Ellen Stofan Quotes

Getting a team of scientists on Mars could be transformative.

Looking down the road, space exploration and the benefits it yields - in medicine and information technology - should not be overlooked.

Exploring and colonizing Mars can bring us new scientific understanding of climate change, of how planet-wide processes can make a warm and wet world into a barren landscape. By exploring and understanding Mars, we may gain key insights into the past and future of our own world.

Buzz Aldrin doesn't think we need to go back to the Moon - that we should go straight on to Mars. I'm more on the side that says we should go back to the Moon. I think there's a lot we can utilise the Moon for scientifically.

There are people who would love to spend their last ten years, or five years, or whatever it is, on the surface of Mars.

Pascal Lee is a true pioneer of Mars exploration.

I think we know how to do Mars.

The conquest of space is not merely a technological project of interest to a handful of select scientists and specialists, valuable though that research and information may be.

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.

NASA has made a difference.

There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.

There is good science you can do in space. There is stuff there you cannot do on Earth and we can gain understanding from it.

You stop planetary exploration, those people who do that extraordinary work are going to have to go do something else.

I would say keep supporting space flight, keep telling the public and the politicians why it's important to advance science and explore the galaxy. I encourage the Japanese to keep doing what they're doing.

Everyone, red state, blue state, everyone supports space exploration.

President Bush's proposal to focus our resources on sending humans to Mars is intriguing, but it is not the most compelling reason that Americans ought to focus our interest on the Red Planet.

Mars has been flown by, orbited, smacked into, radar inspected, and rocketed onto, as well as bounced upon, rolled over, shoveled, drilled into, baked, and even laser blasted.

There are many experiments and a great deal of research that can be performed on the station that make a difference in our lives and we are committed to supporting this important vocation.

I think we need to move to the moons of Mars and learn how to control robots that are on the surface. It's not the impatient way of getting there, but Mars has been there a long time.

When I was a grad student at MIT, I had a chance to become friends with the Viking Mission's chief scientist, Dr. Gerald Soffen. Viking was the first Mars lander looking for signs of life on Mars.

We're going to be focusing our science on things that will take us farther and longer into space. For many of those experiments, the crew members are human guinea pigs, which is fine; that's part of my job. I don't mind being a human guinea pig.

A permanent base on Mars would have a number of advantages beyond being a bonanza for planetary science and geology. If, as some evidence suggests, exotic micro-organisms have arisen independently of terrestrial life, studying them could revolutionise biology, medicine and biotechnology.

We'd never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn't been for space exploration and NASA.

We are not building the space station for science any more than we went to the moon for science, but we got a hell of a lot of good science out of it.

When we explore other planets, we learn a lot about our own.