Quotes About Astronautics

Astronautics, strictly speaking, will be concerned with voyages to other stars. Remarkably enough, to achieve such feats, we might not even have to leave the earth. It would suffice to accelerate the sun itself to a very high speed and let it drag all its planets with it.

In August 1994, I was invited to have dinner with House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich. At that time, I was a senior engineer working for Martin Marietta Astronautics in Denver, where I had been responsible for inventing a new plan called 'Mars Direct.'

I did two master's degrees - aeronautics and astronautics, and the second one was technology and policy. That taught me how to think about issues in science and technology as they relate to the general public.

NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant; he's the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows how to make space hip.

In 2013, the International Academy of Astronautics issued a 350-page report projecting that with enough funding and research, a space elevator capable of carrying multiple twenty-ton payloads might be possible by 2035. Price estimates usually range from $10 billion to $50 billion—a fraction of the $150 billion that went into the International Space Station.

Finally, Dr. Sean C. Solomon of MIT reported (in Astronautics, February 1962) that "The Lunar Orbiter experiments vastly improved our knowledge of the moon's gravitational field indicating the frightening possibility that the moon might be hollow." Frightening? What, indeed, is the significance of that word? The significance was mentioned by no less a figure than the late and great astronomer Carl Sagan in his book Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966).

Secretaries of Astronautics don't have to know much about science. They have to know about politics.