charcoal filter, urine is a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage. I was about to use the word unobjectionable, but that's not accurate. People object. They object a lot.”

“THERE IT IS,’ my mother says, and what she means is that the dot we’ve been nearing for weeks, the one that’s been growing into a larger dot with two smaller dots circling it, has now become even larger than that, growing from a dot to a disc, shining back the light from its sun, until you can see the blue of its oceans, the green of its forests, the white of its polar caps, a circle of colour against the black beyond.”

“Her lips twitched, then she laughed. “You are so freaking likable.” He smiled. “I feel the same about you.” “Okay then. We’re both adults. And neither one of us is physically up to engaging in anything amorous anyway, so—” “Well,” he said with a grin, “that isn’t precisely true.” Her cheeks pinkened. “Stop making me blush!” He laughed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Here is one way to conceptualize NASA's heroic era: in 1961, Kennedy gave his "moon speech" to Congress, charging them to put an American on the moon "before the decade is out." In the eight years that unspooled between Kennedy's speech and Neil Armstrong's first historic bootprint, NASA, a newborn government agency, established sites and campuses in Texas, Florida, Alabama, California, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; awarded multi-million-dollar contracts and hired four hundred thousand workers; built a fully functioning moon port in a formerly uninhabited swamp; designed and constructed a moonfaring rocket, spacecraft, lunar lander, and space suits; sent astronauts repeatedly into orbit, where they ventured out of their spacecraft on umbilical tethers and practiced rendezvous techniques; sent astronauts to orbit the moon, where they mapped out the best landing sites; all culminating in the final, triumphant moment when they sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of their lunar module and bounce about on the moon, perfectly safe within their space suits. All of this, start to finish, was accomplished in those eight years.”

“Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne's 1865 novel "De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon)." The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne's book apart from the other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel -- his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists -- the Russian, the German, and the American -- were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer.”

“Un singur punct cenușiu - meteorit uman, singuratic, lunecând lent prin beznă, printre spiralele albastre... Apoi teleecranul se stinse; undele viorii, minusculului meteorit uman și masiva umbră convexă planetară, ce-l atrăgea, se topiră, în aceeași lumină argintie, ce invadă încăperea, ca un metal fluid opalescent.”

“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.”

“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.”

“After the others had departed, Miriam gave David, Alex and Richard an honest, weary smile. “One hurdle cleared.” “You were perfect.” David reached over and squeezed her hands atop the table. “Kennedy said your new ship will be ready in a week or so. What are you going to call her?” “I hadn’t really considered it. The Stalwart II redux? Stalwart III, I suppose? If that isn’t getting too absurd.” David snorted. “ ‘Stalwart’ my ass. We might as well have called them ‘ships that blow up Solovys.’ I say it’s time for a new name.”

“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.”

“People ask what will happen if Mars One fails. There will be Mars Two, Mars Three, there will be Gliese 581 One, Proxima Centauri b One etc. If a project opens the path for other projects, it means that it has already triumphed!”

“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.”

“From space the little world looked like nothing much - perhaps a pitted and decaying pumpkin, dull orange-black in color, with a handful of tiny orbiting craft floating around it like fruit flies. Here and there amber lights shone out of craters in the surface. What seemed to be scores of deformed silver minnows nibbling the pumpkin rind - together with numbers of smaller noshmates - were actually huge transactinide carriers and lesser starships, either taking on fuel or docked nose-to-ground while their crews rested and recreated inside the not so heavenly body. I have been told that the original Phlegethon of Greek mythology was a fiery river in Hades. Sheltok Concern owned a dozen or so similar way stations with brimstony names - Gehenna, Styx, Sheol, Tophet, Avernus, Niflheim, and the like - that served vessels bound to or fro the terrible R-class worlds where ultraheavy elements are mined.”

“Reaching out, Lisa tentatively rested a trembling hand on his shoulder. His skin was cool and bore a light coating of perspiration. She drew her hand down over his biceps. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and something she couldn’t identify flickered in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice hushed while the alarm continued to blare. “Did I hurt you?” “No. It’s . . . You’re the first person who has touched me—not with intent to harm, but with kindness—in a very long time.” His words broke her heart.”

“Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo.”

“...and then the mysterious Elb appear to rearrange the very fabric of reality itself. They do not travel through the vast expanse, instead space becomes a cocoon as they weave the strings of the universe into a silken-case, only to break it open, emerging at their destination. A form of travel so inexplicable that the Eyt have not developed the conceptual awareness to even measure the basic mechanics of such phenomena.”

“It really seems to me sometimes that the only hope is space. That is to say, perhaps the most energetic—in a bad sense—elements will move on to a new world in space. The problems of mass society will be transported into space, leaving behind this world as a kind of Europe, which then eventually tourists will visit. The Old World. I'm only half joking.”

“Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, and the stars themselves are scattered no more widely than the seed of Adam, even then we shall still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth. The ants have covered the world, but have they conquered it - for what do their countless colonies know of it, or of each other?”

“I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.”