Carolyn Porco Quotes

When the history books are written in a thousand years, when space travel would have become routine, the moment that humans first left Earth will be of huge importance. Star City is a central part of this story and it deserves more recognition.

You don't think about the danger. The spaceship becomes your home.

I want to get to the moon. I want to go to Mars.

It's hardly a secret that I'm skeptical of declarations that the aliens are out and about on our planet. Still, I try to answer every one of these mails and phone calls because, after all, it's not a violation of physics to travel from one star system to another.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

The Space Program is an investment of the nation’s future…. Humans will not be confined to this planet forever.

There are many in the field of cosmology, who believe as I do, that finding ways to travel great distances will be essential to keeping human kind alive in an aging universe.

Planet colonization is not a short term concern of mine. The physical limitations of space travel render it low on the list for me.

Of course, I was completely enthralled by the space program as a kid - particularly Apollo 11 - and was glued to the television like most of the world. Then I stopped thinking about it too much. I was a little disappointed that they weren't going on to Mars at the time, but I didn't think much of it. I was more interested in becoming a director at that point in my life and falling in love, things like that.

Despite the immense distance between our own solar system (including the earth) and the nearest other solar systems, a journey from one system to another is theoretically possible, once an unlimited source of power is developed.

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

You get to a certain moment where you realize all those humans who landed on the moon did so in between Chris [Nolan] being born and me being born and no one had gone back since, all these Super-8 films we grew up watching of rocket launches, you get to a certain age and you realize all the speeches about going back, they're speeches, there's no money there, we're not going back.

I think the public needs to be reminded just how much inspiration and intention was given throughout the world to be bold, to send human beings to the moon in the '60s and the '70s. It's important now to bring together the nations that weren't able to do it then and help them do it. We need to move forward.

There's no question that all the generations got excited about the first flights, with Kennedy's inspiration to go to the moon, leaving the planet for the first time, and fortunately coming back.

By 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space. So we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow and I expect to be around in see it.

I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.

I can't think that leaving Earth once is enough.

Every age has its dreams, its symbols of romance. Past generations were moved by the graceful power of the great windjammers, by the distant whistle of locomotives pounding through the night, by the caravans leaving on the Golden Road to Samarkand, by quinqueremes of Nineveh from distant Ophir . . . Our grandchildren will likewise have their inspiration-among the equatorial stars. They will be able to look up at the night sky and watch the stately procession of the Ports of Earth-the strange new harbors where the ships of space make their planetfalls and their departures.

Now when we opened Disneyland, outer space was Buck Rogers.

Many short-sighted fools think that going to the Moon was just a stunt. But the astronauts knew the meaning of what they were doing, as is shown by Neil Armstrong's first words in stepping down onto the soil of Luna: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was. "Is there any tea on this spaceship?" he asked.

I love the John Glenn model... I may call NASA in 25 years or so, and see if they'd like to send me to Mars.

I want to encourage public interest in space. I have never let my condition stop me. You only live once.

If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.

Oh, my. I'd forgotten how much I hate space travel.