Alan Stern Quotes

For a long time, we've worked on detecting planets with whatever was at hand, making use of existing small telescopes or even amateur telescopes. It's time to move on to the next stage.

I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies.

If you start out with a little telescope observing the stars and you keep at it over the years, as I have, it's kind of a dream to one day have an observatory where you can always go and use the telescope conveniently.

I would have taken whatever hand I was dealt. Space was it.

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

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

When we meet people who are astronauts or deal in astronomy, it's always really fascinating.

With space travel, [it's] no different. You know, in 1990 I read the name Virgin Galactic Airways. Loved the name. And set out to try to find an engineer or rocket scientist in the world who could build a safe, reusable rocket that could take people to and from space and we could start a whole new era of commercial space travel.

Space is the ultimate frontier. I think when people historically thought of the frontier, there was where you were living and then there was some edge beyond which no one had explored.

All of a sudden, space isn't friendly. All of a sudden, it's a place where people can die. . . . Many more people are going to die. But we can't explore space if the requirement is that there be no casualties; we can't do anything if the requirement is that there be no casualties.

Mythology, science and space exploration are subjects that have fascinated me since my early childhood. And they were always connected somehow with the music I write.

It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.

I was fortunate enough, after many visits to many wonderful, weird people to come across Burt Rutan, who is a genius in the Mojave Desert. And SpaceShipOne was born and had three flights into space that won something called the X Prize. And from there, we're building SpaceShipTwo, which is ... a beautiful spaceship that is very, very, very nearly completed and will be ready from about next Christmas onwards to start taking people into space.

'As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?' Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I'd prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar.

The moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

We used to joke about canned men, putting people in a can and seeing how far you can send them and bring them back. That's not the purpose of this program... Space is a laboratory, and we go into it to work and learn the new.

My interest in the space program has a certain purity to it because I recognize the romance of it but I was never seduced by it. That allowed me to view it through a more purely scientific lens. My interest in space while in school came about through my scientific activities.

The universe is so amazing and so limitless, who wouldn't want to study the universe?

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought-particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.

Eventually everyone will have the opportunity to travel onto space.

Traveling makes time go fast. So maybe traveling in space will give people time.

As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. And my own passion was that I wanted to be a film director. I realized that being an astronaut was not going to be an option, so I said, "Well, I'm going to be a director and do films in space."

I think that it's good for us to be able to travel in space and do research in space, and I emphasize the research, because space travel to me is far more than just seeing how far we can go.

I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space.