“When good people do bad things, it is sad, but when they reach the point where one can predict that they will do nothing but bad things, a deeper kind of sadness sets in, almost at the level of resignation.”
“There is in us a spark of something good, something right and beautiful.”
“It was the summer of 1968 or so, and Dad and my little brother were out camping. While up in the mountains, my brother was bitten by a rattlesnake. As they raced back to the base, my dad sucked out the venom and used his hands as a tourniquet and probably save his life, for it was a serious bite, and he was just a little kid.”
“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.”
“Life is an affirmation, not a defamation. Life means living. Life means taking that one tiny or giant leap beyond what you know you can do, or simply beyond what you know. It is in these moments that we live.”
“We face fear many times a day, in many ways, and usually we turn away from it. It often hides itself behind laziness and complacency, which are its shadows and aliases. We accept the things-as-they-are world in which we are comfortable.”
“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.”
“I’ve been doing a few interviews since the loss of the SpaceX Dragon on its way to the Space Station. Each one very quickly questions the viability of what they call commercial space in light of the failure. I tell them space is hard: this is what happens early in a program with new technology.”
“Go out tonight and look at the stars. And allow yourself to dream.”
“As we have seen in our own history, the injection of new ideas from other worlds transformed life for all, and with the establishment of new frontier communities far from the reach of the old world, new social systems also formed, more in tune with the fact that it was the individual who had to make the decisions and do the work of pioneering.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There are moments in time when the coincidence of art and reality interact to allow us a glimpse into the context of history. The release of the Christopher Nolan film ‘Interstellar’ a few days after two catastrophes in our space endeavor gives us one of those moments.”
“I want to capture and express that passion I see in life all around me to go wild, to push into anywhere we can, and make of those places new domains for life.”
“Robotics, manufacturing, medicine, farming, energy – all will be pushed to and beyond their limits and, by so doing, will advance at speeds far faster than without the impetus and challenge of opening a frontier – thus also raising the odds of survival in our favor.”
“The opening of space to human development and settlement is the most important activity of the human species. From hope to health, from wonder to wealth, the environment, and the very act of living, space is the future.”
“We have an industrial base – one that, if made to take orders rather than being allowed in the vacuum of leadership to create them, if enabled by the elimination of cost-plus contracting to produce and achieve rather than waste and receive, could make something worth the cost rather than making work that costs us our dreams.”
“Space is a canvas, as large and blank as any ever created, for it is indeed creation itself, and it calls to us to paint upon it with our own dreams and imaginations anything we wish, anything we want, and anything we can imagine.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Our greatest theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, recently declared that humans have no more than a hundred years to get off this planet to ensure the survival of our species. And when someone such as he does so, it is with an understanding not just of the science, but of both our tenuous place and our possibility in the universe.”
“To establish human settlements on the Moon, Mars, or in the free-space between, humans will have to again rapidly adapt. Like early pioneers, there will be no nearby friendly merchants or supportive governments to replace that broken tool.”
“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.”
“We are threatened by long-unresolved issues between the melting pot of cultures that make up our nation. People are isolated, every day less united, and every day falling deeper into a new level of cultural despair.”
“If governments decide to return to the Moon – as seems to be the case – it must be to build villages, not bases, and to do it as rapidly as possible, as it needs to be an immediate challenge, not a distant dream. And if some want to go to Mars or mine asteroids, they need to be seen as part of a new frontier community.”
“It was Apollo 8 that first showed us the tiny blue marble of Earth floating in the void of space, one of the great psychological shifts in human history. From out there, we can both appreciate and begin to solve the problems of our world in ways unavailable to us otherwise.”
“I am a Leaper: a person who – thanks to some mathematical errors tied to the cosmic interactions of Earth and Sun and bad math on the part of some old timers long ago – is lost in time, born on a day that simply doesn’t exist three out of four years.”
“We are as old as we feel. And while I never feel my calendar age, I often feel my Leaper age. And I’ll go with that. Because life is not something to be run down like a counter nor counted as it runs you down. It is an experience, and we can choose to live it as we will.”
“Government should support – and benefits from – economic development and settlement. The oft-used analogy of building highways and supporting infrastructure – not driving the vehicles or the industry – fits.”
“Government paved the on-ramp to space. Now, the vehicles taking us up to the space highway are being built by citizens, leveraging off government-catalyzed technologies and needs.”
“Support space-resource and industrial infrastructure. Multibillion-dollar satellites or voyagers to Mars and beyond, if we don’t live off the land, we will always only be visitors or wire stringers in territories we do not inhabit or control.”
“We go to learn about our solar system, to search for life, and to understand what happened to Mars so we avoid it ourselves.”
“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.”
“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.”
“All the best to SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and, yes, the Progress teams, who are all working on their own solutions to open the frontier along with Boeing and the rest of the fliers trying to fly, all of whom I know personally share the dream. This isn’t their fault; they just want to make things fly.”
“When President Kennedy set us on a path to the Moon in the 1960s, he knew exactly why – to produce a photo-op that would clearly show America would be the winner in the decades-long battle of political systems called the Cold War.”
“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.”
“There was nothing technical or physical stopping us from having moved on from Apollo to a permanent Moonbase, the development of industries in space, and the establishment of the first human communities on Mars. We could have – we can – do it anytime we actually decide that it is our goal, organize ourselves to make it happen, and Just Do It.”
“We cannot wait for the next Kennedy to set us on our path to the stars.”
“From John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, presidents have rhetorically opened the door to the frontier for us, and each time, we have turned away to fight over destinations, technologies, and timing.”
