Quotes About Exploration

I said nothing about men adapting themselves to Mars. Have you ever considered the possibility of Mars meeting us half-way?

Call it the Star Gate.

It is not easy to run a shipping line between destinations that not only change their positions by millions of kilometers every few days, but also swing through a velocity range of tens of kilometers a second. Anything like a regular schedule is out of the question; there are times when one must forget the whole idea and stay in port—or at least in orbit—waiting for the Solar System to rearrange itself for the greater convenience of Mankind.

For the last time, David Bowman slept.

The image of Jupiter, with its ribbons of white cloud, its mottled bands of salmon pink, and the Great Red Spot staring out like a baleful eye, hung steady on the flight-deck projection screen.

Apart from the jet-black sky, the photo might have been taken almost anywhere in the polar regions of Earth; there was nothing in the least alien about the sea of wrinkled ice that stretched all the way out to the horizon. Only the five space-suited figures in the foreground proclaimed that the panorama was of another world.

When 2001 was written, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were mere pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescope; now they are worlds, each unique, and one of them—Io—is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.

I'm sure we would not have had men on the moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books

Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.

We're particularly anxious to get our hands on Pioneer 10—the first man-made object to escape from the Solar System.

They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated.

there were some who still found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question: "Where do we go from here?

he filled to perfection the classic recipe for a small boy: "a noise surrounded by dirt.

Someone had once said that you could be terrified in space, but you could not be worried there.

He had no wish to face whatever lurked in the unknown darkness, just beyond the little circle of light cast by the lamp of Science.

Yet among all the distractions and diversions of a planet which now seemed well on the way to becoming one vast playground, there were some who still found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question: "Where do we go from here?

for a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

Mammoths, building a signal to Mars, on the North American ice cap.

There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way… until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.

It's not any kind of rock—it crumbles when I touch it—I feel as if I'm exploring a giant Gruyère cheese…

It was fascinating to watch that agile mind trying one opening after another, testing and rejecting all the theories that Stormgren himself had abandoned long ago.

Magic is just science we haven't figured out yet

Beyond gravity, some of that freedom was regained; with the loss of weight went many of the cares and worries of Earth. Heywood

Nevertheless, when you did not know what you were looking for, it was important to avoid all prejudices and preconceptions; something that at first sight seemed irrelevant, or even nonsensical, might turn out to be a vital clue.