Buzz Aldrin Quotes

Mars is empty now. Five hundred years from now, it'll be full of people.

Did the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return trip? They came here to settle. And that's what we should be doing on Mars. When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you're there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn't be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you're there.

Unless we are able to commit to a permanent growing settlement [on Mars], then I don't think just going there with humans and coming back is worth doing. The expense of planning to come back is like the people who left Europe to come to America and then to turn around and go back to Europe, it really doesn't make any sense at all.

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

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable.

I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.

To establish human settlements on the Moon, Mars, or in the free-space between, humans will have to again rapidly adapt. Like early pioneers, there will be no nearby friendly merchants or supportive governments to replace that broken tool.

I participated with great honor in becoming one of the first to land on the moon, and now I am devoting and have devoted many years of my life to enabling Americans to lead international nations to permanence on the planet Mars.

The first human beings to land on Mars should not come back to Earth. They should be the beginning of a build-up of a colony/settlement, I call it a 'permanence'.

Eventually we must leave Earth-at least a certain number of our progeny must as our sun approaches the end of its solar life cycle. But just as terrestrial explorers have always led the way for settlers, this will also happen extraterrestrially. Earth is our cradle, not our final destiny.

When earth gets good and crowded, like 15th century England, then some new Pilgrims are gonna rocket their Mayflowers to a new solar system.

I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.

Going to Mars is a bunch of baby steps, and it started off with the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin.

The first credible humans-to-Mars plans are starting to weave together in public-private partnerships. In fact, I can say with some authority that this will also be the case in terms of the Moon and asteroids as well.

I think the more people that can go up to space and look back is great, but it's not just this overview and look back effect. There's also a lot of concrete gains from getting more people up in space.

In my opinion, future space exploration will require us to inhabit the moon, initially, and later Mars. This is a humongous task for any one nation to carry out.

Going to Mars would make NASA great again.

Vegas is the city of temptation. I think, perhaps, it is an experiment by NASA. If we're going to send people to Mars, how will we create false economies and cultures to satisfy them? Vegas has the answer. People go there when they've nothing left to lose.

Will we have a colony on Mars? I think so.

Obviously I'd like NASA to follow their charter - the exploration of our solar system and beyond. I'd like to see people someday go to Mars.

It's not a matter of if we're going to go to Mars, it's a matter of when.

In terms of goals for NASA before I die, we need to be living on Mars. And I might not live that long, so they better get on with it!

The space program needs a goal, and the goal should be humans to Mars.

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

We need to move off the planet. And Mars is the next best place.