Quotes from Rick Tumlinson

This is what the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) represents. Experimental, explorational science. Learning about Mars as a new world. Discovering new things that will tell us about the history of our solar system, help reveal the secrets of life, and continue blazing the trail that may someday be traveled by the rest of us.

Life is passion, celebration in the face of chaos, light in the face of darkness, hope in the face of despair, and joy, for the universe without life feels nothing, is nothing, and does nothing except slowly die.

We need Big Ideas, as we are in a time of small people, and as Kennedy showed with Apollo, doing something grand in space is the biggest. At a time of huge national doubt and fear of losing our leadership as a nation to others, it focused us, gave us something positive and inspired a generation.

I do not expect NASA to go out and build settlements and colonies. I do not expect them to give SpaceX all the money needed to colonize Mars. I do not expect them to realize the future of humanity is contingent on harvesting the wealth of the solar system overnight and suddenly subsidize my asteroid mining project.

We go to learn about our solar system, to search for life, and to understand what happened to Mars so we avoid it ourselves.

Your birthday happens each year on exactly the same day. It is a solid thing, a dependable thing, a measure of your life broken down into 365 subunits. For a Leaper, it is a bit different. For us, the basic assumption is shattered from the beginning.

Crazy may not be the one who says the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth is round, and someday people might fly. It may be those who laugh at such words whose minds are lost.

I guess it's human nature, as every group breaks into factions, yet at a time when we are trying to be taken seriously, it can confuse people - especially when it moves from being about where you want to go and what you want to do to why the others are idiots.

We need to open the frontier between the Earth and Moon to large-scale human activities, we need to establish human outposts and communities off the Earth and begin the job of doing so right away - and do so largely based on letting the people take over most of the jobs.

China, Russia and India are shooting for the Moon. United Arab Emirates says Mars. Other private citizens and companies are heading either to Mars, asteroids, or the Moon.

We go as humans into space to expand the domain of humanity and life - not robots. And as we do, we will get more science because when you are living somewhere, you obviously learn more about it. NASA and the government must first get out of the way and then support us as we open the frontier.

After he retired, Dad worked at my uncle's boat company, a camp for kids, and eventually became County Commissioner for a term. He is known around town, works at the Food Pantry my mother helped start, and is a very serious member of Kiwanis.

The exploration of space: Be it by humans or robots, based on the best choice for the mission and the most efficient means to return the data and science sought. Most of the time, this will mean we send robots due to cost and danger. But sometimes, we will need the irreplaceable judgment and descriptive abilities of a person on the spot.

NewSpace is everything we want in this nation: energy, entrepreneurship, and excitement that spurs education, innovation, and an enlightened approach to the future.

On July 20th, 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took the most expensive selfie in history. As the apex of an 8-year, $130 billion effort, they posed in front of a camera and took a shot designed to do one thing - to show our free enterprise democratic system was better than the rigid, authoritarian system that wanted to destroy us.

Space is big. The whole point of the frontier is that we go there to do new things in new places - not one place, and not one thing, but all of the above.

By reigniting the exploration role of our government Lewises and Clarks within and enabled by the infrastructure and economic drive of commercial space and the people themselves, this nation can rise to heights unimaginable.

Governments spending billions on a humans-to-Mars program won't allow wild-eyed billionaires to steal the glory; all heck will break loose as the public and sidelined governments decry and block the perceived cosmic land grab. Yet the private folks aren't waiting.

From the moment those images of Buzz and Neil arrived on the world's television sets, our human space program has been lost - for a blatantly simple and obvious reason - after the first giant leap to take that first small step, there was no plan for the next one, because there was no second question to be answered.

We require, as a species, the difference between what is safe and unsafe to define ourselves. Be it in darkness or in light, where we are means nothing without the comparison to the other place - where we are not. And thus it is the difference between them that tells us who and what we are.

The opening of the Frontier is not an engineering problem. It is not a money problem. It is a challenge to our ability to decide to make it happen and to think and act the right way to get the results we want, we need, we demand.

There is in us a spark of something good, something right and beautiful.

To settle space, we will have to develop the ability to harvest and utilize the resources of the solar system, such as ores, ice, and the rays of the sun itself at levels of efficiency that will transform our relationship to our own planet Earth.

Homo Sapiens is a frontier creature. It is what we do; it defines what we are. This has been true from our very beginnings. It is the core reason our progenitors wandered forth from the first primordial valleys in search of more room, better hunting, or more fertile soil.