Rusty Schweickart Quotes

Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct.

We have the capability - physically, technically - to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts. We are now able to very slightly and subtly reshape the solar system in order to enhance human survival.

We are not learning to view ourselves as an advanced, evolving civilization. That is what we really must learn to do, in due course, if we were to survive. All of that will take place, in due course, and we will be able to explore solar system. We will be able to go beyond it, provided we get our act together and learn to live as a civilization.

I don't want people to spend their nights worrying about getting hit by asteroids. But I do want them to encourage their political leaders to invest in the insurance, which will allow us to prevent it from happening.

In my Ph.D. thesis, written in 1989, I discussed the fact that when a civilization develops the technology to prevent catastrophic asteroid impacts, it marks a significant moment in the evolution of the planet.

Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.

The nice thing about asteroids is that once you've found them, and once you have a good solid orbit on them, you can predict a hundred years ahead of time whether there is a likelihood of an impact with Earth.

Then, I realized that there is an indigenous presence in the Solar System. It's us. So, then, I got to wondering what would happen if a more technologically advanced society moved next door to us, the way we moved next door to the American Indians.

There was a lot of risk taken in the Mercury and Apollo eras, and we don't take those risks anymore. We've designed the systems to eliminate risk, which makes it take forever and cost too much money.

The development of the telescope, together with increased knowledge of things, brought men to see that the earth is not what man had once thought it to be.

We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

It would take an extremely large spacecraft to deflect a large asteroid that would be headed directly for the Earth.

I think we have a good chance of surviving long enough to colonize the solar system.

Man must at all costs overcome the Earth's gravity and have, in reserve, the space at least of the Solar System.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.

Bringing an asteroid back to Earth? What's that have to do with space exploration? If we were moving outward from there, and an asteroid is a good stopping point, then fine. But now it's turned into a whole planetary defense exercise at the cost of our outward exploration.

We do have, and will continue to have an unquenchable curiosity to understand our Solar System.

Why would you need to expand beyond the solar system if you already have access to all the information you need, and you've essentially insulated yourself against a planetary apocalypse? Maybe that's enough.

I've been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet.

We don't use Hubble to stare at Jupiter unless there's a special event or some special reason.

I'm the one who originally coined the term 'dwarf planet,' back in the nineteen-nineties.

We need to make sure that the Voyager probes carrying a record of human civilization speeding beyond our solar system remain an introduction to the world that sent them and not an epitaph for a civilization that caused its own ruin.

We may have a tacit understanding of how our solar system works, but watching the sun disappear behind the moon reminds us of the vastness of space and the enduring mysteries of the universe we inhabit.

Voyager found Saturn to be a planet with a complex interior, atmosphere, and magnetosphere. In its rings - a vast, gleaming disk of icy rubble - the mission recorded signs of the same physical mechanisms that were key in configuring the early solar system and similar disks of material around other stars.