“We do not become an astronaut because we fear not only the risk of space, but we fear the risk of failure along the way more than we want to put in the work to make it happen – and it is easier not to try.”
“We often mistake the artificial chemical and psychological thrill of fake edges for the real. In fact we often seek them out as a substitute for the reality of change, growth and exploration. Our minds and bodies help us in this, as they react much the same to this simulations as to the real world.”
“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 first credible humans-to-Mars plans are starting to weave together in public-private partnerships. In fact, I can say with some authority that this will also be the case in terms of the Moon and asteroids as well.”
“Congress often covers the exposed crotch of our human spaceflight program with the figleaf of science when it’s an obvious lie to justify the pumping of billions of dollars into the belly of an ever-voracious aerospace industrial complex. And yes, of course space is dangerous.”
“We should stop wasting taxpayer funds on ridiculously expensive government missions to nowhere that return little value and blaze no useful trail for others to follow. Of course we should spend much more on science – and yes, use robots to do that science when it makes sense.”
“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.”
“I am a spacer. It is what and who I am. It is my cause and my life. I am not an enthusiast, a fan, or supporter. It is what I exist to do here on Earth. And there are many of us; some, like Elon Musk, are very high profile.”
“The Moon! Mars! Asteroids! Rockets! Helium 3! Space solar power! Space tourism! We go through fads, swarm around the hero de jour, and spend far too much time trashing the other guy’s ideas in favor of our own.”
“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.”
“It is time to take a stand for the future. Not in just words but actions. It is time to step up and demand the Vision. For by its realization, we all will win, and I mean us all.”
“The tide will at last change for us if those of us who can lead do so, and do so by not just talking but making things happen. And to to those who support us, we must call out for action, real tangible actions to help us turn this tide our way.”
“I want the government to focus on the stuff we cannot yet do, like beginning to learn how we can live in space long enough to go to Mars or how to build and operate human communities on the Moon and Mars.”
“Life comes forth for no other reason than to be and make more life. It will fight and crawl and do anything in its power to live, and once alive, it will stand against all to remain alive. Its existence is its own argument.”
“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.”
“It is time to kickstart a new U.S. space transportation industry and time to spread that industry into space itself, leveraging our space station legacy to ignite imaginations and entrepreneurship so that we can move farther out, back to the Moon, out to the asteroids, and on to Mars.”
“NewSpace, commercial space – whatever you want to call it – is rising, with or without government support. It is rising in West Texas and on the Gulf Coast, in California and on the Virginia coast, and rising from the ashes of the old space program in Florida and in small shops and university labs in a hundred places in between.”
“Trust in our economic system and the genius and hard work of our citizens beyond the mandate and control of government.”
“NewSpace is everything we want in this nation: energy, entrepreneurship, and excitement that spurs education, innovation, and an enlightened approach to the future.”
“NewSpace companies are staffed by young, new leaders who worship the giants who got us here, such as the recently passed Neil Armstrong, and are eager to work with NASA to do great things together – but we have to both give them a chance and get out of the way.”
“Like most Americans, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I am pro-future, pro-hope, and pro-abundance. I am pro-frontier and will talk to and work with anyone else who shares my belief that it is our goal and destiny to expand life and civilization into space.”
“As far as I am concerned, the whiners of Wall Street and the political pundits, power players, and the swarms of sycophantic, sound-bite-spewing sewage rats that surround them can stuff it. They are the wrong stuff, and their self-glorification is an obscenity. No matter what they say of themselves, they are not that important.”
“It is in the failures of our striving that we find ourselves, and it is then, in the rising above them and trying again, that we carry ourselves to the next level. If the runner stumbles, they get up and run again.”
“2012 will be seen as the beginning of the frontier era in space.”
“The Apollo generation wasn’t a historical fluke. It was the predictable result of what happens when a free nation actually decides on something and goes for it. We can do it again, do it better, and do it for keeps this time. But we must decide: Will America, as a nation, support the settlement of space?”
“We have a space agency desperately in need of purpose, whose employees and capabilities have been wasted for decades on make-work projects and dead-end PowerPoint pioneering placebos designed to do nothing more than keep the billing high.”
“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.”
“It is time to declare that the goal of the United States in space is the settlement of the solar system, from low Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars.”
“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.”
“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 would just ask you for one moment to imagine what today would be like if we had built on that landing by creating a permanent and growing community there and moved on to Mars.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Each time these pioneers expanded into new realms, they discovered the old ways wouldn’t work. Whenever a new domain was inhabited by humans, old survival patterns were left behind and new patterns created.”
“Our society’s youth will grow up knowing that tomorrow can be better, that there are alternatives for the future, that there are living, breathing humans of all colors and creeds out there in the sky building new worlds.”
“Space is a laboratory, an experiment in all forms of all things, an infinity of possibilities, properties, and places that cry out for investigation and exploration.”
“By opening space, for the first time in our history, rather than inexorably extracting the blood of life from this oh-so-precious sphere in our quest for wealth, we will turn outwards and upwards, creating new wealth from places already dead, advancing into places where there is no life, and bringing its seeds with us.”
“Vets are different than other people. Frontline or support, they carry themselves differently than the rest of us. It is as if they entered the service as one person and came out another, and that is the person who they are the rest of their lives.”
“Whether your father, husband, son, or brother has been on the front lines, driving a computer or programming a tank, wielding a gun or a wrench, they are a team. No one moves, no one wins without everyone doing their job.”
“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.”
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