Quotes About Space

NONE OF YOU WILL EVER STAND ON TERRA FIRMA, TOUCH YOUR loved ones, or breathe the atmosphere of your mother planet again," the president said. "That is a terrible fate. And yet it is a better fate than seven billion people trapped on the Earth's surface can hope for. The last ship home has sailed. From now on, launch vehicles will rise up into orbit, but they will not go back for ten thousand years." The

The complications, as always, had to do with avoiding collisions and respecting what was still called "air space" around habitats, even though it had no air in it and might more properly have been called "space space.

Arjuna asteroid.

The end state of all this would be a Dyson sphere:

the scheduled launch, he had flown to Baikonur, bringing

What is BFR?" asked Pete Starling. For the graph's vertical scale was labeled thus. "Bolide Fragmentation Rate

I don't think a Drop Top can can reach an orbit this high, can it? Dinah asked. Sean's coming alone. It's some kind of special one-passenger model -- the extra mass is being used for propellant. And then what? He just goes to an airlock and knocks on the door? Basically, yes, Larz said. What will they do? Tell him to go away?

That's the thing about space," she said. "So many smart people are so interested in it that it's difficult to come up with a really new idea.

In the old days a proposed system would have been given a three-letter acronym and bounced back and forth between different agencies and contractors for fifteen years before being launched into space.

Where are you supposed to put your arms when you dance? It's like the Universal Question.

Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.

Matter tells space how to curve; space tells matter how to move.?

Without a doubt, the most spectacular way to die in space is to fall into a black hole.

Space programs are) a force operating on educational pipelines that stimulate the formation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians... They're the ones that make tomorrow come. The foundations of economies... issue forth from investments we make in science and technology.

Like the microscopic strands of DNA that predetermine the identity of a macroscopic species and the unique propertires of its members, the modern look and feel of the cosmos was writ in the fabric of its earliest moments, and carried relentlessly through time and space. We feel it when we look up. We feel it when we look down. We feel it when we look within.

In the beginning, there was physics. Physics describes how matter, energy, space, and time behave and interact with one another. The interplay of these characters in our cosmic drama underlies all biological and chemical phenomena. Hence everything fundamental and familiar to us earthlings begins with, and rests upon, the laws of physics. When we apply these laws to astronomical settings, we deal with physics writ large, which we call astrophysics.

Dark energy is a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that acts in the opposite direction of gravity, forcing the universe to expand faster than it otherwise would.

I look forward to the day when the solar system becomes our collective backyard—explored not only with robots, but with the mind, body, and soul of our species.

Some 14 billion years ago, at the beginning of time, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe fit within a pinhead.

The easy part is the ray's 500-second speed-of-light jaunt from the Sun to Earth, through the void of interplanetary space. The hard part is the light's million-year adventure to get from the Sun's center to its surface.

To picture a pulsar, imagine the mass of the Sun packed into a ball the size of Manhattan. If that's hard to do, then maybe it's easier if you imagine stuffing about a billion elephants into a Chapstick casing.

In the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.

I occasionally wonder if the entire Universe is nothing more than a snow-globe on the living room mantle of a space alien.

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted aurora near the poles of both Saturn and Jupiter. And on Earth, the aurora borealis and australis (the northern and southern lights) serve as intermittent reminders of how nice it is to have a protective atmosphere.