Rick Tumlinson Quotes

We continue to not only operate the International Space Station but to increase its capabilities as well as commercial contributions.

If space is not profitable for business, there will be very few people in space.

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

I'm hopeful that commercial space exploration will takeoff. To really fuel the spaceflight revolution will require an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and I think that's only going to happen in the commercial sector - if there are large profits to be made.

SpaceX has reopened the cosmos, and the space race is back on, only this time it is in the private sector.

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.

The government will see that human spaceflight is useful - for science and the economy - and inspirational.

Our goal is to show that you can develop a robust, safe manned space program and do it at an extremely low cost.

The communications industry has been tremendously successful, but we need to build the railroads and the oil wells and the gold mines of space.

Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.

SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company's lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.

It's very sad that there's going to be a hiatus in manned space flight from the U.S. The Shuttle was a fantastic, hugely complex vehicle. It was inevitable it would come to an end, but this is the opportunity for the commercial world to get involved. As the Shuttle era ends, another window of opportunity opens.

You can never tell when a commercial space venture will suddenly become viable.

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

Through these ongoing activities and possibly in the future, a Canadian will go live and work on the International Space Station and we will continue to make Canadians proud of our achievements in space.

The way I see it, commercial interests should manage a lunar base while NASA gets on with the really important task of flying to Mars.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

Spacewalking is a little like rock climbing in that everything, including and especially oneself, must be tethered or docked at all times. If you forget to tether a tool, it's gone. Ditto yourself.

I hope there will be continued U.K. investment in human spaceflight to enable Britain to benefit from space travel in the longer term and that many more Britons - women and men - will travel into space.

After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.

We should've asked China to be a portion of the space station. We should've worked out ways that we can... just give away the technology that we have that puts things up into space, with cooperation up above the atmosphere that's needed to help each other.

Development of space will improve life on Earth. Access to space is important for agriculture, humanitarian efforts, communications, and navigation.

It is true that SpaceX is partially a government contractor, but it would be unfair to say that SpaceX is entirely a government contractor.

When it comes to space, I see it as my job, I'm building infrastructure the hard way. I'm using my resources to put in place heavy lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space.

SpaceX lowered the cost of going into space by 10x.